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Guy A. Person
May 23, 2003

Atlas Hugged posted:

It's because you're making the mistake of thinking that people think that soap operas look bad because they were soap operas and didn't think soap operas looked bad because they looked bad.

Soap operas are just a convenient point of reference because everyone knows immediately what you mean when you describe that specific look.

It's insane to me that in every conversation about setting up a television the specific thing people say is to change the settings to avoid that look because we all know it looks like trash and then when a big name director insists that it is actually good people run out and say the people who don't like it are just wrong.

If you like it, fine. It doesn't bother me that other people like it. I'm saying I don't like it and I would not watch the movie again under those conditions. If it has bothered you in the past, it's very likely to bother you again here. That's valuable information for a product people are expected to spend money on and spend several hours of their lives watching.

I don't think I'm making any mistake because I wasn't even the original person talking to you and didn't say anything about why I think soap operas look bad. For the record though, I think soap operas look bad because they're flatly lit and framed like stage plays and use really bog standard templated shooting techniques because the point is to churn them out daily for decades on end. I think all of the above counts a lot more than the frame-rate they are shot and displayed in. The production pipeline for soap operas is about the as far to the opposite end of the spectrum you can get from how Avatar was shot and produced.

I bolded the part about motion smoothing because likewise it is nothing like what is happening with Avatar. A samsung TV using some lovely algorithm to add extra frames to Friends or whatever isn't remotely the same as a director shooting key sequences in a higher frame rate and selectively using those cuts to reduce the judder effect that happens in certain panning shots (and is apparently more exasperated by 3D). Again, they may remind you of that effect, which if you specifically hate that effect may make you go "oh this looks like that lovely thing I don't like"! Describing that association isn't an attempt to insult or belittle you for making the connection.

It would be like if someone explained the concept of Uncanny Valley and another person shot back with "gently caress you, I don't think Polar Express looks like creepy poo poo because of some psychoanalysis mumbo jumbo, I just think it looks creepy because it does". I just really do not get the hostility here.

(And to be even more explicit, I'm not saying all of this to defend the honor of some fancy high budget director, I personally didn't notice much of the HFR stuff so at best I was indifferent to it. But SFX nerds in the Avatar thread are presumably going to be interested in this stuff and how it works and how people are reacting to it)

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The REAL Goobusters
Apr 25, 2008
Avatar 2 just passed 900 million at the world wide box office

Arglebargle III
Feb 21, 2006

The correct answer to "why did they forget about unobtanium" or "oh this hippy plot is so trite I've seen it before and that's a crime" is always that Pandora isn't real and this is actually about Earth.

If James Cameron could blow up mining operations and sink whale boats with his animal buddies in real life he would be doing that, not making movies about it.

Atlas Hugged
Mar 12, 2007


Put your arms around me,
fiddly digits, itchy britches
I love you all

Guy A. Person posted:

I don't think I'm making any mistake because I wasn't even the original person talking to you and didn't say anything about why I think soap operas look bad. For the record though, I think soap operas look bad because they're flatly lit and framed like stage plays and use really bog standard templated shooting techniques because the point is to churn them out daily for decades on end. I think all of the above counts a lot more than the frame-rate they are shot and displayed in. The production pipeline for soap operas is about the as far to the opposite end of the spectrum you can get from how Avatar was shot and produced.

I bolded the part about motion smoothing because likewise it is nothing like what is happening with Avatar. A samsung TV using some lovely algorithm to add extra frames to Friends or whatever isn't remotely the same as a director shooting key sequences in a higher frame rate and selectively using those cuts to reduce the judder effect that happens in certain panning shots (and is apparently more exasperated by 3D). Again, they may remind you of that effect, which if you specifically hate that effect may make you go "oh this looks like that lovely thing I don't like"! Describing that association isn't an attempt to insult or belittle you for making the connection.

It would be like if someone explained the concept of Uncanny Valley and another person shot back with "gently caress you, I don't think Polar Express looks like creepy poo poo because of some psychoanalysis mumbo jumbo, I just think it looks creepy because it does". I just really do not get the hostility here.

