It showed up out of nowhere, made the most bank in history (for a movie), refused to explain and disappeared for like 15 years, then came back out of nowhere with a sequel movie, a AAA game, and like 3 more movies in the works.
Edit: I think it now has like a Lego line too?
It’s all a lot less fantastical when you compare it to Pocahontas:
Or Fern Gully, or Dances With Wolves… it’s not exactly an uncommon story.
Ah, but before Avatar came along it was never quite so poorly written!
It’s in a unique spot in the 3D space of script quality, time spent refining it, and revenue.
Dances with Smurfs
Yes but Disney’s Pocahontas was boring to tears while Avatar has cool hair-sex and explosions
And it is otherwise entirely dull and forgettable. Despite making so much money, it barely made any cultural impact. Nobody quotes Avatar like ever.
The reason it was such a hit at the time was mainly its visuals, IMO. Story might be predictable and shallow, but you can’t deny it looks beautiful. All the colorful jungle, alien species, green mountain peaks and needle rocks, it’s all just very pleasant to look at. What also helped it being directed by big Hollywood name.
PS: unrelated, but it has amazing OST.
I’ve always looked at the Avatar movies as being more about advancing movie making technology than about creating a good movie. I think James Cameron will be more remembered for his technical advances than for this storytelling.
Agreed, I’ve always seen it as more of a tech demo than a feature film
On the other hand, he directed Titanic, which probably also had tech advances, but is recognized more for the story. Is that a fair observation? I was still a kid when it came out, so I know less about it than Avatar.
no the tech was very much the focus at the time. they did some incredible stuff for that film.
He helped to further submarine technology to get the shots of the Titanic for the movie, and he developed cameras that could withstand the pressures down there. He also helped design a small rover camera called Snoopy that actually went inside the Titanic to get shots of the staircase.
Also it came out right at the time when 3D movies were at their (very short lived) peak.
And it did a GREAT job using that tech. I’ve never seen better.
The movie is a visual masterpiece and a king of theater-watching cinema.
Sure the story is bland but ain’t nobody watching that movie for the story.
Yep, IIRC someone committed suicide because, in part, he would never see real life floating jungle islands.
Doesn’t help that its dialogue is so boring, its most well known quote is literally just “I see you”.
Yeah, that’s kind of the point? Was the comparison between the Na’Vi and native Americans too subtle for you to notice before you saw this meme?
Not for me personally. Just find it funny how 1:1 it is with the original. This meme has been around since the year the movie came out.
But you could do this with every story/movie trope that’s been repeated throughout our species history. The concept of retelling stories in different contexts is itself not new but for sure reason Avatar gets overly criticised for it.
You don’t see the same criticisms for every bank heist movie that all follow the same basic premises as each other. I just did it a bit weird why so many people are against this particular trope. Is it because it tries to deal with our history of oppression and colonisation? I honestly don’t know.
I doubt there are any truly original stories that couldn’t be shown to be a retelling of another. I would even argue that some genres wouldn’t exist if this wasn’t a thing.
You don’t see the same criticisms for every bank heist movie that all follow the same basic premises as each other
That’s because I generally don’t have to hear about every bank heist movie; you can’t avoid Avatar
For me, I will dog on any kind of retelling like this. If you’re not teaching anything new and are just retelling the story for profit, I don’t care about your story. There were no new story beats and no twists that caught me off guard.
When the movie was new, anytime you threw it shade, the first follow-up question was, “Well, did you see it in IMAX 3D?” That shouldn’t matter. If your story relies on visual gimmick to make it anything more than a reskin, I’m not interested.
I have the same feeling towards the live action Disney movies. They’re not adding anything new. I see about 5-10 new movies a year now compared to the 20-30 I used to because so little is not just a rehash of something from last year.
“Showed up out of nowhere”, ie. in development since the mid 90’s; “made the most bank”, ie. made the 2nd most bank; “disappeared”, ie. Cameron said that there would be 4 sequels and that they’re being worked on; “came back out of nowhere”, ie. the first sequel came out more or less when it was supposed to, and Cameron said in 2020 that filming on Avatar 3 was nearly finished.
i feel like the feeling of them coming “out of nowhere” and “disappearing” is created by how little cultural impact those movies managed to create. like give me a single quote, anything memorable from the story itself. we all remember it is a beautiful film to watch, but the plot might as well be a theme park ride around an alien world
nobody talks about it, there is nothing to talk about
like give me a single quote, anything memorable from the story itself
Well there was the part where the… uh… the guy, whatshisface said…
Wait, no… ok well how about when the… um… there was that one part in… err, either the first or the second movie, one of the aliens did… umm…
You know what, I’ll get back to you on this one
“JakeSully” - Blue catgirl Gamora
See this? That’s Unobtainium.
Isn’t the story alien sideboob? I still remember that, very meaningful
It’s kinda funny how sexualized the aliens in Avatar are when they canonically have no genitalia except for their dreadlocks. It kinda defies the sci-fi trope; a sexy alien species that humans can’t have sex with (unless you get a avatar body with its accompanying penis perm of course).
“I see you” is an insanely easy quote to remember from this movie
me_irl
This should be the cover photo/thumbnail/whatever for the show “Um, Actually” lol
Bet you’re a hoot at parties
Want to have a nice cry about it?
What?
What?
deleted by creator
Anticapitalist that made over 2 Billion dollars…
It is a solid point about the irony though. It’s one of the biggest consumer capitalism things ever, even if it’s anti-capitalism they’re selling on the screen.
Why do you think the aliens are blue natives?
Because if they were white folk, the message would resonate too much with the general audience.
I want to hear the original version of the soundtrack. I do not care about the actual film at all, but supposedly Cameron hired a bunch of leading ethnomusicologists to attempt to create something unlike any music on Earth, only to then ditch the majority of what they made because it sounded too weird
That would be a fun director’s cut
Keeping unobtainium in the script unironically met bizarrely little criticism.
