Schattenjäger
Gabriel Knight
I loved the experience but will they be able to duplicate the 3d experience on the DVD? I heard coralines home 3d was terrible.
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Rottenwatch: AVATAR (82%)
- Thread starter SCULLIBUNDO
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Snowman Prophet of Doom
Member
I also kind of wish that there'd been a few moments with Jake and Neytiri just conversing; perhaps Neytiri's response to learning about life on Earth could have been interesting, or perhaps her reaction to learning about Jake's disability might have been worthwhile. I don't know; I loved their dynamic and wanted to see more of it.
adelante said:WHICH PART??
Plus, which studio?Stop teasing us like this...everyone who's worked on the film in one way or another, come out! haha I'd like to give you guys a huge e-pat on the back :lol
My company worked mostly on stuff going on in the command center, particularly the screens and 3d displays.
I'm actually an accountant by trade, but I helped out with the rotoscoping in the sequence near the end
where Quaritch is doing his little presentation outlining the final assault on Na'vi
Drudge linked to an article that mentioned this and had FOX studio reaction: http://www.deadline.com/hollywood/f...-prices-hollywood-now-predicting-85m-weekend/JB1981 said:
Expendable.
Member
Just saw it a second time in IMAX. It's definitely better this time around. You take in so much more. Must-see in IMAX.
saw it in imax...technically amazing movie, the 3D aspect of the movie didnt seem to add much to it at all. to me it felt like the 3D part came up as a coincidence due to the type of technology they used to film this. the action scenes were good but not HOLY CRAP WOW DID I JUST SEE THAT? so the whole thing about avatar revolutionizing the industry is a bunch of crap.
biggest problem for the movie was the char/story. its completely unoriginal and feels too cliched. it just feels like you've seen the same thing in tons of other movies. i'll give this movie a 8/10 just because the execution overall couldnt have been done better. acting was top notch from everyone. i just loved stephen lang who plays the general, badass performance! music was good just no stand out theme or anything that caught my ears.
avatar would be perfect if it didnt have the cliched story/characters. i'll definitely watch it again just for the effects!
biggest problem for the movie was the char/story. its completely unoriginal and feels too cliched. it just feels like you've seen the same thing in tons of other movies. i'll give this movie a 8/10 just because the execution overall couldnt have been done better. acting was top notch from everyone. i just loved stephen lang who plays the general, badass performance! music was good just no stand out theme or anything that caught my ears.
avatar would be perfect if it didnt have the cliched story/characters. i'll definitely watch it again just for the effects!
Boards of Canada
Member
Anyone else find the soundtrack to be lacking? It didn't feel epic at all, and at times I didn't even realize there was music until I really listened for it. Poorly executed in my opinion.
Boards of Canada said:
Easily my biggest disappointment with the movie. While there were a couple of notable tunes there, there were so many scenes where literally, as I was sitting there watching them, I was thinking "man some better musical accompaniment to this scene would add SO FUCKING MUCH to it."
God damn it Horner. That part of the movie really was a big disappointment.
aoi tsuki said:
I think they got it as close as anybody could realistically expect at this point. I didn't feel much of a disconnect there, honestly. It felt quite seamless, much moreso than the scenes at the start when Jake first enters his Avatar and is in the room with the human scientists.
ScientificNinja
Member
jett said:
Oh Jesus Christ, is one not entitled to a legitimate opinion without having to put up with such sweeping assumptions?
Di Caprio gets an A for effort, I'll give him that, but he looks like a perpetual boy-man whose high, nasal voice suggests his balls haven't dropped yet. I saw no better evidence of this than in The Aviator: I simply don't buy the notion that he is a strong male protagonist, much in the same way people on GAF don't buy the notion that Emma Watson or Kirsten Dunst are attractive.