(And to be even more explicit, I'm not saying all of this to defend the honor of some fancy high budget director, I personally didn't notice much of the HFR stuff so at best I was indifferent to it. But SFX nerds in the Avatar thread are presumably going to be interested in this stuff and how it works and how people are reacting to it)

Apologies for not realizing you weren't the same guy. I am phone posting from the Android app and not reloading the full thread every time I reply, so when a new post on the same topic comes in talking about the same thing, I make the assumption that it's the same poster. That's not fair and that's on me. That doesn't make the culturally biased argument any more valid.

I also think we're cross talking on the technical aspect versus how the viewer experiences it. I honestly have no idea how soap operas arrive at their specific look. All I know is that the look they have is the same to me as the action sequences in the Avatar and Hobbit movies and I also know they leap out at me immediately when the switch happens. There is an interesting conversation to be had about the how and the why of arriving at that look, especially if they're managing to do so through entirely different technical processes. That doesn't change the fact that its jarring and is something I find distracting from just being able to watch the drat movie.

For the record, the moment it first really stood out to me was Jake narrating "date night".

So whatever, flat lighting, an AI generating extra frames, or James Cameron filming on an expensive camera, it doesn't really matter to me. It all arrives on a look I would prefer my movies and television not have. I don't see them as looking any different so it doesn't seem relevant to me that they got there in different ways (though I am sure for people interested in the tech itself, there's a deeper conversation to be had). Thus, I do not think your analogy is particularly apt either. The uncanny valley doesn't describe a process or technology, but a look and interpretation. There's loads of ways to arrive at it.

wizardofloneliness
Dec 30, 2008

Guy A. Person posted:

It would be like if someone explained the concept of Uncanny Valley and another person shot back with "gently caress you, I don't think Polar Express looks like creepy poo poo because of some psychoanalysis mumbo jumbo, I just think it looks creepy because it does". I just really do not get the hostility here.

I’ll have you know my brain is actually immune from outside influences and my thoughts are purely my own, thank you very much :colbert:

SCheeseman
Apr 23, 2003

There is nothing cheap about HFR in any technical or artistic sense, outside of it being commonly used in other productions that are cheap or poor quality. There is a connection being made in your head between cheap and HFR and I don't think this is unusual, it's just odd to me that you seem resistant to actually examining why and how that connection got made in the first place, which could provide context that potentially helps move past those preconceptions or at least understand them.

Personally I want film making to gently caress around and experiment more. The standards that have been settled, as practical as they have been, were borne from a mix arbitrary choices and technical compromises, not some divine influence that must be dogmatically stuck to. I've never been one for tradition, though.

chibi luda
Apr 17, 2013

I would imagine the unobtainium is still being harvested or mined or w/e by someone while this is all going on, especially if humanity has been building on the planet rapidly for a year as per the prologue

If you don’t experience anybody talking about offshore drilling for a full day it doesn’t mean it’s not still going on somewhere

Or horrible poo poo to irl whales for that matter :/

Haptical Sales Slut
Mar 15, 2010

Age 18 to 49

Goth Odell Beckham posted:

It would have owned even harder than if the HFR only showed up for the small handful of shots from the whale POV and nothing else

That would be a really interesting idea. The whales big brain lets it see reality in more frames! :manning:

stratdax
Sep 14, 2006

Atlas Hugged posted:

On this note I found it pretty funny that they completely dropped unobtainium. Now it's all about whale brains. Murdering those sentients is bad (sometimes), but murdering these other sentients is funding the project.

Given that, I don't think it really matters what Earth actually looks like. It's just a plot device.

Two things can be happening, why not. The whaler didn't exactly seem to be rank and file with the military. The humans are after everything on the planet, I'm sure the unobtanium is just one part of that. And after finding the whale brain juice "stops aging", hey it's just one more thing to exploit. In earth we mine for elements and also kill rhinos for ivory.

Atlas Hugged
Mar 12, 2007


Put your arms around me,
fiddly digits, itchy britches
I love you all

stratdax posted:

Two things can be happening, why not. The whaler didn't exactly seem to be rank and file with the military. The humans are after everything on the planet, I'm sure the unobtanium is just one part of that. And after finding the whale brain juice "stops aging", hey it's just one more thing to exploit. In earth we mine for elements and also kill rhinos for ivory.

