Avatar

I assume you mean Terminator 2. Terminator 3 was horrible.


Edit: Would you recommend Avatar in general? I am not always looking for a cinematic masterpiece. Is it entertaining...does it suspend disbelief?

I think he was referring to the special effects... the "liquid morphing metal" effect specifically. It was new and state-of-the-art with that movie.

That's still 2, not 3.

My bad!.... I do better with Cary Grant movies

We saw a five-minute preview to Avatar just before seeing Up! in 3D and the graphics looked pretty nice, but the story and acting didn't make me want to see it.

On another note: the new 3D glasses (at least at our local theater) are a pain for people who wear glasses; I had to hold them by hand throughout the entire movie and my glasses have very small frames that shouldn't have been a problem. I have a pare of over-glasses sunglasses that work fine; why couldn't they do this any better? The wife wants to see Up! again for Christmas but we're going to the flat screen version.

3D is just a gimmick to get people into the theaters.

I'm able to wait 'till stuff comes out on DVD/on demand... I haven't been to a movie theater in years. I can only imagine there are lots of other people acting the same way. (I've seen parts of UP!... this is the first I knew it was 3D in theaters.)

We mainly watch DVDs and sat movies... go to the theater about 2 or 3 times a year. This year it was for Star Trek (awesome) and Up! (awesome).

Up! is pretty cool in 3D despite the goggle problem. Pixar's first venture into 3D.

So that's where Luke's blue milk comes from.

Just saw it. Came straight to AppleOutsider to see if there was a thread. GO SEE IT. 3D OR NOT 3D. IT'S WORTH CHECKING OUT.

1. Story was alright. You could see the "Hand of Cameron" throughout especially the mecha design and his usual take on space/army/tech life, but I think exploring the "Gaia" stuff and the nature, the interaction with the biology and the natives, that was really good.

2. ABSOLUTELY MINDBLOWING*. The main thing is the facial expression and the fluid animation. A lot of motion capture, I think, but whatever their secret sauce is, it's pretty good stuff. Again, facial expressions. Amazing. The rendering quality, well, I saw it in regular 2D at a local cineplex off a film print, pretty seamless, does suspend disbelief.

*It works better than usual because, you, the viewer, are also a kind of Avatar of sorts in this different world. Watch it and you'll know what I'm talking about.

3. Politics. Pretty obvious. The only thing I will say is that if our own world is going to hell on a handbasket, beyond nature-based sprituality, non-dualism-based spirituality would be more of the answer. That is, Forgiveness. Maybe temperatures will rise this century by 5 deg C. Maybe 1. Maybe 10. On this Earth, I think, it's just the gawddammned population, man... Stop breeding, for chrissakes? Why are there so many, so many new humans in the worst possible areas for sustainable survival? A cruel joke... a cruel joke.

4. Paradigm. I think mainstream, non-effects and chick-flick movies are pretty meh for me nowadays. I don't need guns and explosions (not all the time). I saw Coraline on iTunes rental and that was brilliant. Twilight (the first one) was strange. I don't enjoy that many movies nowadays, games like Left4Dead, Borderlands, FEAR:Project Origin, Wolfenstein (the latest one) all have much deeper plot, scenery and emotional content than so many movies this year. Just like, IMO, Coraline put so many computer-animated "kids" movies to shame, Avatar just wipes the floor of those that tried to blend real-life humans with CG imagery. It's not perfect, but Avatar sets a new benchmark, particularly in realistic character and animal animation. In terms of scenery and disaster scenarios 2012 was pretty impressive.

I think there's too many movies out there trying to do too many things. I for one watched much less movies this year. I however did play a few real solid games on PC, and caught some interesting TV shows like Lost, Galactica, Stargate:Atlantis (average) and Stargate Universe (promising).

I tend to be very picky with movies, particularly if I'm going to pay for it at the cinema. I really try and avoid pirating nowadays, I'll wait for it on my local satellite TV or iTunes rental.

