James Camerons Avatar = Badly written Allegory

[Sacrosanct]

I didn't care for Titanic or Avatar much.  Still, with results as phenomenal as their box office numbers, it's hard to argue that Cameron didn't know what he was doing or was just lazy.  I think he has apparently successfully figured out what brings in the bucks, even if it happens to be a ham-fisted style I don't care for.  

I still like T2 and The Abyss.

Didn't like Titanic or Avatar, but I really liked The Abyss

[jeff37923]

Aliens was starship Troopers

Not only no, but fuck no.

[Benoist]

I started reading Eclipse Phase once I received it and found that I like it very much from a background's standpoint (I haven't reached the rules yet, we'll see). I can see where all the rage about the leftist take on the near future comes from, but I honestly think the game can be interpreted in a number of ways, including turning the leftist premise around on its head.

This to me is kinda linked to this topic because I consider Cameron much the same way. Yes, he's preachy in his later movies and all that, but it doesn't really stop me from enjoying his shows (Avatar still annoys me with its "Good Savage" stereotype, but then again, I can ignore it and just enjoy the other bits I found decent in the movie).

[TristramEvans]

Not only no, but fuck no.

Upon hearing that they were making a Starship Troopers film in the 90s, Cameron responded: "Oh, I already did that."

[Ratman_tf]

Avatar, and most James Cameron films, are simple stories told well.

Nothing more, nothing less.

He takes very old plots, characters, and settings and plays them straight.

This upsets people for some reason.

I wouldn't call it upset. More like disappointed.
Ok, some nerballs on the internets will get upset, just like they get upset about 40k prices or whether Kirk is a beter captain than Picard.

[TristramEvans]

I wouldn't call it upset. More like disappointed.

I wasn't disappointed. It was a very pretty film. And I liked Ferngully. Missed the singing ooze though.

[Novastar]

Upon hearing that they were making a Starship Troopers film in the 90s, Cameron responded: "Oh, I already did that."

Then Cameron, much like Verhoeven, never read the damn book.

[TristramEvans]

Then Cameron, much like Verhoeven, never read the damn book.

(shrug) okay. I don't have very strong feelings on such things. comparing books to films based on books is like comparing boats and cars. A car can be a really good car without being a boat, no matter how much I like the boat. But make them  too close and you end up with one of those awful 70s amphibious cars.

[Novastar]

I can believe David Lynch read Dune before he directed the '84 film, even though the book and the movie are far from each other. He made creative choices I disagree with, but can understand.

Aliens doesn't even touch on the book, beyond "Armed forces in space". The book is far more political and social commentary, than "blowing shit up".

...and I say that as a fan of both "Aliens" and "Starship Troopers", as movies!
But neither holds a candle to the Heinlein book.

[Spike]

Not really.  History has more than its fair share worth of monsters -- if they aren't universally loathed, this represents a failing of the observer, not a lack of evil.

.

Which is why I said 'usually' and not 'always'.

Of course, if you look back at all ten thousand odd years of recorded history you can find monsters. Sure. Hitler means never having to say you're sorry about having an unapologetic monster for your big bad in a film ever again.


No, wait. That's actually sloppy, lazy writing. There is a reason why the Expanded Universe for Star Wars irritates me so much: Every other big bad in teh universe has destroyed a planet. that's how you know they are the bad guys, after all.

I mean: It worked for Tarkin, right?



But mostly? I think you're less right than you think. We can talk all day long about how Gengis Khan's mongol armies slaughtered millions of people, when millions was an awful lot, rather than just 'the population of a mid sized city'. On the other hand, its pretty well established by scholars that the mongols were actually a civilizing, stabilizing force that had much more enlightened laws than most of the people they were slaughtering.

So: Monster or civilizing force with one hell of a body count?

Or does the presence of any significant body count offend your delicate sensibilities?

More to the point: out of the billions of people alive today, and including all throughout human history what fractional percentage justifies almost every movie or TV show having every bad guy be a purely evil monster instead of a more nuanced take of someone with an opposed goal and a greater willingness to allow collateral damage?

Ironically: In Avatar the human commander was meant to be purely a monster, yet oddly enough I've seen a case made on ye olde interwebz that points out that he was actually the good guy in an objective view (the story, of course, is biased against that reading).  He actually is someone pursuing a goal that is understandable and relatable (that is: Protecting the humans mining unobtanium against murderous alien savages).  His determination to pursue that goal is at odds with the Hero of the story (who really just wants to enjoy walking and to bang the blue chick with pony-tail sex...), and the sympathetic view we are given of the aliens.   His 'monsterousness' in the film is spoon fed to the audience by his callous disregard for the alien's mother tree, drinking his coffee while he slaughters...  

But again, the film is slanted. We only ever seen blue people getting wounded, getting hurt, getting their livelihood destroyed. The miners are never seen with four foot arrows stuck in their guts, or choking to death or whatever else. We only hear, but never see, how bad off Earth is, or how Unobtanium is supposed to fix that.  