Sam Worthington can pull the same ridiculous scowl that Di Caprio does, but guess what? He sounds like a MAN. Thank fuck Di Caprio wasn't cast as Jake Sully.
jett said:
I never had that feeling but out of the corner of my eye I saw a guy reach up to cover his face during a scene with debris whizzing by in 3D.
Zeliard said:
This, so very this. Zoe was fantastic throughout the film and the effects in that scene were nothing short of incredible. If any scene of this movie were to have the effects stick out, it would be that one, but there was nothing. It was flawless.
DieNgamers
Member
Regarding the soundtrack I liked the maintheme, especially during those flight scenes. It didn't blow me away like the LotR score did (so epic) back then but it was good, imo.
Snowman Prophet of Doom
Member
ScientificNinja said:
Dicaprio is such an awesome actor. His performance in The Aviator is pretty stunning, and his work in The Departed was awesome as well. I'm so glad that Scorsese has picked him as the guy that he puts in everything.
The recent slashfilmcast interview with James Cameron is pretty interesting. It actually starts off pretty confrontationally. :lol
Dave Chen's first question asks him about the charge that a lot of critics have thrown at Cameron over the years for what they say is hypocrisy concerning technology.
Dave Chen's first question asks him about the charge that a lot of critics have thrown at Cameron over the years for what they say is hypocrisy concerning technology.
ClosingADoor
Member
ScientificNinja said:
DiCaprio wouldn't be good for this movie, but you can't deny he is a great actor. The Departed, Gangs of New York, The Aviator, DiCaprio was great in all of them.
Gary Whitta
Member
I do think Saldana should get awards recognition and if she wins something I think the vfx guys should get to go up on stage with her 
DieNgamers
Member
Searched and found this:gdt5016 said:
http://www.slashfilm.com/2009/12/18/the-filmcast-interview-james-cameron-director-of-avatar/
Searched and found this:gdt5016 said:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LJKxcbcvxa4
There is no theater in the Cleveland area showing this in IMAX 3D which makes me a sad panda. How much of a difference is there between RealD and IMAX 3D?
I was thinking the same thing lol.
Gary Whitta said:I do think Saldana should get awards recognition and if she wins something I think the vfx guys should get to go up on stage with her
I was thinking the same thing lol.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LJKxcbcvxa4gdt5016 said:
SolsticeZero
Banned
The scene where
was so visually stunning that it damn near brought tears to my eyes. I mean, it just looked so perfect.
Jake is going to pick his "flying mount" with all the floating islands
My two sisters dressed up as Na'vi for my second showing with my brother-in-law. Nothing big just a lot of blue makeup and some blue shirts and shit. This isn't an early premiere anymore, I thought, nobody is going to dress up! Nobody did. But they had fun.
These fuckers at this theatre I went to did something fucked up with the 3D though... for like a good thirty minutes, it felt like my left eye was all like discolored and blurry. Like some filter was over that eye, it was such a weird effect - like I was losing functioning in that eye. About thirty minutes in they finally adjusted the picture right, but fuck that was annoying.
My brother in-law is a much bigger sci-fi geek than me and enjoyed it enough, though he had some minor quibbles. My sisters liked it a lot. My opinion went somewhat downward since the visual spectacle no longer could surprise me, and all I was left with was the bloody caricatures that half the characters were and such. If the ALL-SHOOTING-NO-TALK SARGEANT WITH HIS ROIDED OUT ARMS and the BIG INDUSTRY AGAINST THE TREE HUGGERS could be any more cliche and clumsily written I'd probably think it'd get a Razzie or something.
Also, it's weird that the mechs are the one thing that keep drawing me out of the believability of the CG - which everyone in my group seemed to agree was simply off compared to everything else - and yet the floating mountains were completely believable. Those fuckin' mechs.
These fuckers at this theatre I went to did something fucked up with the 3D though... for like a good thirty minutes, it felt like my left eye was all like discolored and blurry. Like some filter was over that eye, it was such a weird effect - like I was losing functioning in that eye. About thirty minutes in they finally adjusted the picture right, but fuck that was annoying.
