Avatar and the Avatar Cadence (James Cameron, 2009-2031)

[MichaelB]

Evolutionary biologist PZ Myers weighs in:

The planet Pandora is the real star, anyway, and it's inhabited by strange alien creatures that exhibit some real creativity in their design. Except, unfortunately, for the protagonist aliens, who are basically human beings stretched out to be 8 feet tall and with lovely golden Keane eyes plastered on, but otherwise follow our body plan pretty much exactly, right down to the toenails. If I saw that situation for real, I'd be an intelligent design creationist, because it's obvious that the intelligent aliens did not evolve from the animal stock on that world.

I kept wishing that the makers had shown a little bravery and made the aliens alien. Some of the animals had this creepy slick black epidermis, for instance, that looked like a mucous-covered wetsuit; why not drape that over the aliens instead of the pretty blue skins they had? Most of the alien animals also had an interesting complex dentition with a lipless covering — again, be daring and make the aliens look like something that you wouldn't ever want to kiss. District 9 did it, and got away with it — the aliens in that movie were definitely different.

But then, this was a demo reel. They were showing that they can get awfully close to realistic human performances with computer graphics, and this was a story about native Americans anyway, not really about aliens on a different planet.

[Elmyr]

Well, Cameron had very important reasons for designing the aliens the way he did...

PLAYBOY: How much did you get into calibrating your movie heroine's hotness?
CAMERON: Right from the beginning I said, "She's got to have tits," even though that makes no sense because her race, the Na'vi, aren't placental mammals. I designed her costumes based on a taparrabo, a loincloth thing worn by Mayan Indians. We go to another planet in this movie, so it would be stupid if she ran around in a Brazilian thong or a fur bikini like Raquel Welch in One Million Years B.C.

PLAYBOY: Are her breasts on view?
CAMERON: I came up with this free-floating, lion's-mane-like array of feathers, and we strategically lit and angled shots to not draw attention to her breasts, but they're right there. The animation uses a physics-based sim that takes into consideration gravity, air movement and the momentum of her hair, her top. We had a shot in which Neytiri falls into a specific position, and because she is lit by orange firelight, it lights up the nipples. That was good, except we're going for a PG-13 rating, so we wound up having to fix it. We'll have to put it on the special edition DVD; it will be a collector's item. A Neytiri Playboy Centerfold would have been a good idea.

PLAYBOY: So you're okay with arousing PG-13 chubbies?
CAMERON: If such a thing should ­happen—and I'm not saying it will—that would be fine.

Visionary!

[domino harvey]

That is some A+ pandering to the magazine's readers

[LQ]

My skin is crawling; that smacks of a most disgusting colonialist wish fulfillment.

[Elmyr]

That interview makes recent profiles of Cameron (New Yorker, Vanity Fair.com) painting him as a feminist filmmaker all the more laughable than they already were. A+ pandering all around.

[GaryC]

Did anyone else notice that Sully's ID number in his video logs has the letters OZU in the middle?

[tavernier]

I doubt Cameron noticed.

[zombeaner]

I watched it today and while there is nothing new under the sun story-wise, and the dialogue is a bit hokey, it really does need to be experienced. I'd happily see it again in 3D, maybe IMAX this time...

[wattsup32]

It passed the $350 million domestic mark this weekend with $68 million more. It also passed a billion world-wide--in 17 days. The real question is, has it made it into the black, yet?

[perkizitore]

I think it is safe to assume it will become the second highest grossing film of all-time, although 3D ticket pricing is the major factor for this achievement.

[Gregory]

Another choice bit from the same interview:

PLAYBOY: So Saldana’s character was specifically designed to appeal to guys’ ids?
CAMERON: And they won’t be able to control themselves. They will have actual lust for a character that consists of pixels of ones and zeros. ...
PLAYBOY: We seem to need fantasy icons like Lara Croft and Wonder Woman, despite knowing they mess with our heads.
CAMERON: Most of men's problems with women probably have to do with realizing women are real and most of them don't look or act like Vampirella. A big recalibration happens when we're forced to deal with real women, and there's a certain geek population that would much rather deal with fantasy women than real women. Let's face it: Real women are complicated. You can try your whole life and not understand them.

