Badmovies.org Forum

I finally got around to seeing this.  It isn't bad at all.  I was entertained throughout, though I'm glad I waited for the $1 theater.  I don't think it would have been worth $10 for a ticket, nor can I imagine what seeing it in 3D would have added.

The CGI wasn't any better than, say, District 9 imho, though of course the CGI in Avatar was on a much greater scale than D9, or perhaps any other movie besides the 2005 King Kong.

I'd be lying if I said I wasn't cheering for Quaritch during his fight with Sully.  Obviously, I don't have the correct mindset to throw my support to the Na'vi.  Quaritch was the old warrior, he was the badass, he was the one fighting against the odds.  Sully had a superstrong, superagile, superdurable alien body ... and he would have been fine even if that body were destroyed.  Quaritch had a robot suit and was in much greater immediate danger.  Also, Sully betrayed his own people.  Damn right I was rooting for Quaritch.  (Sorry, folks, but humanity needed the unobtanium to survive.  If it means throwing some aliens out of their treehouse to get it, so be it.)

Also, am I the only person who wondered what the Na'vi were thinking when Sully was disconnected from his Na'vi body?  Did they think it was just a little weird when his body was just lying around as if it were dead?  I was also a bit disappointed that when Sully and Neytiri had sex they didn't do the "bond" thing.

Well, I'd disagree with that - look at things like background shots, there are numerous times where the prawns can be seen to slightly float on terrain, and other numerous problems of polish.  You've also got some weak CG towards the end, like the CG pig and some of the explosion/deformation CG.  They also wisely made the aliens insect-like, which makes them far easier to render realistically.  Mammals/birds/reptiles are much harder because the skin/muscles move so much more, and human-like aliens are the hardest because of how good humans are at distinguishing what's real in that regard.  Of course, this doesn't make the prawns any less believable.

District 9 is a pretty incredible technical accomplishment though, especially considering its $30 million budget.


Well, arguably they betrayed him first.  At the point he was still sort of stuck in the middle, he was assaulted and thrown in prison.


This is something I wish they'd gotten a little more into.  From what has been stated elsewhere, it's used for power, especially for space flight.  If humanity can't survive without power from a rare element that's not found on earth and is incredibly rare, it deserves to die off.  

But regardless, I didn't think they set it up that way.  Unobtanium was useful and extremely valuable, but if it was so important to continued life for humans on earth, it seems extremely unlikely they'd leave it in the hands of a single corporation who wanted to mine it for profit.

I will say I quite liked Quaritch too though.   :teddyr:

They may not strictly need the unobtanium, it's probably just the best alternative.  Kind of like gasoline engines vs. coal-fired steam engines.  For humanity to survive, in the universe of the movie, it'll need to leave Earth and colonize other worlds.  If the unobtanium increases humanity's chances to do that, they have every right to take it to survive.  If the Na'vi couldn't stop them, well, that sucks.  It was a situation with no good outcome possible.

I think the humans did what they had to do.  They weren't villains at all.  The humans offered to give the Na'vi education, medical care, technology, etc, it's not like they just showed up and indiscriminately started killing them off.  They even sent in Sully to attempt diplomacy ... which he made no attempt to do.  No, he was too busy playing with animals and chasing some tail.  Quaritch even tried to minimize Na'vi casualties when he attacked the tree home.  He didn't decide to launch a general attack until Sully rallied the Na'vi to attack the humans.  (Way to go Sully, send those Na'vi into a hopeless battle.  Don't use your newfound Big Man status to, I don't know, get the Na'vi to NEGOTIATE a peaceful resolution with the humans, or anything.)

Avatar was actually morally complex.  The humans and the Na'vi both did what they had to do with neither side being completely sympathetic nor villainous.  But, really, Sully can kiss my ass.

Wow.  Just wow.

Like I said, I don't have anything like the mindset to enjoy this movie as intended.  I was still entertained, though.   :teddyr:

I'm still wondering where you got this in the movie.  I don't recall it ever being framed this way.  We see Earth is a craphole, but no where is it suggested the resource will in any way fix the situation.  It'll mostly just line corporate coffers.

Is it just me, or did anyone else think the CGI Na'vi treatment was actually an improvement on Sigourney? Everybody else looked weirder, but when her avatar first appeared, my first thought was "You know, on her face, somehow that works."

I haven't seen it, but I'm laughing at "unobtanium." Is it pronounced like "un-obtain-ium?" If so, that's like something from a 60's sci-fi B movie. I'm going to get started on my script about the substances "inconcevium" and "unbelievite."

Unobtainium is a real term used by scientists and engineers for a hypothetical substance that possesses whatever impossible qualities you choose to give it, for the sake of illustration, argument or whatever. Kind of an inside joke. Avatar uses it as a tongue-in-cheek way of saying the mineral is purely a McGuffin, and we shouldn't worry about what it is or why it's so important.

It was also used in The Core, for the impossible substance that could withstand the heat and pressure in the Earth's core. They could waste time coming up with an explanation for it that nobody other than WyreWizard would care about, or they could just acknowledge it's impossible with a bit of a wink, then get on with the story.

