Nar78 Wrote: C.L.U-1 Wrote:Okay, whats the point of this? these films have nothing in common other than the color blue, and that dances with wolves joke is getting old, and stupid. Meh, you'll get this from every fan base, friend. I've seen this behavior in music icon fan pages as well. You gotta accept that there will always be a group out there to share their contempt as well as those who share praise. Don't take it personal. To each their own.

Unobtanium, Navi (like naive), Pandora (like the box). These are just a couple of direct examples of how lazy the filmmakers were when they made Avatar. And the reason? If they keep it simple enough, it will appeal to a broader audience because they have to put less thought into understanding the film. Yes they made an ungodly fortune doing it but it was clear at the outset that making a great science fiction film wasn't their goal, it was to make the most money possible, clearly. At the cost of dumbing down the film so dramatically that a rutabaga could grasp it!

Here's an excerpt that helps better illustrate my point, from an article on science fiction criticism posted over @ the world in the satin bag or:

http://wisb.blogspot.com/2010/05/science-fiction-criticism-necessary.html

Quote,

"In fact, I'd argue that we've become too nice in the science fiction community, giving so much space to the blindly devotional and not enough space to the deep thinkers. A prime example of this, I think, is Avatar....Of all the movies you could bring to the conversation (of science fiction criticism), Cameron's "masterpiece" is probably the one film that most deserved what it got from its critics and detractors. Here is a film with an absurdly large budget and also the most amazing visuals ever put into a film--so amazing, in fact, that they've already begun changing how we make movies. But, for all that--all the money spent ($200-310 million, depending where you look)--it also has the most derivative story ever conceived for a major motion picture--so derivative, in fact, that it is almost painful. That's the problem with Avatar, and a point that Brady (another blogger) misses when he tries to indicate that all fiction and movies are derivative (they are, but that's another argument). It's not that Avatar is a derivative movie, it's that it is a derivative movie that knows it is one, and that anyone who saw it or heard about it knew from the start. This is not good storytelling, but lazy storytelling. The fact that most of the film's budget was spent on the visual effects is painfully obvious in the story. At least when Cameron tried to retell Titanic, he did so by adding something to it, by taking a story we already knew and creating unique, emotionally-engaging characters to spice things up (yes, I'll admit that as much as I hate on Titanic, I do think it's a good movie). Avatar was panned because those of us who write about the genre and were supposed to make up Cameron's core audience expected more from the man who gave us Aliens, The Abyss, and so on. Cameron is a director who knows how to merge beautiful visuals with strong stories and characters, and the idea that he could fail so miserably to deliver anything other than a giant special effects test was a disappointment to pretty much all of us. The criticism was necessary, because otherwise we're asking for more of this kind of garbage.