I saw the first movie, forgot almost completely what it was about. But I have to admit I thought it would be about the the Airbender. Half of the movie I felt stupid and cheated at the same time… Probably why I don’t remember what it was about.
Well, it’s better than the actual ATLA movie.
Oddly enough, the Shyalaman movie is my favorite version of that whole franchise.
Some people just love watching the crashes more than the race…
That’s even weirder really, the movie was so forgettable.
Nope. I knew what I was seeing.
I usually like to challenge anyone who said they liked it to name two chsracters. I think one person ever has succeeded.
🤷♂️
Jake and Colonel Quaritch.
The problem is, the latter is a name recycled from the Aliens franchise, and Jake is so generic that it’s kind of a gimme.
Avatar didn’t come out of nowhere at all. It is made by one of the most beloved and successful film makers in history. The hype leading up to that movie was off the charts.
Are we not going to talk about the fact that the logo uses something that is almost identical to the Papyrus font?
“I KNOW WHAT YOU DID!!”
You’re assuming there are people who remember what the logo looks like.
Nyeh-heh-heh
Man, it’s just so friggin boring. I gave up on the second movie halfway through and I struggled through the first one. I don’t understand why it became a global blockbuster.
I think it made so much money at the box office because it was so visually stunning (for the time) and no one had made a movie like that at that point. It was very much a movie everyone said to go watch on the big screen in 3D, ideally IMAX 3D. I never did and only watched it on a DVD borrowed from my wife’s friend 6 or 7 years ago, and came away less impressed. Like, it’s fine, but the movie itself isn’t exactly the greatest story ever told, and the visuals, while groundbreaking at the time, are now pretty standard.
Well it had James Cameron as a director which automatically meant was going to make money. Also it was technically very impressive for the time which was kind of the point. Cameron made a huge deal of how this was a story that he’d wanted to tell for ages but hadn’t been able to until the technology got to the point where he could use it.
After the movie came out there wasn’t really any obvious path forward. It wasn’t supposed to be a franchise it was just a movie that stood on its own. So nothing happened for years.
Then things like the volume came along and it started getting used even in TV productions, and suddenly a whole new level of capability arose and so they decided that they would make another movie only this time why stop at just one?
People think it’s so cool to shit on this series and have nothing to say about the Marvel dogshit lol
Also, it’s an original movie. It’s not an adaptation or a sequel of any sorts. No other movie in top 50 highest grossing movies is an original. Closest is Titanic, but that’s half based on a real event.
Well, “original” is relative
It’s original in the sense that it all started with the movie. There wasn’t any Avatar novels, comic books, toys or video games before the movie.
The story is quite derivative though.
All stories are derivative.
Avatar would be considered a “Conquering the monster” archetype. The monster being the evil corporation in this case.
Hero’s journey shows up in every culture around the planet.
I’m not familiar with many tales that include a myco-connected planetary intelligence (celestial goddess, of you wanna phrase it like that).
Manifestation of a Global Inelegance via Fungal Connections
…is all I wanted to hear about in the sequel.
Avatar? Created highest hopes of conversation & art gravitating towards exploration & celebration of our own planet’s “wood wide web”. And demolishing toxic effects of corporations on the planet & people.
Avatar Way of Water? Top disappointment in my film watching experiences. My own fault, of course, the expectations I created for mystic becoming better manifest in stories on screen.
It’s space Pocahontas or Fern Gully.
Yea, the story isn’t exactly original.
Same filmmaker, Titanic (likely?) helped pave the way for Avatar {create a blockbuster such as Titanic, all sorts of doors open}
Am I the only one here that has never seen it or understands what the hype is about?
It was another white saviour movie. It was very strange and not something I ever understood
I’m going off of deteriorated memory but… space pocahontas where the natives of the planet that the humans are invading are tall blue vaguely mammalian-fish looking humanoids with a weird multipurpose tail for controlling animals and apparently also for sex according to supposed axed scene. paraplegic human uses weird technology to control the body of one or something to complete the white man saves the day even though white man cause the problem in the first place trope. I dunno about the sequel maybe he permanently stays in the alien body or something and has alien kids, who knows.
I watched about 5 minutes of it in an electronics store before getting bored. If I’m not mistaken it is Dances with Wolves in space. There’s also a big blue guy who hangs dong.
Dances with wolves, Ferngully, pocahontas, take your pick lol
It’s not about the story, it’s about the sfx.
Watch James Cameron’s movies like the abyss, Terminator2 and Titanic. (There’s others as well if you want to put in more effort)
He’s a visionary director and I just mean his own vision, Avatar was an idea he wanted to see on screen but was unhappy with the technology until he felt it was ready to tell the idea he had.
Like some other things, by today’s standards everyone else who saw what he did have been able to refine and expand on what he did so it may seem in unremarkable, but he finally decided to do the biggie when he felt the tech had come far enough for him to do his vision and it made Bank. So. Much. Bank
Again not because it’s an amazing original story, comparisons to fern gully were immediate even when it was new, but it was something that sits in a divide of how sfx can be used to tell a story in a way that people hadn’t otherwise shown. Even with a really unremarkable plot
Maybe its because Cameron is not one of my favorite directors. I love T2, of course but I can’t say the same about Titanic because (you guessed it) I still have not watched it and also didn’t buy into the hype when it was released. I remember that movie theaters were booked solid for weeks and you couldn’t get a ticket. No movie is that good or justifies that kind of hype, so I have skipped it so far.
It was a very pretty movie
There are dozens of us
The game isn’t good. Triple AAA or not.
That’s not what I said
I didn’t say you did. I was merely stating an opinion.