Which is fine, in so far as every story needs a point of view.  Avatar is a bit more ham-handed and preachy than most, and I have the distinct feeling that Cameron did not intend to allow a sympathetic take on the Colonel's actions in the film, but then again Hollywood has a long history of making accidental heros of the people they most wish to lampoon (Archie Bunker is the archetype of this, I believe.  Ron Swanson is a more current example, as is Alex Baldwin's executive on 30 Rock, or so I hear...), though I wouldn't go nearly that far in this case.

I'm willing to bet that most figures you could hold up as examples of monsters in history could be shown to be quite a bit more complex than a facile recitation of their crimes alone allows for.  There are at least two sides to every story (and usually twice as many points of view...)

[James Gillen]

Upon hearing that they were making a Starship Troopers film in the 90s, Cameron responded: "Oh, I already did that."

"Medic!!!"

[jeff37923]

Upon hearing that they were making a Starship Troopers film in the 90s, Cameron responded: "Oh, I already did that."

Besides being science fiction soldiers fighting alien monsters, the similarity between the movies is not there. Neither film resembles the book by Heinlein.

[gattsuru]

I think you're less right than you think. We can talk all day long about how Gengis Khan's mongol armies slaughtered millions of people, when millions was an awful lot, rather than just 'the population of a mid sized city'. On the other hand, its pretty well established by scholars that the mongols were actually a civilizing, stabilizing force that had much more enlightened laws than most of the people they were slaughtering.

So: Monster or civilizing force with one hell of a body count?

Monster.  And rather easily and obviously so -- Genghis Khan's 'civilizing, stabilizing' aspects are rather clear apologia by any objective standard.  Religious tolerance is a really small fig leaf for "killed entire civilian populations, counting in the millions".  This is a very big pile of skulls.

I'm not talking just about my personal morality.  If you made a screenplay and trying to offset the Mongol's killing of every man, woman, and child in a city with a scene of Temujin's iron rule of terror not caring about religion and being somewhat merocratic... that's not going to make for a very complex villain.

There are certainly historical interesting villains.  But you can't pretend every or even many of the biggest ones are that complicated by modern standards, not without looking like the worst sort of apologist.

Or does the presence of any significant body count offend your delicate sensibilities?

More to the point: out of the billions of people alive today, and including all throughout human history what fractional percentage justifies almost every movie or TV show having every bad guy be a purely evil monster instead of a more nuanced take of someone with an opposed goal and a greater willingness to allow collateral damage?

You seem to be confusing me for someone significantly further to the left of the political spectrum.  Or someone that hasn't posted -- say, today -- in the Watchmen thread.

Ironically: In Avatar the human commander was meant to be purely a monster, yet oddly enough I've seen a case made on ye olde interwebz that points out that he was actually the good guy in an objective view (the story, of course, is biased against that reading).  He actually is someone pursuing a goal that is understandable and relatable (that is: Protecting the humans mining unobtanium against murderous alien savages).

Oh, yes.  There's a lot that could have been very interesting here -- you only need a fairly small improvement from taking the unobtanium to end up making a huge significant difference in lives saved when there's such a large population disparity, there's a large narrative bias to defensive wars, the average society without substantial governments and technological bases tend to be incredibly nasty by modern standards, so on.  As I said, you could make a much, much more complicated story with changes to three scenes.  I agree that it's not a terribly realistic story for the modern day.

But that's different from there not being a sizable contingent of assholes just like him in history.

I'm willing to bet that most figures you could hold up as examples of monsters in history could be shown to be quite a bit more complex than a facile recitation of their crimes alone allows for.  There are at least two sides to every story (and usually twice as many points of view...)

There are always different versions.  When an undisputed reality holds that systemic murder and rape were quite common agents of aggressive expansion, holding up examples of aggressive expansion is going to be a hard sell..

[beejazz]

I didn't care for Titanic or Avatar much.  Still, with results as phenomenal as their box office numbers, it's hard to argue that Cameron didn't know what he was doing or was just lazy.  I think he has apparently successfully figured out what brings in the bucks, even if it happens to be a ham-fisted style I don't care for.  

I still like T2 and The Abyss.

Being a winter blockbuster might have as much to do with it as the writing, in the case of Titanic and Avatar. It's possible that people come for something besides the writing, and the writing just isn't off-putting enough to matter. A financial success doesn't mean that every aspect of the film is "right" or even "right for the audience" necessarily.

I was disappointed by the writing, disappointed by most aspects of the design, and pleasantly surprised by the interesting use of negative space with the 3D (as opposed to the usual "shit jumping out at the audience").

Simple stories told well include Star Wars and Jaws. There's usually more going on even in the simplest stories I remember fondly than there was in this particular story.

[jeff37923]

I wrote about this when the movie came out, but Avatar lost me not with its ham-fisted written ecological morality but with its piss-poor biological science. No matter how hard I try, I cannot think of any sound evolutionary reason why any life form would have a naturally occurring neural interface in its hair or other head covering. Allowing for some cool scenes in the movie isn't good enough.