I'm going to continue to be picky with movies. UP just never caught my fancy, without Steve I wonder what Pixar is really up to nowadays? More vampire movies, rom-coms, meh.

Gamer was an interesting movie for me, because it was quite relevant to me and society in general, I thought.

But other than recent memory of 2012 and Gamer, I can't even recall any other movies this year I saw. Very strange, but that's the way movies are... Hmm... movies... 1st half of this year... umm... nope, can't recall anything outstanding.

A giant, sexy, amazonian (boy, she's tall ), tribal-blue alien woman-esque-thing with a tail. Disturbingly HOT.

BTW... I think they served too much of it at Jedi Academy. Probably one of the things that pissed Anakin off so much: "...Not letting me visit my mom, who was still a slave the whole time, by the way, is one thing. But, Jedi council, you and your gawddammned blue milk. Breakfast, lunch, dinner, geeez...!!!"

Makes me think of that joke... Come to the dark side... We have cookies - not served with blue milk.

Now I remember... Orphan. Great, twisted movie. If I had kids myself I probably would not have enjoyed it as much as I did...

Mmm...blue titties.

It's all mocap based. The actors acted including the emotion and these were mocap'd and applied to the models. It's not the usual animation with the actors speaking in a mike and the animators bringing it to life. It's the actors moving through pretty much all the action on a soundstage.

Does anyone think this James Cameron film will best the Titanic?

Couldn't resist:

Wow! Something we agree on! I really liked Terminator 2. They should have stopped there. But the others after that weren't really a Cameron film.

As for Avatar I haven't seen it yet but I've yet to see something from James Cameron I didn't like.

Loved Avatar, seen it twice in RealD 3D. I understand how some say the story was lacking, but I argue that Cameron did well to not bog it down with an overly complex story. The storyline and plot were classic, which I’m sure some will hate, but I think it was the best mix of film making to satisfy 10yo to 60yo males and females.

I think that like Titanic it will be a box office success, despite its lackluster opening weekend. Titanic only did $8M it’s opening day compared to Avatar’s $27M yet went on to gross $.18B worldwide. December movies simply aren’t the best time of year to launch if you want to break records out of the gate.

The only issue I had with the movie is… [highlight for spoilers »»»»]
...how the final attack on the Na’vi was coordinated. You have ships that can fly into space and you can’t figure out how to drop explosives onto a tree from above. Sure, the floating rocks could have gotten in the way, but then why have an attack from a single point of entry on a horizontal plane? That simply doesn’t make sense. You don’t attack from a lower position than your enemy did and you come in waves from multiple directions. I just didn’t by that from a strategic PoV.
[spoilers and rant end]

Favorite quote from Cameron on Titanic…
Good article from Wired. It details some of the equipment that was required to make this film…

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http://www.wired.com/magazine/2009/11/ff_avatar_cameron

My reply: [highlight for spoilers »»»»] ...I didn't have a big problem with the final attack, they had to have some David vs Goliath ending anyway. The only weird thing for me was the advanced tech that they have in actually "creating" and "driving" the Avatars itself, seems way ahead of the military, colonisation and mining capability... I suppose being a "mining outpost" covers that angle, with the Avatars tech coming from Earth itself... Oh, and the final battle with the Colonel ~ how it conveniently took place just outside their remote pod with the Avatar hookup devices. ...Nonetheless overall the movie was quite satisfying and reasonable. You're right, it didn't have to have a superb story, for me emotionally it worked out anyways. Seeing it on film (not digital) in 2D not 3D maybe made things more "real" for me in terms of the story. If I was watching the 3D version, maybe I'd be like all too much ooh and ahh to get involved with the movie emotionally. Might go and see it in 3D with my dad though, sometime in the next few weeks. Believe it or not I haven't seen anything in 3D in at least 5 years, IMAX3D or whatever-else-3D.

