Avatar — the Metacontextual Edition 15
An anonymous reader writes "Here's Avatar stripped of the distracting special effects. Rudyard Kipling would be proud." It's funny how something so visually amazing can have such an underwhelming and rehashed story.
Failblog win (Score:3, Informative)
http://failblog.org/2010/01/10/avatar-plot-fail/ [failblog.org]
It's Pocahantas (or a zillion other stories) with just a change of names.
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That's a lot better than the main article. The main article mainly just repeatedly criticizes the movie for daring to provide backstory (gasp!) and for Neytiri saying (a single time) that the reason she saved him was that he has "heart" -- never mind that it was a clear metaphor for bravery given that she just watched him get chased by an overgrown cat and jump off a waterfall.
Your link is a lot funnier, as it concisely harps on how much of an archetype this story is.
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Actually if they wanted to prove anything... (Score:1)
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And an original plot.
No, it's quite well established that the plot for Terminator was ripped off some old "Outer Limits" episodes. Harlan Ellison even got into the credits. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harlan_Ellison [wikipedia.org] (Although, there's at least one other "Outer Limits" episode that was ripped off)
There's no contesting... (Score:2)
... the fact that Avatar has a pretty standard plot, but pretty much any plot, no matter how original, can be written up in a similarly snarky way, and seem stale and uninteresting.
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Have you ever seeen any bollywood films? Those plots are generally quite involved - and frequently fantastically far-fetched.
Too much cynicism. (Score:2)
Some of the criticisms in this analysis are spot on, while some are just dumb and deliberately fail to see why the points being criticized do in fact work.
EVERY movie Cameron has ever made has been formula to the bone. This one is the same. Its only two crimes are A) It was a 20 year old script which wasn't quite tight enough. And B), It criticizes American values and pits love and spiritual awareness directly against technology and human colonial expansionism.
Touchy-feely is good in a sinking-ship movie
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I'm not altogether clear on what you were saying with much of that except to say you appear to consider cynicism a valid response to life.
I suppose definitions are in order, because perhaps you mean something I am not grasping. From my personal dictionary, "Cynicism" presupposes negativity and banality in all things, and actively warps observations until they fit this preconception. Objective observation, by contrast, requires that one take the bad with the good. (And vice versa, in this case.)
Blind cyni