Blarghagh

It seems I'm a bit younger than most people here, but I felt much the same way. Except my comparison was: my first theater experience, five year old dinosaur obsessed kid, Jurassic Park. I saw it again twice now. Once in 3D again, and once standard in a local theater with some friends (it was a spur of the moment kind of thing) and I was happy to discover that the movie can be enjoyed flat. So that might cheer up those who don't have the opportunity to see it in theaters right now.

He was hilarious in Bad Lieutenant. That film is so odd. He has all these weird mannerisms in there that just make you go "...?". Plus, at some point he hallucinates iguanas on his coffee table, and there's this super long, loving shot of the iguanas.

Wow. Worldwide: $329,266,915. It's definitely gonna make back it's budget, then. Because it's only just in release so it'll definitely make some more cash. Plus, it's eventually gonna be a hit on DVD.

I just don't understand all these people going 'the plot sucks'. It's not original, I'll admit. It is, however, a decent plot that is done well. It borrows from other sources, but I don't understand how that is a bad thing in itself when it forms a good whole. I felt the same way when my english teacher couldn't stop ranting about how Lord of the Rings ripped off all kinds of old tales.

I knew about that. Isn't she called upon for female character dialogues a lot? I think she doctored Rene Russo in Lethal Weapon. But mostly it's just novelists, screenwriters and directors. Joss Whedon and Kevin Smith do a lot of script doctoring I think.

I saw it. It was a pretty useful lesson on filmmaking. Chapter 11: What not to do. Anyway, I probably not going to get anywhere with this, but I recommend you see it anyway. I was pretty skeptical going in (hearing things like Ferngully meets Thundersmurfs on Ain't It Cool News all the time will do that to you), and while I was like "this is it?" for the first 15 minutes, after that I was sucked in completely and just let all it's pure, unwashed epic give me pleasure*. *Why yes, I did take effort to make that sound as disgusting as possible.

Aww, that's too bad.

Possibly, but I think I spell better than the majority of that group. At some point I decided there wasn't a real reason to learn the grammar rules of a language that consists mostly out of exceptions to those rules.

Yeah, the technical parts weren't that interesting to me. Mostly because English is my second language, and I learned it almost exclusively from reading and watching television. I haven't a clue on how it works and do it mostly on what feels right.

You mean script doctors?

Reading Stephen King's "On Writing". It actually has some interesting things to say, and interesting methods that I can try out. EDIT: Not that I want to be a writer, but I have written scripts for animated short films. I'm just not very good.

I laughed so hard at the part where he tries to teach the kid to talk like a real man.

Why would 3D glasses not work? Even the newfangled polarized goggles?

I think it's more about corporations than advanced nations. In fact, it's much like Aliens in this regard. It has the nameless company, and Giovanni Ribsi's character is pretty much what Paul Reiser did in Aliens. With that, the hypersleep, the exo-suits and the colonial marines, this movie could be taking place in the same universe. That being said, the only word you got right is cliche. It's handled well. If I had to try and identify this movie's inspirations, I would say Edgard Rice Burroughs Barsoom series.

I disagree, but it sorta comes down to this yes. Much of it's appeal lies in it's expert special effects, which work best in 3D. The 3D effects really add something instead of being just a gimmick. There's an expert sequence where the characters are up incredibly high, and in 3D many people will actually get some vertigo. I did, and I've read reviews of people who had the same.

That's entirely possible, I admit. Most of my friends are interested in this sort of thing, and most of the websites I visit are created by people who that applies to as well. But none of those movies broke Apple.com's trailer page for weeks on end. Avatar did. I can't remember another movie where the first images, nearly half a year before the movie came out, started an internet backlash because it was already overhyped. EDIT: But enough of that. Some people were overhyped, other apparently weren't. Let's just leave it at that.