I almost don't want to read how they made it, and keep the feeling fresh in my mind. Obviously there was tons of motion capture, but really seamless. The rendering must have taken a ton of high performance computers in the render farm. With the visual quality of video games now approaching movies from just several years back Avatar really set a new benchmark. It was like DirectX20 vs our DirectX10 in PC games. I heard of some other cool things like a device Cameron used to look through to have a real-time composited view of the shot, some sort of augmented reality thing. Anyways, I'd rather keep the magic intact by not reading up too much on the technology, if I can resist it.

If you have the George Clooney version of Solaris it's quite interesting to hear Cameron's commentary (along with Soderbergh's). He goes on a little bit about his take on relationships and so on.

I think that has to be the future... I saw a little bit of Hulk (the most recent one) again on TV. The days of animators manipulating a 3D model and then lip-syncing and all that could be numbered. My problem with the Hulk and especially Spiderman (which I thought was all entirely rubbish) is that the animation is too exaggerated sometimes... Too cartooney. Also, with Avatar, the depth of the facial expression is an order of magnitude greater than anything before it.

Of course as I understand you still need animators because the raw motion capture data is not 100% useable right out of the capture session.

...

One thing about the paradigm that we may not have discussed is attention span. With a regular movie without too much effects, by 60 minutes I start to fade out. Avatar seemed like 2 hours of solid "Wow".

Sometimes, even with effects, I fade out after an hour, like with Narnia: Prince Caspian. I was like, okay, let's get this over with so I can go back to my computer, phone or go grab a snack. Sad, huh? But I think I'm old school at 31 (I don't Facebook or Text much at all, and I only have 2 screens of apps on my iPhone 3GS including built-in apps), can't imagine those in their 20s and teens and their attention span nowadays. BTW school must be hell for them, maybe more so than in my day.

Has anyone read Orson Scott Card’s novel "Speaker for the Dead”? I see a lot of similarities between [the Na’vi and Piggies], with Cameron’s use of a [neural net connecting life] to be a more impressive and better idea. Remember that a [seed was buried with the dead Na’vi] and our protagonist was allowed to [make a bow from the Great Tree]. Both things very similar to Card’s “Speaker for the Dead”. Note that Cameron hired Card to write the novelization of the screenplay The Abyss, so I am certain that he was well aware of Card’s body of work long before the making of Avatar. I have been wanting someone to make a movie that covers that subject and I think that a sequel may very well delve deeper into that idea.

(Bracketed areas are spoilers and require highlighting to read)


I understand that, but I don’t think it will ruin it. It’s not a making of, but talking about what Cameron has gone through from being a trucker to getting to where he is today. The only part about Avatar that I can recall is how the film was put on hold until the technology was available to do what he wanted. A lesser film costing $400M would have been possible right after Titanic, how he saw Gollum in LotR and knew it was time to make Avatar, and how he flew to Japan to get Sony to redesign their cameras so they could be handheld, which really means a still heavy camera with a giant cable going to huge computer nearby for processing.


I didn’t care for Solaris. The story was lacking on many levels.

Avatar - the movie, sucked big time for me. It was OK the first time around. I had the misfortune of seeing it a second time and that pretty much killed any good will I had from watching it the first time.

Other than good computer graphics, the movie lacked a lot of things. YMMV.

I liked it but I can see why some folks would dislike the rather liberal plot line. But big impersonal corporations with scumball execs is nothing new for Cameron.

I had issues with only one thing but that was tactical in nature. Too bad there isn't a spoiler tag in this forum or is there?

If by tacticle you mean the [attack on the Na/vi], then i agree. They used a space-capable transport ship as a bomber. They could have [attacked from multiple directions, much higher up and/or just bombed the crap out of the area from above without a single line, slow, low-altitude attack with ground forces]. I have a hard time finding a justification for such a bad [strategy from trained military personnel].

(Highlight for spoilers)


That is how hide them but they do become visible if you quote my post without changing the colour code.

Thanks.

Yes, that's what I mean except I'd have simply dropped a rock on the tree of souls or whatever it was called from orbit. Or just a few oversized crowbars. Google project thor. There's also a wikipedia entry for kinetic bombardment. I mean geez...a classic line from Aliens is "I say we take off and nuke the entire site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure."

