God, I hated that movie.
But it did make for an entertaining Pitch Meeting several years later.
“It’s Pocahontas but in space with some big blue kitty cats.”
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…and nothing of value was missing. What was Avatar other than a noble savage trope with 3D and amazing (for its time) visual effects?
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Indeed. Why stop with The Word for World is Forest when there is all the rest of Le Guin’s Hainish Cycle to adapt?
JFYI: That word has been around for ~70 years. I first encountered it in my teens when I saw it used in Car & Driver magazine.
Even in current engineering circles its use can cause a cringe or two. The term, when employed in a professional setting, comes off like some old, hackneyed attempt at humor? workplace bonding? whatever the case, it no longer works… assuming it ever did.
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This is close, but you’ve got the scales reversed, the blue ones are supposed to be the giants.
For crying out loud. They supposedly had the resources of an entire planet, but they wound up doing a slightly better cavalry charge.
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I don’t understand how this is supposed to work. People have forgotten about Avatar after 13 years. They are doing an Avatar sequel. Rather than encouraging everyone to watch the original so they just HAVE to watch the sequel, they added an extra barrier to anyone who might want to watch but now has to make a major commitment to do so.
Avatar wasn’t a particularly good movie. It had stunning special effects in its day. I saw it in 3D IMAX and really enjoyed all the plants and stuff. The plot was hackneyed with its white savior and the military world building was ridiculous. It’s 1918. Surely, someone has heard of artillery,
Are people supposed to go to theaters, a pain in the ass before COVID but now even worse since some people don’t want to get COVID again, watch the movie with its dated special effects, lame plot and adequate acting and then go see the sequel?
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Kodi and an add-on like Seren make it pretty easy to stream.
As I recall, that was basically the plot of “Avatar” too, so Disney+ are merely being faithful to the spirit of the original movie.
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Yeah let’s prioritize “the theatre experience” while we’re still in the middle of a pandemic.
The irony!
Ooh maybe with one of these:
Jurassic Park was a mix of CG and practical effects. You might be surprsied how much of it actually wasn’t actually CG.
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Yep, I know - I even saw in person the talk Spaz himself gave at SIGGRAPH. 
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Lord of the Rings is a big one for me. I liked the movies then and still do, but that scene at the start of the second (?) movie where you see the great battle between orcs and elves/humans where the ring was lost -yikes.
It seemed impressive once, but now looks pretty inadequate. Maybe even really inadequate. The rest of the effects stand up pretty well though (and I’m aware that they’re a mix of CGI and practical).
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Will the new one look as horrid as the original?
I saw it in a theater when it came out
I don’t remember any of the characters’ names
Wait, they had names?
3D should be trendy again in 2040
Maybe that’s when they should do a sequel
I believe my antipathy towards the movie partly came from hearing an interview with James Cameron, talking about how this movie was going to be an Incredible Revolution for science fiction and movies, and how it would immerse people in an incredible new world. I’d already had a few decades where my brain had been happily soaking up Middle Earth, many fantasy realms, dozens of alien worlds, dimensions, I’d been gaming for decades and had routinely occupied dozens of “avatars” of various species and heroic stripes in detailed well-written RPGs, so a 2 or 3 hour movie with a predictable plot wasn’t going to rock my socks, even if it was pretty. I also, for better or worse, can suspend disbelief pretty easily, which makes the Doctor Who episodes with weak/bad SFX watchable, as long as the characterizations/dialogue is less than terrible. So excellent state of the art SFX, for me, may be gilding a lily.
It’s kind of like the Superman movie tagline “You’ll believe a man can fly!”. I grew up believing George Reeves could fly, so believing Christopher Reeves could fly wasn’t astounding, and wasn’t a selling point for me. Duh, he’s from Krypton, it’d be weird if he couldn’t fly.
That said, if the movie scratched some itch for you, then of course you should revel in it and enjoy it. One’s trash is another’s treasure, my nearest dearest don’t dig all my content or hobbies, and vice versa.
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I seem to remember the original Avatar being very successful and really sticking in people’s minds.
I personally didn’t like it. I think it was just a remake of the much better Aliens, but with the aliens being the good guys and the humans being the bad guys this time.
It was quite commercially successful in theaters but it definitely never stuck in people’s minds the way Cameron hoped it would. He wanted this to be a cultural touchstone on par with Star Wars, the blockbuster franchise he’s been chasing for his whole career. (I remember reading an interview years ago in which he admitted his first reaction to watching Star Wars was a sense of anger and frustration the he wasn’t the one who made it.)
Avatar sold a lot of tickets but Star Wars it was not. After Avatar came out you didn’t see every kid in America dressing up as characters from the movie for Halloween or buying action figures and merchandise. There weren’t a thousand and one other filmmakers making blatant Avatar knockoffs trying to emulate the film’s winning formula. The characters’ names didn’t become so well-known that even people who never saw the movie could tell you who they were—Sigourney Weaver is still better remembered as Ellen Ripley from the Alien franchise than for her role in Avatar.
And I think all that kind of stuck in Cameron’s craw, because he wanted this franchise to be more than a movie which sold a lot of tickets. He wanted this to be his great Magnum Opus, an achievement remembered and studied for generations to come.
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He also really wanted it to be a film that changed the industry and led to basically all movies being made using the latest 3D technology that he’d been developing. He was sure this would be the one to change people’s mindset on that from being a gimmick to being an indispensable storytelling tool. And for a short time all the major studios were releasing everything in 3D, until people got tired of it again.
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