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Has ANYONE seen the similarities between Avatar and The Abyss besides me? I haven't read this entire thread, but I noticed it left and right, from the bioluminescence to the light patterns on the aliens skin to Quattrich and Coffee (Michael Biehn!) to Sigourney Weaver and Mary-Elizabeth Masturbatorio. This movie was like a more high-tech, family-friendly, fanciful version of The Abyss. Not that I'm complaining that much. Seemed to go right over the heads of the reviewer at The Onion, who was busy comparing it to Terminator and Aliens.

Went in not expecting a lot but was largely and pleasantly entertained by this film...however the whole giant smurfs communing with nature and the film's deep ecology bullshit made me wish that Werner Herzog would show up with a nuclear rocket launcher:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3xQyQnXrLb0

The 3D was a lot of fun. For the action scenes. I pop boners for dragons in 2D, so to ride on a dragon in 3D, yeah, I was fucking my popcorn and making weird throat noises. 3D for lab scene exposition was distracting, though. You can't 3D mundanity without calling attention to the senselessness of the act. "Ooh, the railing in that static shot is in my fuckin lap, awesome. Jeez that display screen is really popping out, wait, what are the talking people saying again?" But 3D dragons, yeah, sign me the fuck up!
The story was dumb. And the whole "noble-savage" bullshit set cultural anthropology back 80 years, but flying 3D dragons, yes, please let me fuck a dragon, let me fuck a dragon in 3D.

Kurt Russell's Beard wrote:flying 3D dragons, yes, please let me fuck a dragon, let me fuck a dragon in 3D.

when the guy was on the dragon with a machine gun... it was like heaven

closest thing to an adaptation I'm going to get, I suppose

The Torsion wrote:Has ANYONE seen the similarities between Avatar and The Abyss besides me? I haven't read this entire thread, but I noticed it left and right, from the bioluminescence to the light patterns on the aliens skin to Quattrich and Coffee (Michael Biehn!) to Sigourney Weaver and Mary-Elizabeth Masturbatorio. This movie was like a more high-tech, family-friendly, fanciful version of The Abyss. Not that I'm complaining that much. Seemed to go right over the heads of the reviewer at The Onion, who was busy comparing it to Terminator and Aliens.

I noticed this some too, but mostly in the sense that The Abyss was Camerons excuse to try out CGI technology, and this was his chance to try out 3-D technology.

For fucks sake this movie looks like a homoerotic fagorgy.

http://www.reelzchannel.com/movie-news/ ... -up-in-dvd

ien Sex Scenes Cut from Avatar May Pop Up in DVD

Stop reading now if you have not seen James Cameron's epic sci-fi masterpiece, Avatar, because this article contains at least one PLOT SPOILER.

For those of you who have seen the movie already, you're aware of the very brief scene depicting the coupling of Jake Sully's (played by Sam Worthington) avatar body with the alien Na'vi, Ney'tiri (Zoe Saldana). Very little was shown of that encounter, but you may get your chance to see exactly how the Na'vi "do it" when the DVD comes out, said Cameron in a recent group interview.

We had it in and we cut it out. So that will be something for the special edition DVD, if you want to see how they have sex.

If you guessed that the strange tendrils the Na'vi use to connect or "sync" with other creatures on Pandora might have something to do with how they "get their groove on," you would be right, according to Saldana.

If you sync to your banshee and you’re syncing to a tree, why not sync into a person? I almost feel like you’ll have the most amazing orgasm, I guess. It was a very funny scene to shoot because there were so many technical things that sometimes you have to keep in mind that paying attention to all those might disrupt the fluidity of how a scene is supposed to take place.

And because Jim was shooting for a PG-13 rating, we couldn’t move in certain directions. The motion would look a little too past the PG-13 rating standards. So it was really funny for Sam and me. We had a lot of giggles there.



WAT

Iron Goldie wrote:

YES! I love that thing!
X 911 !!!!

Yeah you can totally see their queues (CNS ponytails) converging between the two of them when they bone... it's in there, all right. Nice find on all accounts.

Necrometer wrote:

Iron Goldie wrote:

YES! I love that thing!
X 911 !!!!

Yeah you can totally see their queues (CNS ponytails) converging between the two of them when they bone... it's in there, all right. Nice find on all accounts.

Both of those things got pretty big LOLs in my theater. Every time I look at that blue deer thing I posted I laugh.

I'd like to sync my tendril into Zoe Saldana.

LOL?

If KRB or any other smart anthro person is out there... can you enlighten me on the whole Noble Savage problem? I watch Avatar and see a romanticised ideal of a civilisation living at peace with its environment. Is that racist or something? I'm aware of pretty much every allegory Cameron was trying to cram in there, and yeah I guess I sort of get why it's ignorant to hold injuns (or injun-like aliens) up as some sort of majestic ideal that we must strive to emulate... is that it or is there something more? I mean they WERE fucking aliens, and I think I am OK with them being an artistic embodiment of an ideal that the hippie director believes in. Is that hippie director being culturally insensitive, then?

I understand that the term is tied to primitivism: "the opinion that life was better or more moral during the early stages of mankind or among primitive peoples (or children) and has deteriorated with the growth of civilization. It is a response to the perennial question of whether the development of complex civilizations and technologies has benefited or harmed mankind." Is that so retarded? I think it's open for debate whether or not technology has improved quality of life in the non-quantifiable ways.

I read this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noble_savage and couldn't make much sense of it. I get the vibe that this "problem" is along the same lines as that of the "magical negro", where it's tacky but not outright offensive?

