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The real problem with the movie is that the plot is so removed from reality as far as human motivations are concerned. All the interest is in the background. Real life is a very mixed bag. The evil corporation in the movie was just out to make money by destroying a beautiful integrated environment. There was no real conflict of motives. Just suppose the valuable substance was direly needed to save millions of lives back on Earth. Just suppose the aliens had very deep traditions of brutality amongst themselves and the anthropologists were in sympathy with a sector of the aliens who were so badly treated by their own traditions. As with many Arab cultures today that mistreat their women but there are wonderful traditions amongst the Muslims of kindness and consideration. Life is interesting because it is not clear cut and decisions are not easy. The so called advanced West is doing brutal callous things to the Arabs and the Arabs are being brutal and callous right back. How the hell do you make sense of all this? That's what makes life interesting.

math was never my strong point, it must have been 94/95 which puts me at 30

This is now one of my favorite movies, I'm a big Sci-Fi fan too. The plot was fairly simple but serveral valuable messages can be taken from it. The visuals were out of this world. Even when I left the theatre I felt like I was still on Pandora. Sand, did you see it in IMAX? It wasn't overdone in 3d, but just right.

The script was missing dimensions of complexity but the SFX weren't deplete in dimensions of scenery. So it was basically 'good against bad' in an awe-inspiring setting. I suppose that's good for a bit of escapism at least. And although it's a disappointing speculation but perhaps it was marketed at a majority who don't mind simplicity in a story line.

It's very generous to describe the distances of kindness and brutality in life as interesting I think. It would be interesting in a movie, but I'd much prefer the monotony of simple kindness in real life. And the way I make sense of it is to suppose there are differing degrees of delusion affecting upon each of our circumstances. The only way I find it bearable is to assume there is hope for vast improvement. I am grateful to not consider delusion as permanent.

I found the movie to be entertaining, that is why I went & was not disappointed. The plot had a good flow to it. It was in a fantasy setting, so I expected things to be a bit out there.

Did I find anything about it give me the shock & awe that I had when I saw Star Wars? Nope.

The graphics were cool, 3D has gotten much better over the years.. still has a ways to go, but it's stepping forward. Graphics were still a bit cartoony is some cases, yet I can't recall better computer graphics in any other movie.

There were very little surprises, only a few scenes made me edge forward in suspense.

I enjoy fantasy concepts that allow me to escape away from this reality. The movie was overall effective at doing that for me for a few hours.

Plot: C
Graphics: A-
Half naked blue aliens babes with tails: A+

Overall personal experience: B

No imax in Helsinki but I saw it in 3D. I liked "2001" much better as SF. Better sense of of real science fiction and a greater sense of wry humor.

What is generally misunderstood about science fiction in general is that good science fiction is the literary equivalent of speculative science and mathematics. Theater in general has ancient roots in morality plays with good and evil being invested in the total character of individuals and allowed to illustrate moral principle of a culture to prove that those who violate those principles will inevitably be punished. When science fiction first appeared in "Frankenstein" and "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" this morality was a strong element and the battle of good and evil was exaggerated in the concept the only God had the right to create life (in Frankenstein) and one must not play games with character perfection (in Jekyll and Hyde).

The emergence of H.G.Well's explorations brought out true science fiction where he imagined the consequences of genuinely new events. In "The Invisible Man" he explores the events of a man becoming invisible and the powers it bestowed and the awful reaction of social fears to the event. It was not a conflict of absolute good or evil but how normal emotions were exaggerated by amazing events. In "The Time Machine" he explored how current social forces would move evolution and change the nature of humanity. In "The War of the Worlds" he explores the clash of two very different evolutionary processes.

In the early part of the twentieth century into mid-century science fiction was considered trash literature and was published in pulp magazines. Much of it was morality plays in space known as space opera where space ships replaced horses or fast cars and ray guns replaced pistols and machine guns and the magazine lurid covers showed clawed and toothed monsters grasping for half naked beautiful women defended by guys in space suits. That's where Star Wars and Star Trek came from and it's not real science fiction, but it can be fun.

