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SF author Greg Egan reviews Avatar

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Re: SF author Greg Egan reviews Avatar

#51

Post by hugh_ »

waterlesscloud wrote: post #36
anigbrowl wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In a nutshell, the audience for nuanced, elaborately plotted scripts is not as big as that for epic hammy ones. The movie industry ( qua theaters) is not really about movies so much as it is a marketing operation for comfy chairs, sugary drinks, and popcorn. Hence the big-budget movie emphasis on the 'wow' factor, best appreciated via a 75-foot screen. To some extent, it's always been this way. Look at Shakespeare: m…

It's also true that if you're spending $300,000,000 making the movie, it's got to play everywhere. EVERYwhere. It's going to be translated into 50 languages, usually badly. It's going to play in villages where no one reads and no one speaks English and the sound system loses half the words anyway. Simple works. Complex doesn't. As foreign box office has grown to a higher and higher percentage, this has become more an…

A simple script isn't the same thing as a bad script, though. Star Wars, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Die Hard, Alien... these are simple scripts, but they were all turned into good movies.

The problem with Avatar's script is not so much its simplicity, but its preachiness. A story set in a simplified world of good and evil isn't so annoying (cf Star Wars) unless it's supposed to be making some kind of political commentary on our own world.

Re: SF author Greg Egan reviews Avatar

#52

Post by elblanco »

Me thinks Egan is reading too much into things. This is the complexity and imagination of a 1960's 12 year old who grew up reading golden-age sci-fi and then grew up and built his imagination with modern tech.

Critically analyzing this is like critically analyzing a 12 year old's day dreams.

That's about it. It's a thrilling and wild ride, a great place to be for a bit north of 2 hours, and that's it. It's a spectacle with a plot no deeper than Star Wars. But also no less fun that Star Wars.

Re: SF author Greg Egan reviews Avatar

#53

Post by gnaritas »

randallsquared wrote: post #23
nearestneighbor wrote: post #20

What puzzles me is why, with their $237e6 budget, they couldn't afford a decent script.

So many expensive movies reportedly have terrible dialogue and scripts that there must be a reason other than the obvious. Maybe it's really, really hard to tell if a script is good before it's filmed? I dunno.

It's pretty simple really, most people can't follow a complex plot. For a big blockbuster movie to make money it has to attract the widest audience possible, and that requires dumbing it down so the average person can follow along and not get confused.

This technology however, once it becomes more widespread and cheaper, will enable future movies to be made so cheaply that it'll become profitable to chase the more targeted audience. You can't make a smart movie for 300 million dollars, you'll lose your ass; there just aren't that many smart people out there that would appreciate it.

But when you can eliminate the actors, and their salaries, and just CG everything and hire a bunch of voice actors, and get that 300 million movie down to 1-10 million, then you can target highly selective audiences with something aimed directly at them profitably.

Take for example Man From Earth http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_from_Earth shot for 200k, exactly the opposite of Avatar, virtually no budget and a fantastic plot. A movie I loved but couldn't get most people to sit through if I tried, they just wouldn't appreciate the plot and would complain about how cheap it looked.

I loved Avatar by the way, but not for the plot, it was exactly as weak as I expect all blockbuster plots to be, but it was fucking beautiful visually and technically stunning.

Re: SF author Greg Egan reviews Avatar

#54

Post by elblanco »

blhack wrote: post #37
seldo wrote: post #2

Many of the reviews of Avatar have focused on the (over-)simplicity of the plot. I don't understand these people. Avatar is packed with so much visual confection that I could barely process half of what I was seeing; I wouldn't have had any brain left over to _understand_ a plot. Who cares about the plot? It's beautiful . Amazingly, wonderfully, brilliantly beautiful.

Who cares about the plot? It's beautiful. Amazingly, wonderfully, brilliantly beautiful. There is a wonderfully realistic, fully immersive, 3D environment right outside my office window right now, but I don't care. Want to know why? Because the plot is boring. I get out of my chair, walk to my car, go to the gas-station, and then go home to play with my dog and go to bed. The end. People go to movies because it is be…

> but it doesn't really do anything that reality doesn't.

Apparently you live on Pandora,

where you can look at the office window right now and see the alien planet with floating mountains, giant six legged carnivores, pack hunters, bio-luminescent forests, two kinds (count them 2) of flying dragons and 12 foot tall blue skinned people with tails and braids with autonomous nerve endings at the end that can mentally bond with all of the above (sans the flying mountains).

Re: SF author Greg Egan reviews Avatar

#55

Post by Daniel_Newby »

ars wrote: post #29
emmett wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Egan gets your point entirely, and laments that it hasn't been put in service of something better. The best technology in the world deserves to be joined with a great script, not a severely impaired one.

All new technologies are first paired with non-risky material. So they use a non-risky script, with nothing objectionable in it. Once the technology matures you can use a better script. The price of better is that sometimes it's worse, that's why it's a risk. If it was a sure thing everyone would do it, but it's not easy to create something great. You can try, and sometimes you'll make it, and other times you'll flop…

That would be http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heaven%27s_Gate_%28film%29

Joe Valdez at This Distracted Globe has a good review: http://thisdistractedglobe.com/2009/01/01/heavens-gate/ TL;DR version: quit perfecting and ship it!

