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(feel free to downvote at will ...) my trollish reply to everyone who has been analyzing the heck out of Avatar in the past week has been: "it's a friggin' ACT

(feel free to downvote at will ...) my trollish reply to everyone who has been analyzing the heck out of Avatar in the past week has been: "it's a friggin' ACTION movie, that's all! enjoy it as that, and don't expect more!" james cameron was the guy who brought us the Terminator movies, True Lies, and a few other great heart-pounding action movies of the 80's and 90's (Titanic was an outlier for him ... it was far different than any other movie he had done). nobody was over-analyzing the geo-political realism or marital relations in True Lies. the man is an action filmmaker. his movies should be compared to other big-budget Hollywood action films (e.g., transformers, bourne movies), not to deeply profound works of sci-fi/fantasy art like LOTR, Neal Stephenson novels, etc.

jseliger 17y ago
"my trollish reply to everyone who has been analyzing the heck out of Avatar in the past week has been: "it's a friggin' ACTION movie, that's all! enjoy it as that, and don't expect more!"" My generic answer tends to be, "If we expected more, we'd get better action movies." My specific answer WRT Avatar is that the movie obviously aspires to be more: an eco-parable, opposing large organizations, whatever. Therefore it deserves at least some of the analysis it gets.
- pgbovine 17y ago
  fair enough :) for me, the storyline simply served to provide the setting for the action scenes. the story was solid enough to make for beautiful action scenes where we actually sorta cared about what happened (rather than, say, Mortal Kombat style where random dudes just fought each other without motive or reason). but i definitely wasn't expecting anything profound in a movie taken up mostly by action and chase sequences.
roundsquare 17y ago
I agree with your reply if someone is giving James Cameron a hard time for something in his movie. I disagree with you though if someone is pointing out how people might watch Avatar and get the wrong impression. Not that the movie shouldn't have been made or should not be watched, etc... but just that its interesting to note how people watching the movie might be thinking.
icefox 17y ago
Downvoted at will :) Sorry, but the last Bourne movie I saw had no plot, same goes for the second transformers movie. And LOTR wasn't exactly a cheap movie to make either... And the Terminator series has a nice deep story about AI. It is an action movie that was fun to go see. It was visually rich. It had an actual plot (that wasn't half bad!). While Transformers2 was written over a few weeks, it produced a movie that was stupid and confusing. Avatar has been in the making for the past sixteen years. There are a ton of details that were created and even if they were not shown in the final film. A full language, foliage, planetary physics, not to mention questions like am I a murderer if I kill your avatar when you are in it? And then of course is the technical aspect of the movie from being in 3D (and cameron's history of that), to the amount of CGI in the movie. Sounds like a pretty good movie to geek out on to me.
- pgbovine 17y ago
  totally agree with you --- i think it's one of the best action movies i've ever seen. when placed head-to-head against other movies of its genre, it truly shines.
cookiecaper 17y ago
I think any backlash probably has more to do with the hype surrounding the movie than the actual expectations set by the trailer or the production company. My wife and I have lots of friends who rave about Avatar. We know some people who called it "the best movie [they'd] ever seen". We saw it and were thoroughly disappointed as such. As an action movie, it's fine and cool. As "the best movie ever", not even close.
trevelyan 17y ago
I didn't find the linked article remotely critical or insightful. The author accuses Cameron of hypocrisy simply for having an environmental agenda. Why it is wrong for a successful entrepreneur to have an ecological agenda. I use money and care about the environment. Am I a hypocrite too? The most interesting thing as far as I'm concerned is the evolution we can see in Cameron's approach to the military industrial complex. In Aliens it is the corporation that is the malevolent organization. It manipulates the military to do its will, and while the military is dehumanizing and anti-feminist, at least the individual soldiers are morally neutral and somewhat sympathetic characters. In Avatar we see a much more coercive and malevolent military organization which is inseparable from the corporation itself. Cameron has become much more cynical in his view of politics. And that is interesting on its own, even without going into all of the strange parallels the script draws between the two sides which imo undermine the claims that this is an unthinking film.

jseliger 17y ago

"my trollish reply to everyone who has been analyzing the heck out of Avatar in the past week has been: "it's a friggin' ACTION movie, that's all! enjoy it as that, and don't expect more!"" My generic answer tends to be, "If we expected more, we'd get better action movies." My specific answer WRT Avatar is that the movie obviously aspires to be more: an eco-parable, opposing large organizations, whatever. Therefore it deserves at least some of the analysis it gets.

pgbovine 17y ago
fair enough :) for me, the storyline simply served to provide the setting for the action scenes. the story was solid enough to make for beautiful action scenes where we actually sorta cared about what happened (rather than, say, Mortal Kombat style where random dudes just fought each other without motive or reason). but i definitely wasn't expecting anything profound in a movie taken up mostly by action and chase sequences.

roundsquare 17y ago

I agree with your reply if someone is giving James Cameron a hard time for something in his movie. I disagree with you though if someone is pointing out how people might watch Avatar and get the wrong impression. Not that the movie shouldn't have been made or should not be watched, etc... but just that its interesting to note how people watching the movie might be thinking.

icefox 17y ago

Downvoted at will :) Sorry, but the last Bourne movie I saw had no plot, same goes for the second transformers movie. And LOTR wasn't exactly a cheap movie to make either... And the Terminator series has a nice deep story about AI. It is an action movie that was fun to go see. It was visually rich. It had an actual plot (that wasn't half bad!). While Transformers2 was written over a few weeks, it produced a movie that was stupid and confusing. Avatar has been in the making for the past sixteen years. There are a ton of details that were created and even if they were not shown in the final film. A full language, foliage, planetary physics, not to mention questions like am I a murderer if I kill your avatar when you are in it? And then of course is the technical aspect of the movie from being in 3D (and cameron's history of that), to the amount of CGI in the movie. Sounds like a pretty good movie to geek out on to me.

pgbovine 17y ago
totally agree with you --- i think it's one of the best action movies i've ever seen. when placed head-to-head against other movies of its genre, it truly shines.

cookiecaper 17y ago

I think any backlash probably has more to do with the hype surrounding the movie than the actual expectations set by the trailer or the production company. My wife and I have lots of friends who rave about Avatar. We know some people who called it "the best movie [they'd] ever seen". We saw it and were thoroughly disappointed as such. As an action movie, it's fine and cool. As "the best movie ever", not even close.

trevelyan 17y ago

I didn't find the linked article remotely critical or insightful. The author accuses Cameron of hypocrisy simply for having an environmental agenda. Why it is wrong for a successful entrepreneur to have an ecological agenda. I use money and care about the environment. Am I a hypocrite too? The most interesting thing as far as I'm concerned is the evolution we can see in Cameron's approach to the military industrial complex. In Aliens it is the corporation that is the malevolent organization. It manipulates the military to do its will, and while the military is dehumanizing and anti-feminist, at least the individual soldiers are morally neutral and somewhat sympathetic characters. In Avatar we see a much more coercive and malevolent military organization which is inseparable from the corporation itself. Cameron has become much more cynical in his view of politics. And that is interesting on its own, even without going into all of the strange parallels the script draws between the two sides which imo undermine the claims that this is an unthinking film.