There's a show on the travel channel called Meet the Natives. These island natives visit the US. On the island of Tanna, the natives live there without technology in a small island where they hunt and farm. They mostly don't use currency. On this island, they have no concept of stress, they have fought in the past, but learned to live in peace and have for many years now. Ai'wa is on their side apparently.

Well I guess their entire culture is culturally insensitive or something.

Necrometer wrote:If KRB or any other smart anthro person is out there... can you enlighten me on the whole Noble Savage problem?

its soft racism in the same way as "blacks are good athletes!" or "asians are good at math!" or whatever. it's insulting, incredibly cliche, and says more about the white filmmaker's white guilt than it does about modern society. also, it's almost always tied to the White Savior cliche where the stupid savages are incapable of doing anything without being led by a noble white man. so yeah, its like the magical negro and its dumb as hell.

its really only offensive in avatar because the navi are so clearly supposed to be native americans and painting one side as cartoonishly noble and good and the other side as cartoonishly evil and greedy is massively lazy writing. For an excellent example of a nuanced metaphor of the conflict between technology and environmentalism see (i cant believe im about to recommend an anime christ almighty) Princess Mononoke. the people of iron town are not evil, they are good people in fact, but their society is destructive and the conflict is mostly bred from misunderstanding and not being able to see the impact of the industrialization that is providing for their way of life.

I read one review of avatar that made the suggestion that maybe the humans could have been refugees escaping the dying earth but were encroaching on the natives of pandora. i thought that would have made a far more compelling story with plenty of room for dragon-riding machinegunnery.

wait, can anyone actually talk shit on princess mononoke? is that even possible with a straight face?

seriously ross, if you haven't seen it, i heartily reccomend it.

DeadWalrus wrote:I read one review of avatar that made the suggestion that maybe the humans could have been refugees escaping the dying earth but were encroaching on the natives of pandora. i thought that would have made a far more compelling story with plenty of room for dragon-riding machinegunnery.

It certainly would have, but this whole thing must necessarily be a blockbuster, so anything even half as morally confounding as that would have put the thing out of the running. I see how it's frustrating to many that this thing that's primarily entertainment (rather than art) even attemts to have "something to say", but I'd rather have it that way than watch another Spider-Man, LOTR, Pirates of the Caribbean, or Transformers with absolutely no voice. And I understand and respect that plenty of people think Avatar's voice is stupid, of course.

Thanks for the response overall. I presume the movie would not be regarded as (passively?) racist if the natives had no similarity to human natives, and instead were just some bizarre aliens who were at one with the land, and at peace... so yeah the screw-up was Cameron's blatant mimesis.

I pause at the instant dismissal of anything that touches on the ideas of "white guilt"... to me, that phrase seems to be a tool of passive white elitists who want to undercut any doubt of whites' rightful place at the top of the social latter. I think there should be much more white awareness/empathy regarding why whites are where they are in society, but it seems that if anyone tries to bring that up, they are mocked with the "white guilt" catch phrase. If that makes sense. I mean... to apply it to the American natives... we are living on stolen land. I am not sure that non-natives should feel guilty exactly, but at least acknowledge it.

technology problems with avatar:

they have the ability to remotely control biological bodies from anywhere on the planet but they still have pilots in cockpits? why weren't those mechs solid tanks piloted by operators 1000 miles away?

why didnt they simply bombard the tree of souls from fucking orbit?

did the future marines buy all of their vehicles and robots from hasbro? i'm pretty sure we have materials capable of stopping arrows right now, let alone in a future where we've conquered interstellar travel. and what kind of weak-ass combat robot gets owned by a lion and naked blue dude with a knife?

oh fuck, really? a robot gets owned by a knife?

i cant imagine it's going to do nearly as well without the spectacle of 3-d to wrap it up in.

thürstön.3®®0® wrote:i cant imagine it's going to do nearly as well without the spectacle of 3-d to wrap it up in.

Which is why you should push a couple extra burritos to find a way into this movie...

Necrometer wrote:I pause at the instant dismissal of anything that touches on the ideas of "white guilt"... to me, that phrase seems to be a tool of passive white elitists who want to undercut any doubt of whites' rightful place at the top of the social latter.

that's not how i intend the phrase. i use the term 'white guilt' to mean the paternalistic and patronizing soft racism that rewrites cultures into cartoons, even if it's meant favorably, and is just another way of otherizing people.

i think the movie going public can handle more intelligent and thoughtful fare. especially if its set up in layers, like district 9, where you can enjoy the action and effects or you can look a little deeper to see what the film is trying to say about the world. it doesn't need to be a binary solaris-or-transformers 2 metric you know.

quite frankly, i cant imagine how anyone can imagine that a large set of corporations is going to spend that many hundreds of millions of dollars on an effects film without:

1) pushing forward a social agenda/message of some kind
2) appealing to the least common denominator, intellect wise

I love District 9 and would love to see more nuanced filmmaking of its kind being produced, but it's not going to pay for a $400M outlay, even if it were rated PG13. The best work is not going to bring in the most people, that just the nature of the tugofwar between art and populism.

I know it's not "all or nothing" and my point was that I think it's cool that JC didn't go "nothing" as far as his message like most of the other mega-movies. Seriously even a "classy" series like Lord of the Rings doesn't really have a stance. What... don't obsess over jewelry?

thürstön.3®®0® wrote:quite frankly, i cant imagine how anyone can imagine that a large set of corporations is going to spend that many hundreds of millions of dollars on an effects film without:

1) pushing forward a social agenda/message of some kind
2) appealing to the least common denominator, intellect wise

OK, so ... Pirates of the Caribbean? And Fox financed the thing... I don't see the connection.