My brother in-law is a much bigger sci-fi geek than me and enjoyed it enough, though he had some minor quibbles. My sisters liked it a lot. My opinion went somewhat downward since the visual spectacle no longer could surprise me, and all I was left with was the bloody caricatures that half the characters were and such. If the ALL-SHOOTING-NO-TALK SARGEANT WITH HIS ROIDED OUT ARMS and the BIG INDUSTRY AGAINST THE TREE HUGGERS could be any more cliche and clumsily written I'd probably think it'd get a Razzie or something.
Also, it's weird that the mechs are the one thing that keep drawing me out of the believability of the CG - which everyone in my group seemed to agree was simply off compared to everything else - and yet the floating mountains were completely believable. Those fuckin' mechs.
The Main Event
Member
Avatar tops everything I've seen this year. Watching it gave me that old-school/simple but so well crafted/warmhearted movie making that's been missing in recent cinema.
Yes, it's not original, we've seen it before, but that movie is needed for the new (Twilight uhem) generation. It's going back to why I felt in love with movies in the first place.
James Cameron :bow
Yes, it's not original, we've seen it before, but that movie is needed for the new (Twilight uhem) generation. It's going back to why I felt in love with movies in the first place.
James Cameron :bow
It's not like it took much away from the scene at all. i was just cognizant of the difference. The combination of CGI and live actors reminds me of The Abyss, specifically the scene where the doctor touches the pseudopod. i do have to wonder if i'd "notice" a difference had Key'tiri been a live actor playing the role of a regular human.Zeliard said:
Twilight Princess
Member
saw it in imax 3d. the movie is great but imo 3d is completely overated, the glasses dim the picture and it takes time to adjust to the whole 3d preception because it's so different from real life 3d. i wish imax had a 2d version of avatar, i wouldn't have bother with 3d. complete gimmick.
JaseMath
Member
I'm pretty sure even though I saw the "IMAX 3D" version of it (the screen seemed a lot smaller than an IMAX screen should be) I'm thinking we all saw a fake IMAX digital 3D version of it and were duped into paying IMAX prices. Anyway, yeah, you'll be fine. I don't see how Digital 3D vs. IMAX 3D would be any different except for screen size.Joe said:
Fallout-NL
Member
WARNING! Some unmarked spoilers here and there. DONT READ IF YOU HAVENT SEEN THE FILM!
I saw the movie last night, IMAX 3D (in Amsterdam). And I feel the need to share some of my feelings, which are extremely mixed to be honest. It's going to be difficult to write a coherent piece on such a 'big' movie that went all sorts of places.
First off, I'm pretty big James Cameron fan and I consider Terminator 1 and 2 among the best films ever made, so yeah, there were some expectations and a pretty large amount of trust when it came to Avatar. Still, I was very skeptical about the involvement of blue humanoids/indians and those doubts were pretty much confirmed. Before I get to that I'll just start to work my way through my feelings with the movie in a somewhat chronological order.
If this was supposed to be some kind of poster child for future film/visual technology, it did a pretty poor job of convincing me. Some scenes looked great, like the part where Jake is woken from his cryo sleep, the ship had a sense of depth that was very convincing. But in other parts it didn't work as well for me, most of the jungle/pandora scenes felt very flat. Another complaint I have is with contrast. The glasses I had seemed to dim the images a little. Without the glasses the image looked a lot more crisp and vibrant. I'm not sure how this 3D tech works, but sometimes there appear to be different visual panes, but I can choose to focus only on the one the filmmaker wants you to look at. Which caused me to sometimes look for the 'correct way' of looking at the image and resulted in sometimes just blurry imagery. It took some practice.