Speak for yourself, you child-man.

[Caged Horse]

Let's face it: Real women are complicated. You can try your whole life and not understand them.

Speak for yourself, you child-man.

Give Jim a break: he's only on his 5th 'attempt' to understand women.

[foofighters7]

I just want to know when Mr. Webs...err... I mean Mr. Cameron and Walter Huston met? Pre Terminator or pre Titanic?

[Antares]

My skin is crawling; that smacks of a most disgusting colonialist wish fulfillment.

[HarryLong]

Heck it's the same basic plot template of LAST OF THE MOHICANS, LAWRENCE OF ARABIA, THE LAST SAMURAI, practically every Edgar Rice Burroughs novel, FLASH GORDON (minus falling in love with the native woman) and - as has been noted, DANCES WITH WOLVES. It's like Cameron plopped a bunch of scripts in ablender.

[jbeall]

I don't know if any members here read ESPN.com's Tuesday Morning Quarterback, but scroll about 2/3 of the way down this page for a pretty funny critique.

"Millions for defense, not a sixpence for tribute," Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, once a delegate to the Constitutional Convention, said in 1796. "Millions for special effects, not a Starbucks gift card for writing," might be the motto of modern Hollywood, at least if "Avatar" is the exemplar. "Avatar" should have been marketed as a cartoon and best animated feature of 2009. The special effects were great -- though yours truly increasingly finds computer-drawn special effects boring, since they are so obviously fake. The script was as dull and predictable as the special effects were flashy. Maybe the dialogue sounded better in Na'vi.

Hardly anything was explained -- so let's start with why the whole plot was set in motion in the first place. Sinister humans are bent on removing peace-loving blue aliens from a point on Pandora above some minerals the sinister humans want to strip-mine; the peace-loving natives won't move because the place is sacred ground. Reader Bryan Law of Independence, Ohio, notes: "Even today, horizontal drilling means you don't have to destroy the surface above a resource to obtain it. So why wasn't the problem on Pandora solved by horizontal drilling? Don't tell me that 150 years from now, humanity has become capable of interstellar travel, yet forgotten a basic mining technique."

The mineral is an anti-gravity substance that floats. Midway through the movie, we learn there are entire mountains of it floating above Pandora. So why not mine the floating mountains, where no Pandorans live, rather than go to war with the natives? The clichéd super-heartless corporation that wants the mineral is depicted as obsessed by profit. War is a lot more expensive than mining! If profit is what motivates the corporation, war is the last thing it would want.

Because hardly anything in the movie is explained, we never find out what nation or organization has built a huge base on Pandora, then brought along an armada of combat aircraft. The Earth characters all look, act and talk like Americans -- in fact, slang hasn't changed in 150 years! But does this project have some kind of government approval, or is it an interplanetary criminal enterprise? It's hard to believe that 150 years from now, humanity's first interaction with another sentient species would be conducted without any public officials present, but that's what is depicted.

And who are the gun-toting fatigue-clad personnel commanded by the ultra-evil Colonel Quaritch -- are they regular military, mercenaries, private security contractors? Audiences never find out. They're just a bunch of trigger-happy killers who want to slaughter intelligent beings, and all of them but one do exactly what Colonel Quaritch says, even once it's clear Quaritch is insane. The colonel must work for somebody -- for the Pentagon, some government agency, for the corporation. So why isn't he subject to supervision? No organization would entrust a project costing trillions of dollars -- a town-sized facility has been built five light-years away -- to a single individual with unchecked power. You'd worry that the single individual would commit some huge blunder that wiped out your trillion-dollar investment, which ends up being exactly what happens. I found the colonel with absolute authority a lot more unrealistic than the floating mountains.

