The Last Dances with Ferngully's Samurai Wolves in Space (wo

Bamshalam wrote:

It's actually got some atypically strong female characters, Wulf. I'd give it a go.

Grace and Trudy were really the highlight of the movie. So it pissed me off to no end

Spoiler:

It really was a pretty-looking movie, though, with the phosphorescent vegetation and all the colorful animals with extraneous limbs and even though I found myself checking my watch about two-thirds in, at least I got to see what all the fuss was about. That, I think, is about as much as anyone can gain from Avatar.

I liked it, though more for the visual effects than for the story, which I got the impression was cobbled together from lots of other movies. It was still fun to watch, though.

Mhy friends and I gathered forces fulliy ingtending to murderfy htis mofy with sporkrs but we were foiled on account of ticekts being sold out

BREAD.

Penguin wrote:

Mhy friends and I gathered forces fulliy ingtending to murderfy htis mofy with sporkrs but we were foiled on account of being pulled ovre on the way to the moviei theatre becasue we were drivign on the side wakl.

That's better.

I just came back from watching the movie three hours ago. I have only two coherent thoughts about it so far:

1: It was so freaking pretty.
2: I want to be blue.

My mind is currently stuck on my desire to be blue, so I guess I'll have to get angry at the movie's shortcomings later.

Why can't I be blue, you guys? If I get silver poisoning, will I be blue?

Snake Bandage wrote:

Why can't I be blue, you guys? If I get silver poisoning, will I be blue?

Yes.






But then you'll have silver poisoning.

Maybe you should meet your human physiology halfway and dye your hair blue? [You must be registered and logged in to see this image.]

Snake Bandage wrote:

I just came back from watching the movie three hours ago. I have only two coherent thoughts about it so far:

1: It was so freaking pretty.
2: I want to be blue.

My mind is currently stuck on my desire to be blue, so I guess I'll have to get angry at the movie's shortcomings later.

Why can't I be blue, you guys? If I get silver poisoning, will I be blue?

I'M BLUE DA BA DEE DABBA DA-EE, DABBA-E DABBA DEE DA BA DAI!

It figures you would like the three hour long waste of a special effects war game because it had some half assed, done to death plot and "moral."

Bamshalam wrote:

Snake Bandage wrote:

Why can't I be blue, you guys? If I get silver poisoning, will I be blue?

Yes.






But then you'll have silver poisoning.

Yeah, I figured that wouldn't be fun. Plus, it's kind of an ugly shade of blue.

Penguin wrote:

Maybe you should meet your human physiology halfway and dye your hair blue? [You must be registered and logged in to see this image.]

Well, I wouldn't go that far, dyeing your hair is hell. Though I suppose a single blue streak wouldn't be too bad.

Mikey Go WOOGA wrote:

I'M BLUE DA BA DEE DABBA DA-EE, DABBA-E DABBA DEE DA BA DAI!

That song was annoying when I was ten and it's doubly annoying now. Shut up, Mikey.

Quote :

It figures you would like the three hour long waste of a special effects war game because it had some half assed, done to death plot and "moral."

There were morals? I didn't notice, I was too busy enjoying the pretty effects and the wicked world-building and the cool blue people. Now I figure I kind of put my brain on hold while I was watching the movie so the plot (which I heard beforehand was not anything to write home about) won't detract from the potential pretty.

Snake Bandage wrote:

There were morals? I didn't notice, I was too busy enjoying the pretty effects and the wicked world-building and the cool blue people.

AND THE HELICOPTER LIZARDS! Don't forget the helicopter lizards!

Alright, it's been a few days and I finally have the time to jot out a sporking of the finale. This entry will be shorter on summary and slightly longer on commentary.

Now, in fairness, the climax of the film is visually striking and an example of outstanding direction of an action scene.

Doesn't stop it from being cheesy as hell, nonsensical, and about as believable as the Ewoks defeating the Empire in Return of the Jedi.

Jake goes and rallies all of the interchangeable Na'vi tribes of Pandora in their stand against humanity. They get together, and the Na'vi on their flying dragons and bows and arrows start kicking human ass. Marine Colonel Badass eventually firebombs helicopter pilot Trudy, who has defected in order to defend the Na'vi. He then goes down to the ground and mans a robot in order to go after Jake's real body--after all, if he kills that, Avatar Jake is dead, too. He breaks the windows in the trailer that houses the avatar machines and forces the paraplegic Jake out of his pod. Neytiri turns up, kills Marine Colonel, holds Jake's almost-lifeless body, and then saves it by putting an oxygen mask on him.

After this, they decide to round up the humans and send them back to their "dying world".

Real klassy, folks. The "morally superior" race is sending back a group of people desperately trying to save themselves. If they were that morally superior, wouldn't they exhibit more compassion than to dispassionately send them packing? Oh wait, they're blue, pretty, and cry before they kill animals. I guess they're inherently better than us.

We cut to a scene of Jake's mind/soul being removed from his real body and placed into his Na'vi avatar body once and for all. The last shot of the film is his yellow eyes opening. Cut to credits and awful, awful Leona Lewis ballad.

I guess the thing that Avatar made me realize is this: you can throw as much money in visual dressing into a project s you want, but if you don't put enough thought into the substance of the film, it falls woefully flat. $313 million and, despite the special effects, it's incredibly dull and fails to be fully immersive.

I totally loved the Marine Colonel Badass character. I'd think, that if I was a chick, I'd totally want to suck his cock.