I'm not calling it a plot hole or saying the movie is worse for this decision. I'm saying it's pretty clear that the human motivation to Cameron isn't that meaningful: it's just a plot device to justify specific action sequences and set pieces. If you take it out, the bad guys have less reason to have an entire water operation, and the film has to have that to work.

As you said, they want everything on the planet, so whatever.

I'm just rolling my eyes a bit because a common criticism of the first film was how silly unobtainium came across and he seemingly doubled down with whale brains. The captain literally says it's basically funding the whole operation, more or less mirroring the line from the first film.

SCheeseman posted:

There is nothing cheap about HFR in any technical or artistic sense, outside of it being commonly used in other productions that are cheap or poor quality. There is a connection being made in your head between cheap and HFR and I don't think this is unusual, it's just odd to me that you seem resistant to actually examining why and how that connection got made in the first place, which could provide context that potentially helps move past those preconceptions or at least understand them.

I will clarify my language to say what I mean is that it explicitly looks much faker than the non HFR sections, which are quite frequently stunning. "Cheap" isn't necessarily fair as you say, but I don't think that matters all that much.

I also don't really think there's anything that deep to your claims of brain association. The first time I noticed this specific type of look, I didn't have any other opinions on the source. I didn't start from the premise that soaps are bad; I just knew I didn't like how they looked. Now I'm seeing other things that look the same and it's a point of reference so we all know the specific effect we're discussing.

I don't really feel like dropping $30 to take my family to stare at it for 3 hours.

Happy Noodle Boy
Jul 3, 2002


https://twitter.com/hollywoodhandle/status/1606392633873637404?s=61&t=G3m8nutfW6kqlR5N5atkIw

Cameron you fool others have tried do not try to take on Sonic

AccountSupervisor
Aug 3, 2004

I am greatful for my loop pedal

Goth Odell Beckham posted:

I would imagine the unobtainium is still being harvested or mined or w/e by someone while this is all going on, especially if humanity has been building on the planet rapidly for a year as per the prologue

If you don’t experience anybody talking about offshore drilling for a full day it doesn’t mean it’s not still going on somewhere

Or horrible poo poo to irl whales for that matter :/

General Ardmore specifically says "we're not here to mine, this is about the survival of the human species on Pandora" so Im pretty sure theyve dropped unobtainium extraction completely for now, for whatever reasons(too much effort for a reward that isnt relevant to humanities needs or goals on Pandora)

As much as the whale brain goo has the "its expensive" angle too, it seems much easier to obtain and its much more about its anti-aging effects. Theres constant themes of
death and rebirth in Avatar, "all energy is borrowed and must be returned" etc. Camerons absolutely setting this series up to take a deeper crack at the idea of the rich and wealthy chasing immortality, fear of death and upsetting "balance" for selfish reasons.


TWOW has made double in two weeks what Sonic 2 made its entire theatrical run. I wouldn't be surprised to see them push it forward two weeks.

Babylon got absolutely decimated (for many reasons) this weekend but you can bet your rear end one of them is Avatar.

AccountSupervisor fucked around with this message at 20:49 on Dec 26, 2022

ghostwritingduck
Aug 26, 2004

"I hope you like waking up at 6 a.m. and having your favorite things destroyed. P.S. Forgive me because I'm cuter than that $50 wire I just ate."

Arglebargle III posted:

The correct answer to "why did they forget about unobtanium" or "oh this hippy plot is so trite I've seen it before and that's a crime" is always that Pandora isn't real and this is actually about Earth.

I think it’s funny that people think it’s weird that an entire planet has more than one valuable resource.

Arglebargle III
Feb 21, 2006

Atlas Hugged posted:

I'm not calling it a plot hole or saying the movie is worse for this decision. I'm saying it's pretty clear that the human motivation to Cameron isn't that meaningful: it's just a plot device to justify specific action sequences and set pieces. If you take it out, the bad guys have less reason to have an entire water operation, and the film has to have that to work.

I think you've got this completely backwards. Cameron is a pretty hardcore environmentalist, and he's been around the block long enough to know that extractive industries don't exist to satisfy a need. They create needs to satisfy the extractive industry.