But editor John Campbell of Astounding Science Fiction (later to morph into Analog) fostered imaginative writers and real scientists who knew the actual strange properties of new science, guys like Robert Heinlein, A.E. Van Vogt, Arthur Clarke, Robert Forward, William Tenn, Isaac Asimov, Lester Del Ray, L.Sprague de Camp, Harry Harrison, P.Schuyler Miller, Theodore Sturgeon, Clifford Simak, Alfred Bester, Hal Clement, Lewis Padget (Henry Kuttner), Jack Williamson and many many others. Their protagonists fought, not evil but the rigid laws of science and the monsters and wonders that emerged from that.

Standard literature, for many years, couldn't make heads or tails out of that and relegated it to the junk pile but it produced very thoughtful writers of real solid scientific background like Ursula LeGuin who wrote "The Left Hand of Darkness" and Greg Bear who wrote "Blood Music" and the astronomer Fred Hoyle who wrote some marvelous stuff.

These days SF is very much a major field with the enhancement of Hollywood's special effects but real, very good science fiction, is still more the exception than the rule.

Ursula LeGuin is a very old lady now and won't be with us much longer. The Masters; the likes of Heinlein (before he went soft in the head) and Theodor Sturgeon belong to the ages. We have a few good SF writers like Pournelle, but the best days of SF are in the past (alas!). You make a good point. Changing the locus of SF from the page to the screen was a bad idea.

ruveyn

Talking about the main character - I've learned that I'm absolutely terrible, I mean *abysmal* at accurately identifying actors (unless they're that distinct in appearance and/or stature to where its obvious). Anytime I'm watching a movie I'll see an actor that looks familiar, think of someone who looks 90% like them, be like "Oh, is that ____" at which my friends just roll their eyes and say "No, its ______".

With this one I would have sworn that the main character was the same actor as the guy who played lead in Fast and Furious - Tokyo Drift, then again I think my friends were even of that impression as well. I checked that one out on IMDB - no cigar.

I think Avatar firmly fall under science fantasy though (you may be in full agreement on that - not sure). Science Fiction, at least the definition I got in my Sci-Fi class back in highschool, was it took either political ideas or currently virgining scientific technologies and was meant to outline what the world would be like or what kinds of problems the world would run into if these things came to full fruition or went to one extrema or another. Computers overloading because they fell in love with women through the rantings of their operators, clashes between what a perfect human being could be as an android and how it would fall out due to human depravity (ie. A.I.), children mutated to adapt by radioactive waste, societies of some sort of totalitarian government driven by an ideal (ie. 1984, Equilibrium, Metropolis, etc.), or worlds where man's automatic assembly started depleating and destroying the earth to where man lost any power to shut it off - the plot and moral/philosophical experiments of the authors overpower the personalities of the characters and, in a way, the meaning of science fiction seems less like like 'fiction angled toward science' and more like 'fiction used as a form of hypothetical science' - not excluding scientific progress as an antagonist but not necessarily needing it either.

What'll really be sexy, IMO, is when they're able to take this sort of escapist plane and really chase the spiritual - make a clean break with the fantasy base and make the movie something either completely alien and beyond anything we'd comprehend or, alternately, something either as grimey at its emotional core as say Training Day or Midnight Express (pretty much a 2 1/2 hour Tool video) or even taking something like a romantic comedy and putting it in about the most psychedelic framework that's ever been done - on an alien world with an alien race, alien technology and climate, and no trace of human anything.

I tend to get seduced a lot by transcendentalism, exploring things that go beyond the realm of human or things that go so deep into the underworld that they seem almost otherworldly or reverent to the point of being almost of some abstract high religious impulse. See my avatar? They need to start making movies the way I like my music .

The only film that came anywhere close to that presentation of a true and incomprehensible alien confronting humanity was in 2001 where the alien never actually made an appearance but could create instant bizarre environments that made the familiar frightening and totally strange. When the hero was transported across immense light year distances after entering the transport nexus floating near the outer Solar planets the film attempted to show odd planets and environments passing by with a psychedelic light show that few in the audience understood. And when the hero arrived at te destination it was not shown as a weird ecology but as a strange but rather normal room that the aliens had reconstructed to give the hero a place to exist before being manipulated and sent back to Earth as an embryo to mature into a different human being. This utterly jarring experience was so incomprehensible to most people that the film made no sense at all to the majority. But it was real true science fiction.
Everybody, when confronting the the truly alien, can only see it in terms of what they know and when it makes no sense in those terms it is merely rejected as nonsense.