Cameron could have transplanted half the lines from Aliens into Avatar and it would have worked. Especially from Hudson. Cameron should have gotten Paxton to reprise that role. Heck, he's died to an alien, a predator and a terminator. Why not the na'vi too?

At least the pilot was a much cuter version of Ferro. Michelle Rodriquez looked pretty damn good.

Oh, heh...you can't hide links that way.

Avatar has finally won a world record. It’s the highest grossing non-adjusted domesitc film for the 2nd weekend. It looks likely to take Spiderman for the 3rd weekend if it can do better than $45M. From 4th to the 12th weekend the world records are owned by Titanic. He might take a few Titanic records but all of them seems pretty unlikely to me.

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http://boxofficemojo.com/alltime/wee...?page=2&p=.htm

I’m not sure about Paxton but I think I recall reading that Cameron decided not to bring Michael Biehn into the film because he already had Weaver.

I don’t think they had [nukes and I don’t think they wanted radiation to deal with the mining operation but there are plenty of other ways to have attacked that would simply make more sense]. If they wanted to make up some reason for that poor strategy and make a statement of over-confidence against fighting the “savages” which made the poor strategy a go I would have been okay with that.

Note, our protagonist in is Avatar is also in Terminator 4 as a Terminator.



That is fine. The [unobtainium in the rocks made them float and even at the center we see rock formations in an arch that indictate that there is a strong magnetic field there, but why only one line of attack and why use ground forces at all when the jungle is the one place you lose the advantage. Flying in manually from a higher altitude with your “space ship” to drop the bombs would have worked better. If there are floating mountains above the site I would suggest blowing the bottom of the mountain which looks to be unobtainium free and having that fall on them. Starting a fire in the forest to burn back the natives so they could even get close or coordinating waves with multiple points of entry.] I’ve seen it 3x so i obviously enjoy the film but I really wish that scene was thought out better.

This movie is doing amazing well in the box office and will likely break records in Blu-ray sales, too. With RealD 3D TVs starting to come out this year I wonder if theyll actually make a 3D Blu-ray version. I dont know if this needs a new player or just the TV, but I suspect the former. I figure the cable and network cost for this movie will also likely be one of the highest ever.

So, with just 2.4 weeks in the theaters its already grossed more than $1B worldwide. Many films were much faster out of the gate. The Dark Knight holds many records up to $500M, and likely beyond that, but Avatar looks to be the fastest since at last $700M onwards. Its already beat out the The Dark Knights 33 week gross making it the 4th highest grossing movie of all time in just 2.4 weeks.

http://boxofficemojo.com/alltime/world/ (All Time World)
http://boxofficemojo.com/alltime/?page=byrecord&p=.htm (Records By Film)
http://boxofficemojo.com/alltime/wee...NDSCAT1&p=.htm (Consecutive Weeks at #1)
http://boxofficemojo.com/alltime/wee...?page=3&p=.htm (Top Grossing Weekends)
So, it can beat out Titanic for the 4th weekend gross of $28M next week with the only compelling film premiering next week is Daybreakers? Will it out gross Titanics more than $1.8B now that China started showing Avatar yesterday? How many more #1s will it have?

Found this piece about conservatives crying a fit about Avatar.

http://www.latimes.com/entertainment...,5932910.story

Makes me want to see it.

It was kind of cool to see Sigourney Weaver again. The movie itself was a bunch oh hippie bull crap, damn hippies.

China opened a week ago with stunning sales, for China. They have at least 800 RealD 3D theaters, as I recall and will slow, but powerful, mover. I wondered if the content would not work for Chinese government, as some American movies have to get edited or banned outright, but the content of the film could be seen as the big American corporation trying to destroy the way of life of the indigenous people. Even the politics of the NaVi are more inline with Marxism than with democracy.


How so? Because they lived in a big ass tree? Its more fighting to refer to them as Keebler Elves than hippies. They killed the local fauna. They killed humans. They were warriors who were defending their home and home land. If they didnt do that stuff they would be hippies", IMO.