• Welcome! The TrekBBS is the number one place to chat about Star Trek with like-minded fans.
    If you are not already a member then please register an account and join in the discussion!

James Cameron's "Avatar" (grading and discussion)

Grade "Avatar"

  • Excellent

    Votes: 166 50.0%

  • Above Average

    Votes: 85 25.6%

  • Average

    Votes: 51 15.4%

  • Below Average

    Votes: 11 3.3%

  • Terrible

    Votes: 19 5.7%
  • Total voters
    332
Samuel Walters said:
But that doesn't mean more people went to see Avatar than any other film. And that's important, too. And it's not purely an "academic" argument, either. It's fact.
Click to expand...

Yes, it is a fact, and it also is the one meaningful measurement by which other films can be said to be more successful than Avatar - number of tickets sold is absolute. The "adjusted for inflation" argument, OTOH, is superficial and meaningless because it's an "adjustment" for a single variable ignoring all the many others - some of which you've already listed. Nonetheless, people toss it out there smugly as if it has some intrinisic meaning, the same way they endlessly cite the "three-times-the-production-cost" mantra of several decades ago to justify whatever conclusion they wish to reach concerning the profitability of a given movie.
 
Last edited:
Well, I'm not going to wade through 78 pages right now, but I finally saw this today and enjoyed it quite a bit, even though the whole time I felt like I was watching "Fern Gully."
 
It's an animated kid's movie from 1992. I used to love it...when I was 7.

Seriously, though, "Avatar" basically has the exact same story.
 
It's one thing to recycle story ideas. It's quite another to feel like you're watching the exact same story.
 
T'Baio said:
That's just...silly.
Click to expand...

Sure it is (and I gotta credit you for being so informative.) Why have a selection of small budget fare when you can instead have the choice of seeing the same movie on 87 screens in your city?

That's the kind of thinking that had Fox spending 25mil on HELLO DOLLY while Universal saw what happened with EASY RIDER and spent about 7mil on half a dozen flicks, one of which was SILENT RUNNING. Yeah, we'd've been better off with Uni doing a HELLO DOLLY knockoff instead of SILENT RUNNING.
 
It's really tiresome to see people repeating the exact same "criticisms" of the movie referencing the exact same previous movies.

I mean, really, if you're going to post something that's going to be read by other people can't you at least try to be original?

Everything on forums like this now is just imitation - posters just recycle and recycle the same complaints over and over. It's impossible to tell if most have ever seen a movie, since instead of saying anything new they just say what's been said before and often in the exact same words.

It's one thing to reuse complaints, it's another to feel like you're reading the exact same post.
 
Dennis said:
I mean, really, if you're going to post something that's going to be read by other people can't you at least try to be original?

Everything on forums like this now is just imitation - posters just recycle and recycle the same complaints over and over. It's impossible to tell if most have ever seen a movie, since instead of saying anything new they just say what's been said before and often in the exact same words.
Click to expand...

I would say that the fact the people who see the film keep independently coming up with the same complaints might point not to flaw with them but a flaw with the movie. Or do you htink RoJo was laying about not having been paying attention to the controversy before seeing the film?

But I keep forgetting that you're the sole arbiter of quality around here. Silly me.

Dennis said:
It's one thing to reuse complaints, it's another to feel like you're reading the exact same post.
Click to expand...

Now you know how the folks who found Avatar dull and derivative feel. :techman:
 
^True story.

If you see the same complaints over and over (especially in a thread with over 1000 responses, where you can't expect people to have read everything), maybe it's because those complaints are valid.

I thoroughly enjoyed the movie, but seriously, the first thing that popped into my head after seeing it was, "Wow, I can't believe how much that movie was like FernGully."

I mean, it was neat, but I have no desire to ever see it again.
 
There is still an extraordinary amount of twaddle being spouted. Even resemblances to Dances with Wolves are highly overstated, unless you somehow think that the Indians winning is a trifling detail. As for Ferngully? The belief that a minor children's animated movie exhausted the movie going public's familiarity with the story is crazy. Simultaneously complaining Jake is Mighty Whitey and Jake is a bumbling idiot is also nonsense.

The problem with the plot is not that it is too familiar. Every list that tries to support that is too short, unless it arbitrarily hauls in movies that are pretty much the opposite. Claims it is cliche ignore the flouting of real cliches. Claims it is predictable are claiming that a logical development of the plot is an offense. Claims that the villains are too Snidely Whiplash omit to notice the obvious historical fact that the reality is much, much cruder. Indeed, Stephen Lang's Courage (which is what his name usually sounded like, significantly,) is pretty positive by lots of movie standards.

The problem with the plot is that God(dess) did it. Period.
I for one can suspend my disbelief for a couple of hours for a movie that does more than treehugging sermons.

That said, the huge popularity of Avatar just shows that it does something well. It is likely the daydream of genuine rebirth.
 
Dennis said:
It's really tiresome to see people repeating the exact same "criticisms" of the movie referencing the exact same previous movies.

I mean, really, if you're going to post something that's going to be read by other people can't you at least try to be original?

Everything on forums like this now is just imitation - posters just recycle and recycle the same complaints over and over. It's impossible to tell if most have ever seen a movie, since instead of saying anything new they just say what's been said before and often in the exact same words.

It's one thing to reuse complaints, it's another to feel like you're reading the exact same post.
Click to expand...

It's really tiresome to see directors repeating the exact same "plots" referencing the exact same stories in previous movies.

I mean, really, if they're going to produce something that's going to be watched by other people can't they at least try to be original?

Everything in theaters now is just imitation - directors just recycle and recycle the same plots over and over. It's impossible to tell if most have ever written a story, instead of writing anything new they just produce what's been produced before and often with the exact same plot.

It's one thing to reuse plots, it's another to feel like you're watching the exact same movie.

;)
 
Personally, I loved it. I'm confused about many of the reviews, because most people seem to have seen a very different film to the one I saw. I saw an intelligent, subtle, ambiguous, balanced film with a lot of hidden depths. I've had some fascinating discussions about it. However, the majority of people seem to have seen a much less intelligent and shallower film than I saw, and their overviews of the plot, "message", implications etc confuse me.

So I'm confused. But I know I loved it and that a lot of the subtlties seem to have been missed entirely by a lot of people. If you think it was one-sided, Na'vi-good, human-bad becoming-Na'vi and leaving humanity, nature-is-best, unsubtle anvil-dropping, you saw a different film to the one I saw.

Okay, not extraordinarily intelligent or subtle, but certainly enough so to keep me thinking and re-considering. Intellectually stimulating, I'd call it. Plus it looked pretty and I liked Grace.
 
Deranged Nasat said:
So I'm confused. But I know I loved it and that a lot of the subtlties seem to have been missed entirely by a lot of people. If you think it was one-sided, Na'vi-good, human-bad becoming-Na'vi and leaving humanity, nature-is-best, unsubtle anvil-dropping, you saw a different film to the one I saw.
Click to expand...

The message would have been more subtle if the angry Marine and Giovanni Ribisi's characters hadn't been made out to be so utterly douchey and evil.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
If you are not already a member then please register an account and join in the discussion!

Sign up / Register


Back
Top