My own suspicion is that the universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.
John B. S. Haldane

I very much appreciate your ideas about going beyond our comprehension through abstraction. The task is to still convey meaning so that it doesn't become a meaningless trip. The abstract filmmaker would succeed at this if they can leave 'the door of their mind' open for the rest of us. They need to hold that bridge steadily that can take the audience from our usual reality into this entirely other abstract world. The bridge, or link necessarily had to be there when the writer first conceived of the idea - so IMO it should be possible to transport others along it as well. They sometimes set the time, place and circumstances through voiceover or words on the screen - but I think there are more interesting ways that they could go about this.

I liked your comparison to music and movies in this respect. I used to consider music to have the most scope in terms of conveying meaning. As brilliant as performances in other mediums can be - there's something limiting about the image of a human being (or an animal) in them. I'm not sure what it is about abstractions that I think have the ability to connect with us at a deeper and more forceful way. Perhaps it's the profound potential of symbols, or maybe it's because it forces us to think.

That said, I'm basically inspired by anything that gives me a sense of higher purpose. And thankfully there's quite a bit that seems to do that for me. Even if it's simply the beautiful things of this life - it inspires me with the idea that beauty like that could exist forever. Humour does the same. Even some of the more repulsive things of this life can inspire an awesome sort of passion in me. I can usually invent meaning in anything lol! - but it's better to receive the intended meaning.

By the way I don't know what your avatar means - but I'm gathering that it means something to you.

NB. My earlier post makes it sound like I've seen the film. I was just surmising stuff based on what Sand was saying.

haha! It sounds like you may have a degree of prosopagnosia, or face blindness like me! Now that could truly be considered as a science fiction experience! lol It really gives me a sense of living in an alien world far removed from reality when I eagerly approach a stranger because I think I know them due to certain physical resemblances. I've never encountered anyone who seems to appreciate it when I do this to them. But I forgive their unwelcoming response because I react with the same bewilderment when people I supposedly know approach me in the same way. When they say they haven't seen me in ages I really have to restrain myself from telling them that I've never seen them before in my life. (Although sometimes there's no other way around it.) The experience is truly bizarre - especially when they even know my name. And then there's the question of how familiar I'm supposed to be with them once it's established that we apparently know each other! lol

Thankfully I tend to recognise people if I've seen them enough times.

No doubt Avatar is a feat in facial CG, with the director forcing a new level depth in the background and this movie is the Birthplace of an new kind of camera. A motion capture Real time Camera. (Filming the actor with her white markers on, fills the cameras viewing screen with the CG actor in her CG environment in Real time. Technology is still advancing...

I prefer the Black and White era in films. example, Both Dr Jehkel & Mr Hyde movies were great. But in the world of Fantasy The Most recent Inglorious Bastard Movie was probably the most AWESOME REVENGE FANTASY I have ever seen.
No, its the best movie I have ever seen. And I had given up on Its Directors pointless violence by 2005.

What an exceptional cause and effect alternative to what I have Printed in my mind... The 39to45 black and white documentaries that were shown to us in high school. How completely outrageous humans can be.

Some times Fantasy is better than the Truth. I wish the face of Hitler was obliterated by that guy as it was...in my new fantastic memory of 45, this is now my alternate mental image to the cowardly way he escaped human judgement, that we know.

An ultimate Triumph.

I just re-read my previous two posts on this thread and realised that I may as well have typed 'bluurgh!' for the amount of sense they make. So I'll attempt to clarify and I apologise if this turns out to be yet another w*k.

The ultimate art-form, I think - will go beyond my comprehension yet still manage to take me there also. Thus expanding my own awareness of what's possible.

And as for the SF of face blindness (which unfortunately is not fictional!) - [insert music from The Twilight Zone for eery effect] - it's having people I recognise, deny that I know them. And people I don't recognise, insist that I DO know them. This is due to my over and under-recognising of people. (But sometimes I'm spot-on as well!) It's like some sort of parallel universe that's not exactly parallel. So then, perhaps it's inspiration for SF movie?

EDIT: And bigblock, I agree that fantasy can be better than the truth. Even if they both involve destruction, one can still emerge from the fantasy relatively unscathed.