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I do not get why people call Avatar the lowest common denominator

Honestly, Avatar felt like an incredibly safe & cliche movie that took very few risks and was designed to appeal to as many people as possible. Nothing about the movie was bad, it told its story effectively and had fantastic special effects, but nothing about the movie stood out to me or made any kind of lasting impression.

Ultimately Avatar is a good movie but it's probably Cameron's weakest piece of work since Piranha 2
 
Caddywompus said:
fireflame have you see Pocahontas or Dancing With Wolves? I could see that greatly influencing your opinion if you've never seen that story done before. That would probably mask the flat characters if you found the story compelling.
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I saw Pocahontas ages ago and Dancing with Wolves partly, though i don't remember well. I can see the parallel but the execution in Avatar was great.

There are a few scenes i enjoyed more, like the taming of the giant bird, or the aerial battles.
 
Avatar was a great movie, a huge cinematic success, the movie is actually responsible for the explosion of the Chinese market, which expanded massively after audiences experienced Avatar. Despite some people claiming Avatar is not risky, it is in fact, one of the riskiest film project that I remember, of course it paid off greatly. The film was a non-sequel, non-reboot, non-adaptation original with no established character, no established franchise nor box office draw actors, and it's the highest grossing film of all time. That speaks volumes of the tremendous success and the greatness of Cameron as a filmmaker to connect to global audiences despite huge language and cultural barriers.
It is the greatest film success story of the 20th century, which is especially impressive in the day of sequels, movie universes, remake, reboot and spin-offs. What was the last original film that's hugely successful worldwide? Exactly! The movie is unfairly bashed because of how cynical the internet generally is, TFA is more of a rehash and without the WOW factor (the visuals, the motion capture and the 3D of Avatar), yet nostalgia blinds everything.
 
NCSOFT said:
Avatar was a great movie, a huge cinematic success, the movie is actually response for the explosion of the Chinese market, which expanded massively after audiences experienced Avatar. Despite some people claiming Avatar is not risky, it is in fact one of the riskiest film project I ever remember, of course it paid off greatly. The film was a non-sequel, non-reboot, non-adaptation original product with no established character, franchise or actors, and it's the highest grossing film of all time. That speaks volumes of the tremendous success and the greatest of Cameron as a filmmaker to connect to global audiences with huge language and cultural barriers.
It is the greatest film success story of the 20th century, which is especially impressive in the day of sequels, movie universes, remake, reboot and spin-offs. What was the last original film that's hugely successful worldwide? Exactly! The movie is unfairly bashed because of how cynical the internet generally is, TFA is more of a rehash and without the WOW factor (the visuals, the motion capture and the 3D of Avatar), yet nostalgia blinds everything.
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Not to mention the sheer cost of the movie. Its why so many were predicting a bomb like water world, which i think further explains the simplifying of the story to appeal to as many people as possible. It couldnt survive as a more niche scifi movie, it needed mass appeal.
 
Xero said:
Not to mention thr sheer cost of the movie. Its why so many were predicting a bomb like water world, which i think further explains the simplifying of the story to appeal to as many people as possible. It couldnt survive as a more niche scifi movie, it needed mass appeal.
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Exactly, I was trying to get this point across for the last 8 years. The movie costed 400 M (production + promotion), unlike Hollywood of the old days, a completely original blockbuster of that scale just can't make it anymore. Cameron was successful because he made it connect to the global audience, Cameron also wanted to impress with 3D, motion capture and having CCI characters in a fully immersive CGI world. To achieve that, a simplistic plot that can easily connect to the mass is crucial, a convoluted plot would be a huge turn off, and frankly a distraction to what Avatar was trying to provide: the best cinematic experience.
I don't think a familiar and simplistic plot necessarily means its bad either, it was effective and I was touched.
 
coming up with an original story is most likely why its taken them 10 years to make a sequel everyone caught onto them with the first and now they cant pull that off again
 
entremet said:
You know what I mean haha.

Best Picture.

But you're right for the technical stuff.
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Oh, It was definitely in the race for the best picture, it was 2nd in line after The hurt Locker, it even won best picture at the golden globes, also among the 5 films nominated for best director.
 
Am I crazy if I don't think the cgi is that great? It hasn't particularly aged well either, but even past then I got this uncanny valley feeling with the blue aliens that made the whole thing really corny, specially in emotional scenes. The animals were great, but the humanoids really weren't.
 