Edit: And why does everyone consider the blue apes to be noble and whatnot? Bunch of poop flinging savages, who are ready to kill others in a heartbeat. That is, unless a fluffy bug happens to land on them.

This movie was everything I expected. It was ridden with cliches (seriously, I could've probably given you a 95% accurate blow-by-blow account of the plot about 5-10 minutes into the movie), the message was clumsily presented, the science was painful at points (their spines come out of their heads? That can't be beneficial, no matter how many dragons they tame with it), and it fell for the "Noble Savage" fallacy hook-line-and sinker.

And I liked it.

It had a fantastic amount of eye-candy, the Na'vi looked awesome (I thought), and the fight scenes were epic. As long as you were able to ignore the horrible dialogue and the "big message" that even the movie itself seemed to ignore, it was a good popcorn movie. That's all I was looking for in it.

Was it worth all the hype and the 50 bajillion dollars Cameron spent on it? Definately not. With all the needless hype and money poured into it, this just turned out to be James Cameron's own version of Chinese Democracy.

Achtung Baby wrote:

Real klassy, folks. The "morally superior" race is sending back a group of people desperately trying to save themselves. If they were that morally superior, wouldn't they exhibit more compassion than to dispassionately send them packing? Oh wait, they're blue, pretty, and cry before they kill animals. I guess they're inherently better than us.

Echoing what Bam said earlier, I think you didn't pay enough attention. There are plenty of things wrong with this movie, but the Na'vi explicitly state when they take Jake in that they've tried to make "skywalkers" understand their world over and over again, to no avail. Then they get all the sacred places of their ancestors fucked up and their giant treehouse burned down simply because they don't want to give the humans a shiny rock that sells for lots on the market.

Before the tree blowing up, they never said they told the humans to gtfo, they just weren't gonna move out of their treehouse for some shiny rocks.

InkWeaver wrote:

Before the tree blowing up, they never said they told the humans to gtfo, they just weren't gonna move out of their treehouse for some shiny rocks.

That part I didn't get. Why exactly didn't they want to move? I mean, if I happen to come across a grizzly in the woods, I'm not going to stand in it's way demanding it to respect me.

They were there first, blah blah, this was their ancestral home, they were cliche "sophisticated savages" - you know the whole cliche drill, Viley.

I loved the happy-sappy ending. I guess it would've been a bit of a downer, if they'd shown the Evil Company returning some years later and bombard the whole area from the orbit.

As if the Evil Company is going to just go: "Meh, that unbelievably valuable stuff isn't worth couple of big bombs."

VileCorp wrote:

I loved the happy-sappy ending. I guess it would've been a bit of a downer, if they'd shown the Evil Company returning some years later and bombard the whole area from the orbit.

As if the Evil Company is going to just go: "Meh, that unbelievably valuable stuff isn't worth couple of big bombs."

The fanbrats are way ahead of you:

Avatar: Revenge

Okay, so I saw the movie today, and...

InkWeaver wrote:

It was cliche as hell, and I knew every turn as it came, and I predicted everything that would happen an hour before it actually happened, but DAMMIT, it was shiny and there was FLYING and... and...

I liked it. I fully recognize that it was the same old bullshit only with pretty smurfycats and Native American ripoff themes, and I still liked it. It was dumb as hell, and I liked it.

AND THE FIGHT SCENES WERE AWESOME. SUE ME.

...everything Inky said is basically what I thought as well. Special effects were awesome.

I agree with most of the complaints about this movie, but I still enjoyed it as a very pretty slice of action. I didn't find the Green Aesop to be too egregious (though the Native American/Generic Noble Savage stereotypes with the Na'Vi were unnecessary and annoying), partly because I kept:

a) Thinking that it wasn't a particularly good Aesop taken at face value, because Pandora's wildlife had a literal hive-mind/overgod/whatever, whereas Earth's doesn't, ergo points made about one are less than relevant to the other. Ergo, I viewed it more as "humans deal with alien world they have trouble understanding" (I did wonder why the supposedly benevolent scientists had such crappy luck interacting with the Na'Vi, but figured it was because no-one bothered to ship any proper anthropologists however many light years) than "HUMANS CANNOT COMPREHEND THE MAJESTY OF NATURE HURR DURR".
b) Going into Alternate Character Interpretations where the story is actually about an alien race and/or hive-mind assimilating a human into itself as a way of chasing most other humans away from itself. The line at the end about how "the aliens went back to their dying world" was actually kind of chilling (as opposed to smug), viewed in that light.

FFFFFFFFFF- WHY DID HE CHANGE IT DAMMIT. WHY. WHYYYYY.

No, seriously, I kind of want to cry a little. This movie could have been so, so good.

Oh, wow, just read that whole thing, and -- I just don't understand some of the choices that were made in streamlining this thing. Yes, there were a lot of cuts that were needed for time, but the original script had some really important things that would've deepened the characters and plot - especially the addition of the character Hegner.

Bamshalam wrote:

FFFFFFFFFF- WHY DID HE CHANGE IT DAMMIT. WHY. WHYYYYY.

No, seriously, I kind of want to cry a little. This movie could have been so, so good.

A movie like that would have been made of win. I would like to see a good novelist (or even a good fanwriter) write a novel based on the original 880. That would be so good.

Bamshalam wrote:

FFFFFFFFFF- WHY DID HE CHANGE IT DAMMIT. WHY. WHYYYYY.

No, seriously, I kind of want to cry a little. This movie could have been so, so good.

What the hell? This would've been an awesome film? Why did he change all of it? WHY?