When Avatar first came out, a friend of mine described it as “Pocahontas with a tech demo” and I’ve had a hard time enjoying it since. The story is really similar.
The only good thing about this Avatar was a decent videogame tie-in.
It’s pretty clear what’s going on here - they deliberately made the blandest, most derivative story they could, so you can turn off your brain. I guess that might work for porn films and to some degree for normal movies too, but I can’t get behind using blandness so excessively.
The CGI ain’t saving that. (I don’t even like those aliens personally.) I find that this thing and the sequel being the most grossing films of all time, to be an insult to filmmaking and especially storytelling.
Seems like alot of people agree with your take. Despite its flaws, viewers found it and the sequel entertaining. I can’t see it working as a novel though.
I disliked Avatar in theaters, but chalked it up to wearing glasses and seeing it in 3D. I figured with the colors desaturated and the uncomfortable double glasses set up that I just made a poor choice of format.
About 4 years ago I decided to rewatch Avatar at home without the 3D gimmick.
It was worse. Everyone acts in ways that seem to serve the plot not their motivations. The heroes were all devoid of personality and a rigid unsmiling caricature of duty and honor that there was nothing likeable about them. Jake Sully has no personality other than being mystified by the world. The tall smurfs just stare longingly, tell Jake he’s dumb and sigh about the importance of the Earth.
The villains were so over the top on their moustache twirling I liked their bravado so much more than the heroes. After an hour of Smurfs telling us trees are very important in a condescending way, I wasn’t against blowing up a tree.
The battle at the end made no sense. Why the space faring race didn’t just drop a some rocks on the site is baffling to me. Why didn’t they use their range and technology advantage? They just ran as close as possible to people with spears.
I think it’s just a little too heavy handed for me, and feels like many aspects of the plot weren’t thought out.
Jake Sully has no personality other than being mystified by the world.
Agree, and his purpose is to introduce us to the alien world. Him becoming a leader is one aspect that didnt sit right with me. He didn’t earn enough goodwill to do that. Its just trust the superior humanoid, because he did something my great grandfather did.
"The spiders belong to the Roddenberryus genus … "
I admire the naming commitment. I’m not scared of spiders, but I do have moments. Like the first time I saw a huge golden orb-weaver in my yard. I contacted college entomology departments, certain that spider was a bizarre mutation, likely due to human irresponsibility. I thought I was living a Saturday afternoon creature feature. An entomologist was kind enough to respond, and informed me that the spider was common and not a threat to humans.
"But the system is broken. Audiences are dumber. Normal people don’t go through reviews like they used to. Rotten Tomatoes is something the studios can game. So they do.”
Basically Disney is keeping a lot of the same creatives behind the original Daredevil, but intend to use season 1 pay rates because they tacked, ‘Born Again’ on to the title.
Pretty gross penny pinching from one of the wealthiest media corporations in the world.
Yeah, look at any of the Disney channel series, they all change the name slightly to reset the season and avoid union required pay increases. One example: The Suite Life… which was split into 2-3 season series.
It is a complete reboot though isn’t it? The original show on Netflix isn’t part of the canon of this one? If so then I don’t really get their complaint.
A tonne of the same cast are returning. Bernthal is still the Punisher, D’Onofrio is still Kingpin… no, this is a calculated decision to pay the workers less.
Same actors != not a reboot. Iirc they’re going to have gal gadot as Wonder Woman again but are rebooting her character so the 2 previous movies are not canon, didn’t happen.
If they’re making a new series that has literally nothing to do with the previous one, zero connection to anything that happened in it, how is it not a reboot? Should they use different actors just to justify it being a reboot?
I am fully in agreement with you, although I can see why you and others didn’t take that from my initial comment. The calculated decision I referred to was Disney’s cynical claim that this is a reboot. They’re shafting workers, we can all see it.
Even if they wipe the continuity, which is still very unclear, is it really fair to call it a “complete reboot” when they’re using the same cast for the most prominent roles?
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