NCSOFT said:
Despite some people claiming Avatar is not risky, it is in fact, one of the riskiest film project that I remember
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Don't confuse the non-existent "riskiness" of the storytelling in the movie with the riskiness involved in the financial/technical creation of the film.

People tend to be talking about the former when they're discussing the film proper, not the latter, and when people here tend to vehemently go to bat for the film, they're almost always discussing the latter, and not the former.
 
I honestly always found avatar to have more in common with dune anyways. Down to the super rare mineral on an alien planet and taming a great beast on the planet.
 
Execution is always king in storytelling, and Avatar is a simple story told well. That clearly resonated for people. And even as his worst effort, it's still better than the vast majority of blockbuster fare released since then.
 
Bobby Roberts said:
Don't confuse the non-existent "riskiness" of the storytelling in the movie with the riskiness involved in the financial/technical creation of the film.

People tend to be talking about the former when they're discussing the film proper, not the latter, and when people here tend to vehemently go to bat for the film, they're almost always discussing the latter, and not the former.
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I understand that, but I think it is odd to separate story telling "riskiness" with the overall riskiness of the film being produced. The script is a component of the film, which is a visual-audio story telling medium. I think that having a convoluted plot or art-house film like story telling would be hugely distracting for what Avatar was trying to sell: 3D, immersive CGI world, and motion capture. I would argue that it is almost impossible for a film to achieve such degree of technological advancement while achieving the same degree of story-telling innovation at the same time, a film like that would fail miserably at the box office, and that's simply not Cameron. Reaching the maximum amount of audience was his goal, and as a visual-audio story-telling medium, it succeeded.

This is also a weird accusation for Avatar that other blockbusters are not often getting, if we're talking about taking risks in story telling, massively successful blockbusters certainly don't do it much these days, certainly not TFA or Jurassic World. Avatar at least got the technological breakthroughs going for it. The far majority of blockbusters released these days are pushing no boundaries whatsoever, and Avatar for some odd reason is getting hate for "non innovative story-telling".
 
NCSOFT said:
I understand that, but I think it is odd to separate story telling "riskiness" with the overall riskiness of the film being produced.
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It's not odd at all. The film is the film, and while knowing about the behind the scenes shit can be interesting and enlightening, it needs to work as a story, as a thing unto itself. People often talk about the "riskiness" of Star Wars in the same way, and it's just as iffy there - Star Wars' story wasn't risky at all. It was based off very basic mythologies, built out of various pop-culture reinterpretations OF those mythologies.

Now, the notion of creating an entire new system of cinematography in order to make the VFX stand out? That was kinda risky, yes. It cost a fair amount of the $10mil budget to invent and realize. But that doesn't really make the storytelling itself "risky," and I don't know that the story needs to get a handicap because the nuts & bolts behind-the-scenes stuff (the project management stuff, basically) paid off.

Either the story worked or it didn't. Either it did what it tried to do or it stumbled along the way. And in Avatar (and Star Wars, and Jurassic World, and most every big-budget action blockbuster of the last 40 years when the subgenre was basically invented), the lowest common denominator was aimed for by that storytelling, and its success depended on whether the talent in bringing that story to life elevated the relatively safe material.
 
GB: There’s also maybe some heritage linking it to “Dances With Wolves,” considering your story here of a battered military man who finds something pure in an endangered tribal culture.

James Cameron:
Yes, exactly, it is very much like that.
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No James, its EXACTLY like that + melodrama.

Damn no you've made me think of Titanic...damn you!
 
NHarmonic. said:
Wait for the unobtanium defense force that'll argue it's a real concept and blablabla.

Still sounds dumb as fuck.
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The Core uses unobtanium, and the internet be like: What uncreative bullshit is this? Get the fuck outta here with that noise.

Avatar uses unobtanium: What a brilliant use of an established concept! Master class writing! Put a baby in me, Mr. Cameron!
 
James Cameron loses shit loads of points from me just for fucking UNOBTANIUM.

How the fuck do you even think that's good enough to use
 
No substance. Cliche done to death premise, typical cast of character archetypes (the military baddie, the corporate baddie, scientist lady, protagonist who gets won over by the other side), boring and bloated story. It looked pretty, that's pretty much it.
To Far Away Times said:
Avatar is no more derivative than any other typical summer blockbuster.
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So we can agree, lowest common denominator
 
Only interesting thing about the movie was Cameron's speech at the 2009 E3. I remember more from that press conference than the movie itself!
 