You might think that the whaling industry was bad because people needed to harvest whales for oil. In fact, synthetic oils had replaced whale products for most things by the early 20th century. But the whaling industry didn't slow down; in fact it expanded dramatically. The whaling industry used the synthetic oil that had made their product obsolete to build faster ships to hunt faster species deeper into the southern ocean. They used their connections in government to get whale product purchase guarantees from major governments. (This is still the case in Wakayama Prefecture in Japan, where the government serves whale meat to children in school lunches to provide a market for their whaling industry.) The whaling industry embarked on its last and greatest frenzy of destruction decades after its products were obsolete.

The blue whale is the perfect example. It is too fast to hunt with 19th century ships, so the species was almost intact in the early 20th century. About 4/5 of the blue whales on Earth were killed in the 20th century by oil-fueled whaling ships, who couldn't sell the oil or baleen products we associate with whaling because they were already being replaced by synthetics. So what did they sell? About 70% of the blue whales on Earth were processed into margarine. The whalers got it declared a national security priority! British government margarine in both world wars was a whale product. Of course it's much easier and cheaper to make with vegetable oils but hey making sense isn't the priority, only profit.

When the Soviets got in on the whaling act they didn't even have a clear idea of what they were going to do with the whales. A lot of carcasses ended up dumped, because the quota was all that mattered.

So when you notice the senseless extraction, the lack of clear motivation, the nonsensical brutality of the human extraction operation, you're actually seeing the reality that Cameron is presenting correctly. The extractive machine really isn't serving a well-articulated need; it does not have a compelling rationale. It will go on running until it destroys everything. That's the reality of the situation on Earth in real life and on Pandora.

Cameron portraying an extractive system that runs on its own deranged logic and doesn't serve to fulfill any obvious human need is Cameron understanding and portraying the human culture correctly.

Arglebargle III fucked around with this message at 21:29 on Dec 26, 2022

SuperMechagodzilla
Jun 9, 2007

NEWT REBORN

SCheeseman posted:

There is nothing cheap about HFR in any technical or artistic sense, outside of it being commonly used in other productions that are cheap or poor quality. There is a connection being made in your head between cheap and HFR and I don't think this is unusual, it's just odd to me that you seem resistant to actually examining why and how that connection got made in the first place, which could provide context that potentially helps move past those preconceptions or at least understand them.

Personally I want film making to gently caress around and experiment more. The standards that have been settled, as practical as they have been, were borne from a mix arbitrary choices and technical compromises, not some divine influence that must be dogmatically stuck to. I've never been one for tradition, though.

When people say "cheap", what they mean is "tacky" - "tasteless".

It's not hugely complicated: we all (perhaps innately) understand that film is not, directly, vision. We understand that this is a 2D image.
The camera will have been focused on different things than what your eye is now focused on, it will move in ways that your eyes and head do not. 3D glasses do little or nothing to mitigate this, because they only introduce a secondary camera.

Besides this, you have basic issues like that the images on the screen are rarely or never "actual size". You can have a squirrel that's the size of a bus, and that'll mess with your head.

So, ironically, increased "immersiveness" is extremely discomfiting. It's a discomfort that the Manic remake mined to great effect, for example. For film to "work", there's a necessary level of abstraction. Grain, blur, etc.

SSJ_naruto_2003
Oct 12, 2012



SuperMechagodzilla posted:

For film to "work", there's a necessary level of abstraction. Grain, blur, etc.

Not everyone agrees

SCheeseman
Apr 23, 2003

HFR isn't 3D.

The bar of the general audience's tolerance of immersiveness isn't fixed and changes as technologies get introduced, video games in particular had an uphill battle. Stereoscopy has never fully caught on because it's fundamentally flawed and broken and requires very careful management in order to not give the audience headaches. I figure "3D Movies" might eventually work well once volumetric video capture/playback is more a thing as it fixes most of the problems that typically cause eye strain, but that has additional challenges associated with moving the camera around near-field objects creating discomfort stemming from simulation sickness factors. Also VR headsets are still too uncomfortable for long form media viewing at the moment.

I don't think film grain or motion blur are necessary to make a movie a movie, I get annoyed by excessive DNR but seemingly most people do not. Michael Mann often shoots at high shutter speeds, removing blur, and it's hard to conclude that the stuff he makes isn't cinematic either.