Re: SF author Greg Egan reviews Avatar

#56

Post by elblanco »

plinkplonk wrote: post #34
seldo wrote: post #2

Many of the reviews of Avatar have focused on the (over-)simplicity of the plot. I don't understand these people. Avatar is packed with so much visual confection that I could barely process half of what I was seeing; I wouldn't have had any brain left over to _understand_ a plot. Who cares about the plot? It's beautiful . Amazingly, wonderfully, brilliantly beautiful.

"Who cares about the plot?" I do. (Sorry for being ...uh .... different). yes it looks cool. Some of us expectt more in a movie. Sorry about that. I personally found the warmed over "Stupid White Man penetrates exotic closed society and rises to be leader of it, seducing the native woman" plot tiresome, repetitive and tedious, especially with the clunkiest dialogue I've heard in a decade, and insufficiently compensat…

Netflix also rents our pedantic art house flicks so you never have to be troubled by what the rest of us mortals watch for escapism.

I'm sure you can find some overwrought deconstruction of modern human sexuality retold as 4 movements of the lives of people in positions of authority but no power, politicians of the modern era in a mock nuclear stand-down, a 30 minute continuous scene of a single flower, in water, as people pass by blurred in the bokeh of an extreme depth of field and the audio recorded so poorly you can't actually hear what anybody is saying, and a clinically shot orgy with a clown stepping in at minute 11 to juggle, seemingly unaware of his own environs -- driven by the effort to juggle so many balls.

In the end, the clown drops the balls and close to credits.

The credits of course will flow up and will be in a mix of Italian and French. Each scene of course representing impotence, sexual drive, narcissism as a sexual trait, and lust and the struggle to balance a polygamous relationship with three waitress and a gay hairdresser at the same time (as the director was experiencing while he shot this film). The credits of course flow up in Italian and French as a both symbols of ejaculation and of salad dressing.

Enjoy the search! http://www.netflix.com/

Re: SF author Greg Egan reviews Avatar

#57

Post by cakesy »

abecedarius wrote: post #44
matasar wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are his books as overwritten as this review? Honest question, as I found the review pretty leaden, but I'm always looking for interesting sci-fi.

I recommend three of them: Permutation City, Diaspora, and Axiomatic. Here's the opening chapter of Diaspora: http://gregegan.customer.netspace.net.au/DIASPORA/01/Orphano...

Permutation city is an mind blowing read, with an incredible amazing concept. So much so, that one of the people I know adopted its premise as his religion.

Re: SF author Greg Egan reviews Avatar

#58

Post by cakesy »

elblanco wrote: post #56
plinkplonk wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Who cares about the plot?" I do. (Sorry for being ...uh .... different). yes it looks cool. Some of us expectt more in a movie. Sorry about that. I personally found the warmed over "Stupid White Man penetrates exotic closed society and rises to be leader of it, seducing the native woman" plot tiresome, repetitive and tedious, especially with the clunkiest dialogue I've heard in a decade, and insufficiently compensat…

Netflix also rents our pedantic art house flicks so you never have to be troubled by what the rest of us mortals watch for escapism. I'm sure you can find some overwrought deconstruction of modern human sexuality retold as 4 movements of the lives of people in positions of authority but no power, politicians of the modern era in a mock nuclear stand-down, a 30 minute continuous scene of a single flower, in water, as…

Look, there is no GOOD reason for this movie not to have a decent story. People like you admit to not caring about the plot, so surely you aren't going to care whether it is good or not.

Some of use aren't children, so I don't go see children movies (except Pixar, but they can hardly be described as children movies). I don't see Avatar being positioned as a childrens movie. The cost of the movie alone proves that it is not meant to be so.

Re: SF author Greg Egan reviews Avatar

#59

Post by anigbrowl »

patio11 wrote: post #45
lionhearted wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, Princess Mononoke is really a lovely film. I thought when Spirited Away came out and became popular that people would naturally go back and check out Mononoke, but it didn't happen that much. Definitely worth a watch. As for Avatar - My two biggest complaints: 1. It paints it as black and white, good vs. evil. This is such a common source of human misery and brainwashing that I thought we'd started to move past…

Yeah. An alternate reading of Avatar (supported by the text) is the story of a stolid marine colonel's tragic death in support of a mission to establish humanity's last hope for escaping the dying Earth. Sending humanity back at the end of the movie, with the exception of two collaborators, is genocide of the entire human race. I know, that isn't quite the Wars For Oil Suck, Love Your Purple Bambi Earth Goddesses Or…

Ah, spoiler alert!?

Re: SF author Greg Egan reviews Avatar

#60

Post by numbchuckskills »

diN0bot wrote: post #35
fgimenez wrote: post #11

I had to upvote simply because of how brilliant the text width resizing mechanism is. Hint: click the radio inputs at the top of the text.

yeah pretty neat. but then i thought, why not two scrollbars?

then I thought, why implement something so useless in the first place?
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