To quote Plinkett's Titanic review, James Cameron aimed for the middle and he nailed it. Simple and pretty enough to appeal to the largest amount of people. It's an incredibly effective movie. Not necessarily a great movie, but given those box office result, effective.

Some people resent that I suppose. Though I'll take Avatar over other "effective" films like Transformers.
 
The movie is kind of clunky. There's nothing really wrong with the film structurally, as everything moves in a way that is in function to something else in the plot, but it doesn't feel like there's much going on beyond the surface. Most of this stems from the plot feeling hackneyed, the characters are pretty shallow and there are LOADS AND LOADS OF EXPOSITION. This movie is a hair under three hours, and most of that screen time seems dedicated to selling me on the film's concept. I get it, people mind jacking blue cat people aliens who USB plug into nature is high concept, and getting through all of it is necessary to get the story across.

But while all the characters were speaking I felt like I got all the exposition but not really any 'dialogue'. Pandora is setup and shot like this beautiful and expansive world but this tired chosen one white guy monomyth stuff feels like it packs it all into a sardine can. There's apparently several tribes on the planet, but they don't show up until the montage at the beginning of the climax. There's an entire group of people shown piloting Avatar bodies, but we only see Jake, Grace, and Norm.

And the film is so bogged down by exposition that most of the cast don't have much to do outside of one crucial plot point. Jake feels like a designated protagonist who's only there to pay off all of the film's setups. Neyteri doesn't really do much that doesn't involve Jake, which can lead to some weird flip-flopping (I saved you because you had a brave heart. You may have betrayed my tribe, but you tamed this space pterodactyl, so all is forgiven). Grace mostly spouts the film's morals until
she dies
. Norm is here to spout exposition, except he does in a far more grating "What, you didn't know about *plot point*?" sort of way (which is a shame, as there is a hint of him resenting Jake for getting close to the tribe in a way he can't but that goes nowhere). Parker and Quaritch feel like they could've been combined into one character since they fill out basically the same role anyway only Parker gets some hints at sympathy that don't really pay off.

The film just feels so overly familiar that I spent most of the time waiting for the movie to go where I knew it was going. But that's extra frustrating because while the world feels beautiful and fully realized, the plot did it a disservice, and condensed everything in such a way that made me feel like I had seen all it had to offer.

It sounds like I hated the film, but I didn't. I just wish there was more under the surface to this movie, with characters I could feel more invested in.
 
jstripes said:
I'm still upset the movie appropriated ruined that word. It was commonly used in the STEM community as a placeholder for idealized theoretical elements and materials. Now it's not used at all.
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Oh like the creative STEM types can't and won't come up with a new silly sounding name for the concept like Impossiblium.
 
Sibersk Esto said:
It sounds like I hated the film, but I didn't. I just wish there was more under the surface to this movie, with characters I could feel more invested in.
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I like this post. +1

The movie does go over on explaining a lot. I think it does a good job hiding most of it, people are always doing things or if its VO its a) explained as a diary from Jake and b) put up against montages. But yeah, its explaining the world but not really telling a story. That's more in the background and that's the familiar stuff that we already know where it is headed. I didn't have a problem with the characters as some, though. They're basic, and that works for what this movie needs to do and be.

I also liked the movie overall. I liked its craft in action, pacing - always moving forward as you noted, nothing felt really wasted but just too much of it. It can get up its own ass when it not only wants to explain the world and the people but seems to try to introduce major elements far too late (for me, that was the sudden revelation that the entire planet is full of tribes and they need to be united, a plot point not touched upon nearly enough early on so that emotional impact of Jake helping in achieving this fell flat).
 
yanipheonu said:
To quote Plinkett's Titanic review, James Cameron aimed for the middle and he nailed it. Simple and pretty enough to appeal to the largest amount of people. It's an incredibly effective movie. Not necessarily a great movie, but given those box office result, effective.

Some people resent that I suppose. Though I'll take Avatar over other "effective" films like Transformers.
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Who calls Transformers "effective"
 
All I'm saying is...

I wasn't as emotionally attached to these 10 foot tall CGI blue cat people, and home tree, as I was to Two Socks and the buffalo.
 
I actually really loved it. When it was in theaters I had a friend ask me if I wanted to see Avatar with her and her mother and I said yes (I assumed she meant Avatar as in the Nick animated series as it was the only Avatar I knew) and I absolutely wasn't expecting what I saw. Have enjoyed the few times I've re watched it when it has aired on cable as well.
 
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