Then there's director James Cameron's view of military personnel. If I were a military man or woman, I would find "Avatar" insulting. With one exception, the helicopter pilot played by Michelle Rodriguez -- her character is twice referred to as a Marine, suggesting the military personnel are regular military, not mercenaries -- all the people in fatigues are brainless sadists. They want to kill, kill, kill the innocent. They can't wait to begin the next atrocity. It's true that the U.S. military has conducted atrocities, in Vietnam and during the Plains Indians wars. But slaughter of the innocent is rare in U.S. military annals. In "Avatar," it's the norm. The bloodthirsty military personnel readily comply with the colonel's orders to gun down natives. No one questions him -- though in martial law, a soldier not only may but must refuse an illegal order. Plus the military personnel are depicted as such utter morons -- not a brain in any of their heads -- that none notice the TOTALLY OBVIOUS detail that Pandora's unusual biology will be worth more than its minerals. Yes, movies traffic in absurd super-simplifications. But we're supposed to accept that of the deployment of several hundred, every soldier save one is a low-IQ cold-blooded murderer.

What does "Avatar" build up to? Watching the invading soldiers -- most of whom happen to be former American military personnel -- die is the big cathartic ending of the flick. Extended sequences show Americans being graphically slaughtered in the natives' counterattack. The deaths of aliens are depicted as heartbreaking tragedies, while the deaths of American security forces are depicted as a whooping good time. In Cameron's "Aliens," "The Abyss" and his television show "Dark Angel," U.S. military personnel are either the bad guys or complete idiots, often shown graphically slaughtered. Cameron is hardly the only commercial-film director to present watching evil U.S. soldiers slaughtered as popcorn-chomping suburban shopping mall fun: in the second "X-Men" flick, U.S. soldiers are the bad guys and graphically killed off. Films that criticize the military for its faults are one thing: When did watching depictions of U.S. soldiers dying become a form of fun?

[cdnchris]

Maybe it was just more cost-efficient to blow the shit out of them. Maybe war machines, soldiers, and bullets are cheaper in the future.

[jsteffe]

Maybe it was just more cost-efficient to blow the shit out of them. Maybe war machines, soldiers, and bullets are cheaper in the future.

It's not necessarily that it's more cost effective, just that it's more profitable for Earth's leaders and their buddies in the "future" capitalistic military-industrial complex. I suspect that Cameron imagines the climate-destroyed future Earth as a highly militarized, neo-colonialist, fear-based society with Dick Cheney somehow kept alive to run things in the way that only he can.

[foofighters7]

You don't understand. None of you do!!

The mining boss remembered a connection between blue humanesque creatures and the devil.

A Smurf is a Smurf no matter how tall they are!

heard last night it is now the 4th Highest grossing film in history, and is still expected to pass Titanic............... ...................................

Wow.....I mean....maybe it is good to sell one's soul.

[Gregory]

Unfortunately, if Bryan Law thinks that horizontal drilling has eliminated mining-induced displacement of indigenous peoples, he's sorely mistaken. It still happens around the globe. For one thing, horizontal drilling is fine for oil (though more expensive than vertical wells) but it obviously can't be used in every type of mining. I don't know what kind of stuff it is in Avatar. For another, violent or otherwise forced displacement has often served as a way for mining interests to get around conflicts over land and resource rights.

[HistoryProf]

I'll post my honest thoughts and reactions...

This movie was just amazing. I was so stunned. I gasped more times in this film than maybe the last 4-10 years at the movies, combined. I was moved to tears. I was (extremely) elated, swept away by some of the sequences. I thought there were a lot of good laughs, too. The two times I saw it, the audience clapped at the end. I know there's a great hipness in distancing from the common audience here, but I was there opening night at Titanic. And the audience was brought to tears - the experience was just overwhelming and very moving. It was not a "total piece of shit." I think James Cameron is an amazing filmmaker for our time, for all time, really - but we're very lucky to have him alive and innovating in our time.

PS - Am I the only one who can't wait to get his hands on the latest Cinefex issue for this?

PPS - Final worldwide gross estimate: between 1 and 1.4 billion.

this is a joke....right? [-o<

the only thing Cameron is amazing at, is ripping off other writers and artists and profiting from it. He did it for Titanic, he did it for Terminator, and he did it for avatar....

[HistoryProf]

oh, and BY FAR the best article written about Avatar: Please Mount My Hot Blue Alien

[rs98762001]

I don't know if any members here read ESPN.com's Tuesday Morning Quarterback, but scroll about 2/3 of the way down this page for a pretty funny critique.