As for the CG itself, pretty amazing. While I didn't like the art direction at all, I can't deny that the female Na'Vi character looks extremely lifelike. Perhaps we have passed the uncanny valley at long last. The scene where we see her and human Jake together is fucking amazing as well, the fact that it didn't even occur to me just how amazing it was until GAF pointed it out says enough. However, like I said, the art and style looked pretty uninspired. Pandora looks 'real', but it's not that original, more like some kind super jungle.
Avatar starts out interesting enough, I'm a sucker for anything related to interstellar travel and I always love the beginning of a film where tech relevant to the story is explained and the film and its characters take the time to elaborate on its setting/premise/problems or whatever, its nice and subtle and allows you to be immersed in this vision of the future. In that respect I was a little sad to see that the whole 'unobtanium' thing isn't explained. Why is it so valuable, what uses do science and industry have for it, etc. ? I would have liked the movie to delve a bit deeper into that. I guess that target audience isn't really interested in the science part of science fiction. But Avatar really isn't a science fiction film anyway.
Right, so allegiance and identification are a bit tricky in this film. Especially cause I don't really care for space indians. Jake's human and his often funny English remarks and quips allowed me to believe and be involved in his adventure to a certain extent. But as soon as the film started to be more about the space indians, I cared less and less. Sure, the evil and greedy humans are made to be about as immoral as they come, but I still felt like I had more in common with the 'sky people' than with the tribal people who spent their evenings chanting in a circle. The terrible music played a part in this as well. Every time the perspective went back to the Na'vi the most god awful cliched african world music started to play and it yanked me out of the experience entirely. I mean, where the hell am I? Africa? The great plains of North America where native Americans still roam? If they wanted this to feel like an alien people or an alien planet, I would have gone with some decent and more other worldly music.
It's a clever plot device, to have Jake be half alien/half human but it still didn't make me care for the Na'Vi enough. I have little in common with them and I just know they're gonna be fucking wiped out when the next shipment of sky people arrive. And I don't want to be there when the poor suckers are nuked from orbit (which is the only way to be sure, reliable sources tell me).
The final confrontation (and the events leading up to it) is very standard action/adventure film fare. First the good guys seem to do well, then the bad guys pound a couple of key good guy characters into the dust and all seems lost, only to have the good guys turn it around at the last moment to save the day. Very predictable and not that riveting. I wasn't on the edge of my seat at any time. Stephen Lang was a total bad ass though and I felt a little 'fuck yeah' when he jumped that Mech from the crashing ship. There were some great sequences like that, and as Evilore has stated, we have to be thankful to James for not resorting to the shaky cam nonsense that's been so popular with many action directors lately. I absolutely fucking despise it and I was happy to be able to actually see my action scenes.
As for the events leading up to the final confrontation. What a bunch of jumped up cliche nonsense. He captures the Toruk, flies around Pandora in a little montage, where with the terrible music reaching climax after climax, he convinces everyone to join his little rebellion. How many times have we seen this? Perhaps I just need to accept the fact that this film was made for an extremely large audience. Like Titanic, but in the action adventure genre. Avatar never tries to do anything daring or thought provoking or surprising. It just makes a pretty bland planet look very convincing.
It's hard to explain what the difference is with Cameron's other movies. Aliens doesn't have a mind blowing story, neither does Terminator I guess. But something's different, they're not as by the numbers as avatar. Terminator had some fucking raw shit in there. Humanity (in T1/T2) and the Colonial Marines (in Aliens) are as doomed as the Na'Vi, but still I care for them and understand their plight. Cameron's earlier work just felt more personal.
I think I just don't care to see some alien race I don't know, win from humanity in a manner that doesn't seem that believable with a story that never gets interesting.
WARNING! Some unmarked spoilers here and there. DONT READ IF YOU HAVENT SEEN THE FILM!
Twilight Princess said:
You're opinion is completely backwards. 3d/effects are what literally make this movie worth seeing.
