http://www.rifters.com/crawl/?p=959
One could go on trying to deconstruct the underlying ideology of the film, etc.,...and the new age gaia spirituality was daft, but..... Ohhhh, the eye candy!
"Someone put a lot of thought into Pandora’s wildlife; it was beautiful to behold, it was amazingly diverse, it even seemed (for the most part) phylogenetically consistent. Across a wide range of species, everything from nostril placement to jaw structure was nicely suggestive of common ancestry. /Except for the Na’vi/, which are ridiculously anthropomorphic: tetrapod bipeds where everything else on the planet seems to have six limbs; binocular vision on a world where four eyes is the vertebrate norm. Evidently Cameron felt that his hero could not plausibly fall in love with a four-eyed banana-slug, but that a blue-skinned cat-woman just might pass muster. (I agree that the former premise would result in a much more challenging film, conceptually— but then, I /like/ conceptually challenging films.) And while I have no problem in principle with the concept of planetary-ecosystem-as-integrated-network, did anybody give any thought at all as to the ramifications of hanging extra USB-equipped spinal cords off the heads of every piece of megafauna on the planet? Pandora is rife with obvious predator-prey interactions; how would those even /evolve/ in a world where prey could forge a direct neural interface with their predators, force them to feel the pain of being consumed? Wouldn’t that pretty much /have/ to result in completely different trophodynamic networks than the Wild-Kingdom stuff that we saw in the film? [...] It’s been years now since special effects were enough to entice me into a theatre. Ever since the ascension of CGI, it’s been possible to render pretty much anything a writer can imagine. The highest production values have been devalued by the relentless onslaught of Moore’s Law. I didn’t care how eye-popping something looked; there had to be more to lure me in. No modern movie can succeed solely on the strength of its special effects. But then I saw Avatar, and in terms of sheer technical virtuosity it just blew me away. Every frame is gorgeous. Every two minutes of footage looks as though it must have cost as much as any other whole movie to make. Every perfectly-rendered dust mote and shaft of filtered sunlight forces me to smile and widen my eyes despite my most jaded intentions. I have a lot of problems with Avatar as a story. As a movie, though — as an experience — it has made me change my own rules, at least for now. Avatar is a movie that succeeds on the strength of its effects."
Matt wrote:
> Others? Really? Most people I've talked to said "the CGI and 3D were
> rad and the story is well....meh..." I concurred after my first
> viewing.
>
> We could pick the movie apart all day. I wonder how many hours were
> spent tweaking the look of the aliens so that the female seemed
> hot for male viewers, yet still alien?
>
> But 3D floating embers and insects, oh my!
>
> *insert bong gurgle here*
>
>
> Matt
>
>