SCheeseman fucked around with this message at 21:47 on Dec 26, 2022

SCheeseman
Apr 23, 2003

The only thing a movie needs to be a movie is for it to be a visually oriented creative work consisting of recorded image data viewed in a linear fashion. People saying it should be film, 24hz, grainy blah blah blah, it's just dogma to me.

High Warlord Zog
Dec 12, 2012

Goth Odell Beckham posted:

I would imagine the unobtainium is still being harvested or mined or w/e by someone while this is all going on, especially if humanity has been building on the planet rapidly for a year as per the prologue

The first Pandora based human facility we see in the movie is a giant loving mine. You see the sky people torch huge swathes of forest to prepare the ground for it and others like it.

Tom Guycot
Oct 15, 2008

Chief of Governors


Theres a line early in where they talk about the na'vi and sully's attacks on 'the mines' as well as other targets, so they're clearly still mining, it just isn't the focus of this film about the ocean ecosystem.

teagone
Jun 10, 2003

That was pretty intense, huh?

AccountSupervisor posted:

TWOW has made double in two weeks what Sonic 2 made its entire theatrical run. I wouldn't be surprised to see them push it forward two weeks.

Babylon got absolutely decimated (for many reasons) this weekend but you can bet your rear end one of them is Avatar.

But like, no one remembers anything about or cares for Avatar remember? Lol.

[edit] Most would never admit it, but I always felt this take was the truth:

https://twitter.com/Jickle/status/1524583174197907456

Ratios and Tendency
Apr 23, 2010

:swoon: MURALI :swoon:


Atlas Hugged posted:

I'm not calling it a plot hole or saying the movie is worse for this decision. I'm saying it's pretty clear that the human motivation to Cameron isn't that meaningful: it's just a plot device to justify specific action sequences and set pieces. If you take it out, the bad guys have less reason to have an entire water operation, and the film has to have that to work.

Avatar 2 is primarily an anti-whaling movie...like, how can you be this dumb?

euphronius
Feb 18, 2009

The REAL Goobusters posted:

Avatar 2 just passed 900 million at the world wide box office

It probably made money then. Or will make it.

I guess we will never know how much Disney pays for the streaming rights

Vir
Dec 14, 2007

Does it tickle when your Body Thetans flap their wings, eh Beatrice?

teagone posted:

But like, no one remembers anything about or cares for Avatar remember? Lol.

[edit] Most would never admit it, but I always felt this take was the truth:

https://twitter.com/Jickle/status/1524583174197907456
I watched the first Avatar once, enjoyed it well enough, and then more or less forgot about it until I heard about the sequels. Sure, Avatar has a fan base, but most of the people turning up to see Avatar 2 now isn't "Avatar fans", I think. It's regular mass audiences who may or may not remember the first one. It does well with infrequent movie goers - as in not the audience who see every Marvel and DC film, and don't go to see every film like The Lighthouse, The Whale or The Menu etc. These people might have gone to see Parasite because they heard it won an Academy Award, but most likely they just took their kids to see Minions and Maverick.

Vir fucked around with this message at 23:10 on Dec 26, 2022

euphronius
Feb 18, 2009

I love how casually the Quaritch clones and Grace child were handled. Here is some stuff audience, deal with it

Vir
Dec 14, 2007

Does it tickle when your Body Thetans flap their wings, eh Beatrice?

Ratios and Tendency posted:

Avatar 2 is primarily an anti-whaling movie...like, how can you be this dumb?
I don't feel like this movie is targeting aboriginal whaling in Canada or the Faroe Islands for example - in those places the whale hunt is a communal affair, not an industrial one, and no part of the whale goes to waste. The meat, blubber and bone is used for food and materials. I think it's more analogous with the large scale industrial whaling industry in the Southern Ocean (bonus with the whaling captain sounding Australian), or even maybe even trophy hunting, or hunting rhino and elephants for aphrodisiacs.

Edit: It's Moby Dick, but Quaritch is Ahab, and Jake Sully is Moby Dick.

Vir fucked around with this message at 23:12 on Dec 26, 2022

stev
Jan 22, 2013

Please be excited.