You might also notice her Avatar looks more like she does than most of the others.  I'm thinking it's an earlier avatar, one with more human DNA than the later ones.

I didn't know that. It does seem like something from a 50's sci-fi B movie, though. I have a hard time saying "unobtanium" with a straight face.

You know, people give 3D crap, but in this movie it was used very well; it wasn't the tacky 'arrow flying at your face' every five minutes.  It was used especially in subtle ways: like a photo that was 3D rendered that just added some depth to the whole piece. 

If I were to recommend 3D to anyone it'd be this movie.

I can't say I was rooting for humanity, mostly since I felt the movie was an allegory for what Europeans did when they discovered the New World.

Either way, the ending was a downer. I mean, sure the Na'vi won and got to keep their culture and their world, but humanity was essentially sent to go extinct on Earth. Well, probably not. Knowing us we probably came back with a much, MUCH bigger army soon after, nuked several key sites from orbit, and took the planet over anyway. I somehow doubt an army of animals would do much good against a nuclear bomb.

I still also like the alternative ending shown here:

http://www.howitshouldhaveended.com/videos?bcpid=51434042001&bclid=41247345001&bctid=87892043001

Hehe... Game over man, game over...

That thought had occurred to me as well. The atmosphere is already poisonous to humans, they obviously don't give a crap about the local ecology, they'll do anything for the mineral, and they appear to have huge resources. Where are the nukes? Apart from bad publicity (controllable, I would think) and maybe a few moral qualms, there would seem to be no downside for them. And yeah, maybe they didn't have nukes with them because they didn't see any danger of being wiped out or expelled from the planet altogether. Maybe the corporate dweeb in charge wouldn't have gone that far. But the board of directors is sure as hell not going to just give up. There's probably a ship carrying tactical nukes already leaving Earth, with a new administrator who is a bit more of a cold-hearted bastard.

I think the key factor here is the people on Pandora weren't military.  They were private contractors working for a corporation.  And corporations may be powerful, but unless you're in the Aliens universe (which Avatar isn't) or something like it, corps aren't allowed to have that kind of power.  You might recall the massive bomb thing they were going to use towards the end had to be jury rigged, as it wasn't intended to be used to blow up an enemy compound.

Another point is this: imagine trying to FIND the mineral after it has been nuked.  The entire area would be heavily irradiated, so everyone would have to wear heavy radiation suits and the mineral itself would be irradiated, and you would have physically blown the deposits all over the place (depending on how deep in the ground they are).  Beyond that, if unobtanium is a resource for energy (which, IIRC, is never specified in the movie but is revealed in non-film sources), how do you know how it would react to an atomic explosion?  Maybe the blast would blow the mineral itself up, or render it useless. 

A better idea might be napalm or something similar.  Burn everything out (again, assuming explosives and fire don't damage the mineral) then harvest.

Regardless, I expect the humans returning will play a heavy role in the sequels. 

Actually, nuking them would do less damage to the unobtainium than you might think. An air burst at the right altitude would wipe out the Na'vi and clear a good deal of the vegetation, while sucking up a minimum of debris that would come back as fallout. Something on the order of 15 kilotons (and there are far smaller nukes available) would make a crater only a few feet deep and maybe a thousand feet across, basically saving them some digging. The severity of the heat and blast damage drops off pretty quickly as you move away from Ground Zero. The most radioactive of the fission byproducts would decay quickly, with radioactivity dropping off sharply. The greatest danger of exposure is not direct, but by breathing in radioactive material, so in a matter of days you could go outside for short periods with little more than the breathing mask you needed anyway. And most of the work is done from inside airtight machines, so it's not really an issue.  The radioactivity would be nearly gone in a few months, with the remainder being carted off with the topsoil they need to remove anyway, and things would go on as before, except that there would be no arrows flying around. Assuming they don't care about the natives or the planet's ecology, which was made pretty clear, there really is no downside from the humans' point of view.

There might have been no reason to have nuclear weapons on a mining colony, but this corporation surely has the resources to get them or influence a government to send them. I think the odds are very good that as the Na'vi were celebrating their victory, a ship was already preparing to deliver a basket of mushrooms to them in about six years' time, most likely pounding them from orbit before the Na'vi even know there's a ship on the way.

I suppose a sequel is inevitable, so this all works to Cameron's advantage. The humans will be back, probably not to annihilate the Na'vi immediately, because that would end the movie very quickly, and not with the desired outcome. But they'll have more military hardware, a meaner guy in charge, and maybe even a nuclear threat.

I just realised that the link I posted earlier to the 'alternate ending' spoof wasn't direct, but I'll post the proper link here:

http://www.howitshouldhaveended.com/videos?bcpid=51434042001&bclid=41247345001&bctid=62889043001

I think everyone is kind of going into waaay too much detail and bickering over what's basically a flashy, run of the mill, hyped up children's movie.

I still haven't seen this film. And I have no wish too.

Awww, come on. That's the most fun I've had with this movie, making the case that the happy ending isn't going to stay that way. :teddyr: