James Cameron's Avatar Sequels Possible Titles Revealed

[Anwar]

Wrong.

Nope.

Pay attention.

I have, Aliens is predictable Hollywood fluff, T2 is just a rehash of T1 but less intelligent and Titanic was flash-in-the-pan fluff. Terminator 1 was probably one of his best movies and that's mainly due to Harlan Ellison.

The studios have been imitating the way Cameron does things since the mid-1980s...never quite as successfully.

Because their stuff came later, not due to lesser quality. Just that Cameron was lucky to release his stuff when he did. Which is why he isn't the success he once was.

And toss out the pretentious artsy-fartsiness.

 

[Booji]

So, you're saying premises and plot points are all you get out of fiction when you read or watch?

That seems to be disturbingly common, if the kinds of fannish "critiques" of movies and books one finds on the Internet are any indication. It also largely misses the point of fiction in general...but it helps explain why popular entertainment has become so narrow and dull.

No, that's what you are saying and I'm pointing out your usual hypocrisy

 

[CorporalCaptain]

Aliens is predictable Hollywood fluff

That's a total nope.

If there was a constant to Aliens, it was, at every junction, subverting expectations both that were derived from tropes standard at the time as well that might be derived from the original film. It was anything but predictable.

 

[Mudd]

That's a total nope.

If there was a constant to Aliens, it was, at every junction, subverting expectations both that were derived from tropes standard at the time as well that might be derived from the original film. It was anything but predictable.

Exactly so.

 

[Owain Taggart]

Cameron has a reputation for making sequels long after the original. Look at Aliens and T2.

Well, sure, it's not unexpected. In fact, I really wouldn't be surprised if we were to see a sequel to The Abyss at some point in time. The difficulty with these, however is that the first one was paired with a lot of hype towards the 3d technology, and the excitement was there for the technology as much as the movie. I'm skeptical that he'll be able to capture the same buzz for any of the sequels and might be overextending himself and tire it out before it even really gets anywhere.

 

[Anwar]

That's a total nope.

The little girl survivor, the big alien boss, Ripley using the powered armor we saw her wearing before, Burke being a bad guy...all pretty predictable.

 

[CorporalCaptain]

The little girl survivor

Given that, in the theatrical edition, the first time Newt was seen was when Ripley and company first encountered her, I'm gonna have to call BS on Newt being a predictable element.

 

[Mudd]

The little girl survivor, the big alien boss, Ripley using the powered armor we saw her wearing before, Burke being a bad guy...all pretty predictable.

Nope.

 

[Kai "the spy"]

I think it might be hard for those of us (including myself) who weren't old enough to experience Aliens in its original theatrical release to judge whether the plot was predictable by the standarts of the day.

I'd say this, though, to bring this back on-topic: the plot of Avatar was rather predictable, but that is not a bad thing. Sure, we've seen elements of the story in other stories before, but that's because the plot is pretty basic. Sure, you can call it Pocahontas in space. You can call it Dances With Wolves in space. You could even call it Robin Hood in space. Because it uses elements from all those stories. But it takes those elements and uses them to create something new, but with the feeling of the familiar.

And yes, the villain (Giovanni Ribisi's character) is one-dimensional, but that's because he's a stand-in for big capitalism/imperialism. He doesn't care about innocent victims or the environment, because capitalism doesn't care about those things. All he/it cares about is profit. If there was an added history to the character, further motivation beyond profit, that would actually detract from his function as a stand-in.

 

[Anwar]

Nope.

Yep, the unpredictable stuff is what happened in Alien 3. Cameron's always been about banality.

 

[Mudd]

I think it might be hard for those of us (including myself) who weren't old enough to experience Aliens in its original theatrical release to judge whether the plot was predictable by the standarts of the day.

That's pretty much so, and it goes double for Cameron's first hit, The Terminator. That movie probably influenced action flicks of the time nearly as much , if not as obviously, as Star Wars had years before.

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Folks expected Aliens to be a movie pretty much like, well, Alien.

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Schwarzenegger, BTW, was a bit of a Hollywood oddity when cast in The Terminator..his career, such as it was then, had stalled after the lackluster reception of Conan and he was by his own account trying to avoid being tagged as the next Richard Kiel.

 

[Booji]

Nope.

Only if you are completely sheltered and have never read a book or watched a movie. It's cheesy paint by numbers 80s action at best and has aged horribly.

 

[sttngfan1701d]

Yeah, I know...it's not two-and-a-half plotless hours of comic book characters hitting each other. What's the point?

This +100 million

Avatar might've been Dances with Wolves/The Last Samurai in Space, but I'll take it over * ANY* Marvel movie. There are some teenagers in the world who think "Infinity War" is the pinnacle of filmmaking. I just want to bang my head against the wall when I hear that.

And for all the people that complain about it being 99% CGI...Avatar's use of CGI and 3D was groundbreaking and transformative. Marvel's use of CGI is ubiquitous, sloppy, and tired at this point. Much like all the forced jokes in their scripts.

 

[thribs]

We've got water but what about Earth and Fire. This is a Avatar movie, right?

 

[Smellmet]

Avatar, like it or not, was groundbreaking, and Cameron himself is one of the industry's true innovators, pushing the format and surrounding technology. His films are generally an event, the likes of which just about any other director can only dream of.

I'll be there on opening night.

 

[Booji]

The Lord of the Rings trilogy, Star wars PT, and B5 all did more for CGI than Avatar.

 

[CorporalCaptain]

The Lord of the Rings trilogy, Star wars PT, and B5 all did more for CGI than Avatar.

lulz

ed - The Last Starfighter did more for CGI than B5, and Tron broke more ground than any of these things. I'd have mentioned Jurassic Park as something groundbreaking, which did more for CGI than LOTR certainly. But the mention of B5 does not make the statement even remotely credible. I might also have mentioned Toy Story.

And as for the comparison between Avatar and the SWPT, well that's coming down to artistic ability. I felt more immersed in Pandora than in any of the alien worlds of the PT. But also, SWPT wasn't about immersion or even really empathizing with aliens. It was about the rise and fall of Anakin Skywalker in the context of the Fall of the Galactic Republic. Alien worlds were depicted for thematic reasons that were different between the properties. It's an apples and oranges comparison regarding a medium that Avatar is secure in making its own unique contributions to.

 

[Mudd]

There are some teenagers in the world who think "Infinity War" is the pinnacle of filmmaking. I just want to bang my head against the wall when I hear that.

Teenagers are supposed to make you want to bang your head against something. It's the circle of life.

 

[Kai "the spy"]

B5's contribution to the development of CGI was to prove that it was a valid alternative to models and miniatures on a television show. They proved they could do it quick and cheap. Actually furthering the technology didn't play into it.

With Avatar, the 3D technology alone marks it as one of the biggest SFX advancements in the history of cinema.

 

[CorporalCaptain]

With Avatar, the 3D technology alone marks it as one of the biggest SFX advancements in the history of cinema.

I think that Avatar's contribution was much more than simply that it was in 3D. The level of detail in what was being depicted in things both large and small, including seeds on the wind and tiny creatures barely big enough to see, the illusion that all of these things had ecological relations to each other, and then rendering that in 3D to create an experience that made it feel like you are there in something both otherworldly and real, that was the big achievement. It was scope+medium.