I found it odd how late into the runtime the whaling message is a thing. You spend like half an hour with the whales before you even know that anyone's hunting them. They could have at least mentioned that their numbers were thinning because of poachers or something. It's not an issue until they're killing whales right next door to the village.

Vir
Dec 14, 2007

Does it tickle when your Body Thetans flap their wings, eh Beatrice?
I think it's pretty well done how they establish several of the turtle-whales as named characters before they're hunted. This is a James Cameron movie, not a movie made by Al Gore or Greta Thunberg - so it's more subtle in its approach.

Vir
Dec 14, 2007

Does it tickle when your Body Thetans flap their wings, eh Beatrice?
Avatar made 8 million more than expected domestically over the Christmas weekend, despite the winter storm.
Variety: Box Office: ‘Avatar 2’ Scores $90 Million Over Holiday Weekend, ‘Babylon’ Bombs at Christmas

quote:

Extreme weather conditions are pummeling a large portion of the U.S. with frigid temperatures, high winds and blankets of snow, contributing to lackluster turnout at the movies.
(...)
Even with unfavorable circumstances, “Avatar: The Way of Water” managed to bring in solid numbers, earning a better-than-expected $64 million over the traditional weekend and $90 million through Monday. Disney and 20th Century initially projected the sequel would make $56 million over the weekend and $82 million through the four-day holiday frame. However, the film enjoyed a more robust turnout on Christmas. With those ticket sales, a 52% dip from its debut, “The Way of Water’s” domestic tally stands at $287 million.

The first “Avatar” faced similarly severe weather conditions when it opened in December 2009, but that didn’t prevent the film from, over time, crushing records with $760 million in North America and $2.92 billion globally.

teagone
Jun 10, 2003

That was pretty intense, huh?

Vir posted:

Avatar made 8 million more than expected domestically over the Christmas weekend, despite the winter storm.
Variety: Box Office: ‘Avatar 2’ Scores $90 Million Over Holiday Weekend, ‘Babylon’ Bombs at Christmas



AccountSupervisor
Aug 3, 2004

I am greatful for my loop pedal

Vir posted:

I watched the first Avatar once, enjoyed it well enough, and then more or less forgot about it until I heard about the sequels. Sure, Avatar has a fan base, but most of the people turning up to see Avatar 2 now isn't "Avatar fans", I think. It's regular mass audiences who may or may not remember the first one. It does well with infrequent movie goers - as in not the audience who see every Marvel and DC film, and don't go to see every film like The Lighthouse, The Whale or The Menu etc. These people might have gone to see Parasite because they heard it won an Academy Award, but most likely they just took their kids to see Minions and Maverick.

This is pretty much it. Avatar has a pretty big global fan base, more so "fans of Avatar 1" than what we consider modern fandom(think shelves of products behind a youtuber) It is a movie also expertly designed to be easily delivered accross every possible market and culture. Its the easiest currently running big blockbuster IP to digest and a simple buy in.

Its got themes and story threads almost anybody on the planet can understand and identify with in some capacity. It wants you to be wowed without demanding and assuming you will be just by the nature of its expensive CGI so it actually puts in thoughtful effort to impress you.

It does everything a mass marketed film that needs to make billions does, but also happens to be made by a visionary technical genius with infinite clout and tight control over his product so it doesnt come out like some bland fast food meant to be eaten and forgotten about till your next craving.
You may not remember specifics of the meal, but youll remember the experience.

Its old school big franchise filmmaking with the wizardry of modern effects pushed to the extreme and that has and always will be Avatars winning formula. People really do not understand how incredibly rare this type of filmmaking is today, if not practically non-existent outside of Cameron.

AccountSupervisor fucked around with this message at 00:58 on Dec 27, 2022

SuperMechagodzilla
Jun 9, 2007

NEWT REBORN

SCheeseman posted:

The only thing a movie needs to be a movie is for it to be a visually oriented creative work consisting of recorded image data viewed in a linear fashion. People saying it should be film, 24hz, grainy blah blah blah, it's just dogma to me.

While the Tupac hologram can obviously be considered a film, the very things that make it unique make it distinctly acinematic.

MLSM
Apr 3, 2021

by Azathoth
Looks like avatar 2 wont make 2 billion to break even.

Owned.

SCheeseman
Apr 23, 2003

I've used cinematic as a descriptor in the past and on reflection I wonder if I should. What is it describing in the here and now? Cinematic? The cinema? Like the place that plays all those MCU movies?

The REAL Goobusters
Apr 25, 2008
Marvel mfs just can’t handle the fact that Avatar is and always has been more popular because it’s just good. You don’t need to flood the market with multiple movies a year and have fan fiction and people on Reddit and twitter raving for a movie to be popular with general audiences.

MLSM
Apr 3, 2021

by Azathoth

SCheeseman posted:

I've used cinematic as a descriptor in the past and on reflection I wonder if I should. What is it describing in the here and now? Cinematic? The cinema? Like the place that plays all those MCU movies?

The Avatar movies definitely fit the description of “theme park” films.

Haptical Sales Slut
Mar 15, 2010

Age 18 to 49

MLSM posted:

The Avatar movies definitely fit the description of “theme park” films.

This was my takeaway. But not in a negative light, it seemed like some insane trickery you’d get a glimpse of in a very expensive modern Disneyland experience, except it was the entire movie.

The REAL Goobusters
Apr 25, 2008

MLSM posted:

The Avatar movies definitely fit the description of “theme park” films.

I would use this an avengers movie personally. No substance or story just a bunch of stuff happening

Vir
Dec 14, 2007

Does it tickle when your Body Thetans flap their wings, eh Beatrice?
Even a good theme park ride needs a sort of a story. And Flight of Passage and Pandora in the Disney parks seems to be a popular with visitors.

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Atlas Hugged
Mar 12, 2007


Put your arms around me,
fiddly digits, itchy britches
I love you all

Ratios and Tendency posted:

Avatar 2 is primarily an anti-whaling movie...like, how can you be this dumb?

I never said it wasn't. I just think more than one thing can be true at the same time. It's using whaling as a metaphor for the messages that imperialism is bad, humanity is cruel, and that we won't solve our problems through pacifism. At the same time, being about whaling let's him make another wild aquatic adventure, which is something he seems to really enjoy doing.

Cameron wants to have cool as poo poo visual set pieces while pushing the technical limits of film making and he's going to find plots in service of doing that when he can. It took him a decade to make this movie specifically because he didn't feel the technology was ready, but I guarantee you if he didn't think that technology was ever coming together, he would have scrapped it and gone in a different direction with a different environmental/anti-imperialist message.

This is a movie after all and for Cameron, I think it obvious that the spectacle is the point. You can't do the kind of visual storytelling he wants to do in another medium. It's not like this was even the first script for Avatar 2. He continually reworked it alongside the development of the technology to make sure how he told the story would exactly match the limits of what they were capable of doing. He made conscious decisions in his depiction of the whaling process and what tools the humans needed to use because that led to him being able to do other cool moments in the action, repurposing that fictional technology in the hunt against the Na'vi and in the scenes with Sully's family specifically. Remember, none of this is real. He and his team are making it up as necessary.

Arglebargle III posted:

I think you've got this completely backwards. Cameron is a pretty hardcore environmentalist, and he's been around the block long enough to know that extractive industries don't exist to satisfy a need. They create needs to satisfy the extractive industry.

You might think that the whaling industry was bad because people needed to harvest whales for oil. In fact, synthetic oils had replaced whale products for most things by the early 20th century. But the whaling industry didn't slow down; in fact it expanded dramatically. The whaling industry used the synthetic oil that had made their product obsolete to build faster ships to hunt faster species deeper into the southern ocean. They used their connections in government to get whale product purchase guarantees from major governments. (This is still the case in Wakayama Prefecture in Japan, where the government serves whale meat to children in school lunches to provide a market for their whaling industry.) The whaling industry embarked on its last and greatest frenzy of destruction decades after its products were obsolete.

The blue whale is the perfect example. It is too fast to hunt with 19th century ships, so the species was almost intact in the early 20th century. About 4/5 of the blue whales on Earth were killed in the 20th century by oil-fueled whaling ships, who couldn't sell the oil or baleen products we associate with whaling because they were already being replaced by synthetics. So what did they sell? About 70% of the blue whales on Earth were processed into margarine. The whalers got it declared a national security priority! British government margarine in both world wars was a whale product. Of course it's much easier and cheaper to make with vegetable oils but hey making sense isn't the priority, only profit.