I don't know why I'm even replying to you of all people, but you are posting this on the message board for a video game developer who makes highly specialized cult video games. Wake up and smell your breath. It stinks of nerd. Anyway, the backlash on this started three months before the first poster even came out. Every review of this movie that has come out contains either 'believe the hype' or 'don't believe the hype', whether it's an online review or a newspaper/television review. Maybe it's because I'm an animator and I subscribe to things like SFX and 3D World, but I don't remember it being mentioned in those, and even then, this movie had more hype than Lord of the Rings, The Dark Knight and Star Trek combined. If you don't follow movie news, sure. But anyone who did will have been beaten to death with it.

Yeah there was a lot of hype ever since it was announced. The publicity guys made outrageous claims like "this movie will **** your eyeballs". (It didn't, although I made sure to check my 3D spectacles for phallic parts beforehand out of paranoia.)

I'm snowed in for the first time in my life.

I thought about this, and at the end of it I just don't agree (that it's political - I'm not actively disagreeing with you). You've got a set of people who are obviously sentient, civilised and intelligent, and they are being oppressed by a mixed group of ruthless humans who value profit over human rights. These humans then set about actively destroying the homes of the aforementioned sentients and murdering them without a second thought. How is this anything but evil? It hardly seems political to me and were we to compare it to any political entity these days, China springs to mind with it's ruthless authoritarian capitalism rather than the liberal capitalism of the West which is kept in check by human rights empowering democracies. Personally, I felt like it wasn't really preaching it though. It felt more like "let's make cowboys and indians, except with aliens and high tech gadgets!". Sort of like how George Lucas made his tale of the naive farmboy who saves the princess from the horrible black knight. I mean, the theme is definately there. Humans need to stop being greedy etc. blah, but it never seemed to be preaching to today's political world. Not to me, anyway. Everyone will have their own interpretation, naturally.

Source?You're kidding with that question, right?

That's really too bad. In that case, I hope I'm wrong and it's as good on your TV. My track record is in your favor, as I'm wrong quite often.

Sorry, but that comment, joke or meme is going right over my head. : /

Anyone complaining about the CGI is doing so because they don't want to believe the hype. I'm an animation student, and I saw it with a group of animation students, and we all agreed that the CGI was seamless. You KNOW it's CGI because it has to be, not because you can see it. Even the scenes where the CGI Na'vi interact with real humans are not awkward. There haven't been animated characters this good, and there likely won't be in quite a while either. Anyway, I'm not going to review it. I'm only going to give some impressions: - This is the most epic action movie you're ever going to see. In this movie, James Cameron puts every director who has ever made a good action movie to shame. He has outclassed everything in any action movie made, ever. From Die Hard to Lord of the Rings to Stars Wars to The Matrix to James Bond. - An extensive world-building and culture creation exercise like the one that went into this movie hasn't been seen since Tolkien wrote The Silmarillion. - Yes, the plot is riddled with cliches but they're handled well so it doesn't take away from the experience. In fact, it reminds one of how it must have been before everything was done to death. Because something that is cliche can only have become cliche through overuse because it works so well. Despite being predictable, it's done well, with emotion and real characters. This movie is about something. James Cameron tries to tell us a story complete with message, and he does it well, despite it not being a wholly original story or message. This is not a Michael Bay movie. This is not Transformers. The CGI is a large part of this movie's appeal, but it is not the reason the movie exists. At risk of repeating myself, this is more like Lord of the Rings (Tolkien ripped off all kinds of things to make his epic). - While going on about the CGI, after about twenty minutes I was so immersed that I never ever thought about it. Not a single time I wondered how it worked, nor did it it break my suspension of disbelief because I could tell it was fake. And I WORK with this stuff on a daily basis. I SHOULD have been thinking about it because it's what I do. - See this movie for Quaritch. Colonel Miles Quaritch is the toughest mother****er ever committed to film. He makes The Hulk look like a wuss. - My only nitpicks - , and Sam Worthington's performance was good but he still needs to work on his accent. It slipped occasionally. - Making plans to see it again, because buying a DVD will never come close to this as a theater experience.

You'd think so but as part of the dutch basic scholarship thing I get free access to public transport. I had even longer commutes during my last internship, but I didn't mind it so much because the work was more interesting, working on an animated short film. Working on rudimentary flash animation and webdesigns for online learning environments seems like grunt work lacking in creativity in comparison.