Then there's director James Cameron's view of military personnel. If I were a military man or woman, I would find "Avatar" insulting. With one exception, the helicopter pilot played by Michelle Rodriguez -- her character is twice referred to as a Marine, suggesting the military personnel are regular military, not mercenaries -- all the people in fatigues are brainless sadists. They want to kill, kill, kill the innocent. They can't wait to begin the next atrocity. It's true that the U.S. military has conducted atrocities, in Vietnam and during the Plains Indians wars. But slaughter of the innocent is rare in U.S. military annals. In "Avatar," it's the norm. The bloodthirsty military personnel readily comply with the colonel's orders to gun down natives. No one questions him -- though in martial law, a soldier not only may but must refuse an illegal order. Plus the military personnel are depicted as such utter morons -- not a brain in any of their heads -- that none notice the TOTALLY OBVIOUS detail that Pandora's unusual biology will be worth more than its minerals. Yes, movies traffic in absurd super-simplifications. But we're supposed to accept that of the deployment of several hundred, every soldier save one is a low-IQ cold-blooded murderer.

What does "Avatar" build up to? Watching the invading soldiers -- most of whom happen to be former American military personnel -- die is the big cathartic ending of the flick. Extended sequences show Americans being graphically slaughtered in the natives' counterattack. The deaths of aliens are depicted as heartbreaking tragedies, while the deaths of American security forces are depicted as a whooping good time. In Cameron's "Aliens," "The Abyss" and his television show "Dark Angel," U.S. military personnel are either the bad guys or complete idiots, often shown graphically slaughtered. Cameron is hardly the only commercial-film director to present watching evil U.S. soldiers slaughtered as popcorn-chomping suburban shopping mall fun: in the second "X-Men" flick, U.S. soldiers are the bad guys and graphically killed off. Films that criticize the military for its faults are one thing: When did watching depictions of U.S. soldiers dying become a form of fun?

I was also kind of astounded by Cameron's outrageously negative depiction of what's clearly meant to be the US military, and I'm surprised that so few conservative and/or pro-military commentators have brought this up. This is a $300 million (or whatever) US studio film, funded by arch-con Murdoch no less, in which the US military is the enemy. He doesn't take the easy way out by casting a coalition of different nationalities as the soldiers. Nope - all American. And they get their shit blown to pieces by the good guys. It's incredibly subversive in a way. That, along with the heart-on-its-sleeve pro-environment message made me like Avatar a lot more than the script and dialogue probably deserved. In any case, it was a lot better than Titanic.

[eljacko]

oh, and BY FAR the best article written about Avatar: Please Mount My Hot Blue Alien

I think it's one aspect of the film, but to focus on this at the expense of others is silly. The film is total wish fulfillment for a male teenage audience, combined with a (primarily) American audience guilt-ridden over the destruction of our environment. I don't think it's wise to try to separate one part of the fantasy (saving environment vs saving natives vs sexy time) from another because each part is an integral part of the escapism.

In general, I think the criticism against the film for not being imaginative enough is almost missing the point; yeah, the script is bare-bones and the characters even worse so, but it's not about either of those and to focus on them is to miss all that is great about the film (the action and the world). I've always thought films like The Last Samurai failed in the same way that this film does, but I also think the good parts of Avatar hold up so well that to dwell on the flaws is to unfairly ignore the film's strengths.

(for the record: in reference to the quoted article above, I have read nothing else by him, but on first read I think the author was trying to justify the erection he got during the film. during the sex scene, I [and most of the theater I was in] laughed at what I think was obviously the wish fulfillment stretched past its limit. also I have hated all films Cameron made before this)

[MichaelB]

I was also kind of astounded by Cameron's outrageously negative depiction of what's clearly meant to be the US military, and I'm surprised that so few conservative and/or pro-military commentators have brought this up. This is a $300 million (or whatever) US studio film, funded by arch-con Murdoch no less, in which the US military is the enemy. He doesn't take the easy way out by casting a coalition of different nationalities as the soldiers. Nope - all American. And they get their shit blown to pieces by the good guys. It's incredibly subversive in a way.

Cameron isn't American.

Also, a huge proportion of the world's population would be only too happy to swallow a scenario in which the US military is the enemy - and since the film's international box-office take dwarfs its domestic one (as did Titanic's), maybe this was deliberate?