When the Soviets got in on the whaling act they didn't even have a clear idea of what they were going to do with the whales. A lot of carcasses ended up dumped, because the quota was all that mattered.

So when you notice the senseless extraction, the lack of clear motivation, the nonsensical brutality of the human extraction operation, you're actually seeing the reality that Cameron is presenting correctly. The extractive machine really isn't serving a well-articulated need; it does not have a compelling rationale. It will go on running until it destroys everything. That's the reality of the situation on Earth in real life and on Pandora.

Cameron portraying an extractive system that runs on its own deranged logic and doesn't serve to fulfill any obvious human need is Cameron understanding and portraying the human culture correctly.

Like I said above, I think this can all be true while at the same time, it's convenient for Cameron in service of the special effects roller coaster he can send people on. If Cameron just wanted to make an anti-whaling movie, he'd have made a documentary. He also wants to entertain people, and I don't think there's anything wrong with that.

The only real flaw in the analysis I think is that the movie does go out of its way to establish that while necessarily cruel because of the particulars Cameron invented in his fake whale anatomy (he could have chosen to make them easier to kill, but that would have taken away from the awesome whale revenge at the end for instance), it's not really fair to compare a literal fountain of youth with margarin. Whaling in the real world is obviously a monstrous venture that is perpetuated largely by the people who most benefit financially from it continuing to exist, but Cameron is more going after the greed of humans wanting to live forever than wanting audiences to walk away thinking, "Wow, whaling is really bad."

Most of the world already agrees that whaling is really bad and it's not an uphill battle for Cameron to establish that. As an example, it makes international news whenever Japan insists on doing it, despite the Japanese themselves outside of the whalers not really being all that interested in whale meat or whale products. Whaling hasn't gone away entirely, but it is a blip compared to what it used to be and is already illegal in most of the world. He's kind of preaching to the choir on this one, whereas the monstrous nature of the displacement of indigenous peoples and wildlife and the climate catastrophe caused by the destruction of the Amazon is still something that a lot of people don't want to acknowledge and it might kill us all before we reach a consensus on what to do about it.

The characters in the movie, including the Na'vi, also literally say that they were mostly fine with the whaling going on up until it affected the whales that they knew personally. Jermaine Clement's character has to grapple with the moral quandary of the actual good (living forever and infinite money for other research) that comes out of harvesting whale brains with his acknowledgment that murdering indigenous peoples to benefit Earth (a pretty obvious metaphor regardless of if those peoples are whales or Na'vi, or anyone else) is probably most definitely evil. His character doesn't really feel he has a choice and his only way to handle it is through alcoholism. He'll switch sides for the third movie like the other scientists caught in between genuinely wanting to help humanity and also not wanting to be a monster about it in the name of unfettered capitalism.

Put another way, I think the movie's messaging would be a hell of a lot different if the exchange about the cannister being worth $80 million because it just completely stops human aging was changed to something like:

"This right here is worth about $80 million back home."

"But why? What does it do?"

"Does it matter? People will pay for it."

But no, the whale goo literally does the one thing that actual cosmetics in our world can never do. I think Cameron's point with all of this is the same as with unobtanium. It doesn't really matter what the specific resource is: if it does what it says on the tin, far more people than you would expect will be willing to throw away any notion of morality in order to get in on it.

This movie isn't about whaling so much as it uses whaling to get across Cameron's thesis that humanity as it is right now is fundamentally evil and needs salvation, and the Christ imagery isn't there by accident (death and rebirth, a child's virgin birth, a new star in the sky, a special child with an adopted father directly communing with god the mother, etc).

For the record, and especially now that I've written a million words about it, I do not hate this movie at all and I do not regret seeing it. There are elements I dislike, such as the length and the HFR and having to wear glasses for what I feel is still little more than a novelty (though often a gorgeous novelty), but it's incredibly entertaining and has some fantastic moments that only land the way they do because of the care he's spent in setting everything up. I'm just more likely to seek out a 2D version in theaters in the future and if that's not possible to wait until its streaming so I can enjoy it in chunks on my couch without having to be in a room with other people.

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