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Greg Egan reviewing Avatar is like Jakob Nielsen reviewing the 2Advanced website. Totally different levels and types of craft, as many seem to forget.
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Glad to see I wasn't the only one who felt like he was watching a Nazi propaganda movie - with the Na'vi as the pure, beautiful, harmonious Aryans, and the humans as the evil rapacious mongrel race.
Edit: Wow, comment turned out to be very long, background on lots of historical periods. tl;dr is that propaganda and flimsy motives is by no means a Nazi thing, not at all. It's standard operating procedure for most causes and almost all wars in history. History is re-written afterwards to make the story simpler and easier to follow, but most wars and fights had flimsy motives and two sides when they were started. L…
For the most part, I agree heartily with your statements. On the topic of the Civil War, I'd disagree slightly - I'm not sure I agree that the price paid was worth it, but I appreciate that you've weighed the actual evidence and concluded otherwise. Most people just accept what they read in their high school textbook, or cling to "The South will rise again" fantasies.
The reason I drew a comparison to Nazi movies, rather than generic propaganda films, is the racial nature of the conflict in Avatar. The fundamental Big Lie of Nazism was that Aryans were superior to, and being oppressed by, the lesser races. The Big Lie of Soviet Communism, on the other hand, was about the oppression of one class of people by another, and the inevitability of a classless society. It has a human universalism that Nazism lacks.
To make my point in another way, the movie could just as easily (speaking as someone who is not James Cameron) have featured two warring factions of Na'vi - traditionalist and technological - in which case I probably wouldn't have drawn the Nazi movie comparison.
And now, I'm off to learn more about the Sengoku period :-)
I don't know why people keep comparing this film to Pocahontas; It's really more like FernGully in space.
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You're forgetting that Titanic was like the Twilight of its time. Tween/teen girls flocked to watch the movie multiple times to watch Leonardo DiCaprio in his love story. IIRC, I remember a claim that one girl saw the movie 13 times. Without the 'teenage heart-throb' factor, I wonder if it can match up to Titanic in terms of numbers.
I knew a girl who had seen it twenty-something times. She had issues. Personally, though, I still think it's quite a good film. Some aspects of the love story grate a little (in particular Leonardo DiCaprio's always-perfect character) as does the characterization of all first class passengers as snooty jerks and all third class passengers as idealized salt of the Earth (come to think of it, that's pretty much the sam…
I would highly recommend reading it.
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yeah pretty neat. but then i thought, why not two scrollbars?
then I thought, why implement something so useless in the first place?
Upvoted not just for the insightful and non-snarky review, but because Greg Egan is a) the best science-fiction writer most people have never heard of - it's practically impossible to find his work in a US bookstore - and b) an interesting writer on both science and code. Science: http://www.gregegan.net/FOUNDATIONS/index.html Java Applets: http://www.gregegan.net/APPLETS/Applets.html
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.
He recommends Princess Mononoke. It's that fact alone that makes me take his review into consideration. If you haven't seen Princess Mononoke, I'd highly recommend it. Actually, I'd recommend all the Studio Ghibli films. My wife and I have the entire collection, and are in the middle of watching the last one we haven't watched yet, Porco Rosso (which is so far, fantastic). "These" are the kinds of animations I, perso…
-no popular culture references delivered by a wise cracking animal.
-somehow they end up being both more emotional and less melodramatic than the usual us cartoons; and
-they often have very serious themes even though they are for children. They often talk about war, death, love, etc. and manage to be perfectly fine children's movies.
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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…
"Sometime in the next twenty years or so, the technology that enabled Avatar will become cheap enough to risk employing alongside a moderately intelligent script." - it's right there in the review.
It's frustrating when this happens:
Author: A, yet also B. You may think that C, but I'd argue that D makes that untenable.
Commenter: He said A, but clearly C. Another commenter: Hmm, C you say? But what about D? Another commenter: y'all are too swept up in your As and Cs and Ds, have you even stopped to consider B?
This is an accurate, but unfair, criticism. Humans tend to be most comfortable reading and watching stories about other humans, or barring that, human like creatures. (Think talking animals or Star Trek "aliens.") I seriously doubt a Hollywood film could effectively draw a large enough audience to cover development costs if the aliens were too far abstract or alien for viewers to identify with or try and read body language from. (I think this partly is why hard sci-fi is so rare. People might mistakenly think the film's horror if the aliens were more like Pierson's Puppeteers or other non-humanoid creature.)