Fallout-NL said:
It's the characters. The story, being driven by cliche and predictable plot points, leaves nothing left for any actual character development or reason to care for them. Seriously, what do we know of Jake Sully? He was a marine, his brother died, and he can't walk. That's it, and an hour long montage is supposed to make us believe in his conversion to Na'vi, or whatever you want to call it. There's also no real suspense being as you know what's going to happen from the moment he meets Neytiri. The only wrench thrown in along the way is that Jake is captured for about 2 minutes before some no-name character who until that point only has a handful of scenes where he makes disaproving faces at the marine's actions and Michelle Rodriquez, who simarly has no character whatsoever to speak of, come in and save the day. Oh and to win back the Na'vi's trust after destroying their home and betraying them from the beginning (also a very poorly constructed plot point, as at no point in the story did you have a reason to believe Jake would be a cold-hearted enough person to just blindly do that) was to catch a big dragon. Oh don't worry Jake, you killed my parents and a bunch of people I know, but you're just so fucking cool that we've got to like you. No ifs ands or buts, there is 0% tension between jake and the Na'vi now, it would have been infinitely more interesting (and believable) had there still been those who distrusted him.
The evil villains where absolute and uninteresting. They where explained away with one exposition scene in the beginning (this is unobtainium, fuck everone else, we want it). Nothing else ever happened with them.
With all that said, the world itself was insanely awesome and well realized. I understand the need to draw people into a new franchise with such a generic story, especially a big budget sci-fi, that's just the way things are unfortunately. So I'm definitely looking forward to a possible sequel, even though it'll be like 8-10 years before we see another one, I think. I hope at least with that one Cameron won't feel so bogged down with having to cater to everyone as the franchise will already have it's fans at that point.
The evil villains where absolute and uninteresting. They where explained away with one exposition scene in the beginning (this is unobtainium, fuck everone else, we want it). Nothing else ever happened with them.
With all that said, the world itself was insanely awesome and well realized. I understand the need to draw people into a new franchise with such a generic story, especially a big budget sci-fi, that's just the way things are unfortunately. So I'm definitely looking forward to a possible sequel, even though it'll be like 8-10 years before we see another one, I think. I hope at least with that one Cameron won't feel so bogged down with having to cater to everyone as the franchise will already have it's fans at that point.
D
Deleted member 22576
Unconfirmed Member
Damn, an hour and a half before the showing and there are probably like 70 people in front of us.
Twilight Princess
Member
the effects, yes. but the drawbacks of 3d imo just aren't worth it, you have to watch the movie in significantly lower contrast and a pair of giant glasses sitting on your nose for 2 and a half hours. the cool factor wears out about 10 mins into the film.NimbusD said:
Particle Physicist
between a quark and a baryon
jett said:
not really.. but when i first saw the flies, i thought they were actually real flies in the theater, and i was a bit pissed.. till i realized it was the film :lol
also, some times with stuff in the foreground.. i had a strange sensation where i wanted to move my head to look around it.
Anyone mind clearing some things up for me?
I plan on seeing this movie again sometime but in the current weather conditions I cannot and would like some answers cleared up!!
Thanks!
- How did the Na'vi learn/speak english?
-How did they know Jake wasn't one of them
-Why did the humans need to wear masks (was there no oxygen or was it some kind of gas?)
-Do Jake/Norm/Grace ever sleep when they are in the avatar program/out of it? It seems whenever the Avatar sleeps he goes back to his self. Is he sleeping in the contraption?
-Was Pandora a big organism with animals living on it? Is that what they were getting at?
-How did they know Jake wasn't one of them
-Why did the humans need to wear masks (was there no oxygen or was it some kind of gas?)
-Do Jake/Norm/Grace ever sleep when they are in the avatar program/out of it? It seems whenever the Avatar sleeps he goes back to his self. Is he sleeping in the contraption?
-Was Pandora a big organism with animals living on it? Is that what they were getting at?
I plan on seeing this movie again sometime but in the current weather conditions I cannot and would like some answers cleared up!!
Thanks!
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