Generation X was still pretty young when Star Wars was released. You got your generations wrong i think.

I hate this Cameron bashing so much. Show me a 20 minute action sequence in ANY movie in the last 20 years (arguably ever) that is as perfectly timed and minutely detailed as the mental hospital scene in T2. You can't.

Infact i have been thinking of how Kubrick and Cameron have some things in common. 1 - the cold machine like direction in their films. 2 - Perfect timing in terms of directing and editing. Cameron himself said it was 2001 ASO that inspired him most. Look at the Abyss for clear evidence of this influence.

Kids - No matter how hard Cameron tries i am positive that Spielberg out cheeses Camerons films every time. The kids, Newt and Conner, are mature and clearly more intelligent than any other science fiction kids out there. They are forced to be grown ups in these films.

Did you just compare Kubrick and Cameron?

You better run for your life before rocketpig gets back

Yea, i don't know why i said that publicly, i know im going to get beatings. Its just something ive been thinking about lately after rewatching Camerons entire filmography.

Like what i mentioned above with the Abyss, its not that much of a stretch. Just because one is a director of "popular entertainment" and the other is a director of "art" films does not mean they have no similarities.

 lol Unreal 5 engine. that'll be the day eh?

really though i wanna go see this. but outta' funds atm, guess well'll wait.

I think this movie was really about the world and the characters in it. The story was really coming second to that.

Saw it in 3D.

Fantastic movie.

*facepalm* if you don't have the cinematic depth to understand the difference between broad brush, easy strokes as Cameron uses in Avatar vs the excellence of narrative and depth in films like The Hurt Locker and Moon, to name a few this year.  Opinions are fine, we can all have them, but cinema has defined standards and levels as well, and these can be used to measure true excellence, and Avatar falls sure of the high end of excellence.

Also, there are clearly plenty of ways to be original, I see many movies do this every year, not to mention novels and theatre productions.

Avatar was well presented and solid, and in case you didn't notive I wasn't saying it was terrible, but every beat was telegraphed and obvious.  We need someone to get them out of lockup?  Fine, we'll have one sympathetic pilot, we won't explain why she alone has doubts while everyone else is a warmongering jarhead, we'll just have her do what we need with the barest reason to do so when in fact her actions have little basis in her character at that point.

The problem with Avatar is that it was hugely unoriginal in narrative and very basic in motivation - for the most part its characters are caricatures, and if it wasn't for the fact the cast delivers very good performances the weakness of their dialogue would be all the more apparent.

I do appreciate that basic motivations and characters were there at all, look at the awful horror of Transformers 2 to see the real bottom of the barrel, but Cameron has shown before he can juggle broad strokes with detailed characters better than he did with Avatar, and that's why it's dissapointing he didn't push things a little further.  He's got aliens, except they never really act alien, more like a mix of Native American Indians with a few other elements added from other tribal examples.  He's got an interesting character in Jake, but he doesn't really explore him much.

Now if you thought this was told wonderfully fine, but I can tell you that it wasn't as original as it could have been, nor as well written.  Cameron seems to genuinely have a talent for broad narrative and basic characterisation, but he falls short of true excellence in the details.  I just wish he'd give in and hire a great scriptwriter to take his final draft and give it a little character polish.  With Cameron's excellent direction I think we'd then get something trully worthy of this otherwise excellent creation of another world.

Pocahontas in Space? I thought everybody had already agreed that this was Ferngully (The Last Rainforest) in Space

Don't feel bad.  I'm a Kubrick and cinema nut, but actually while Kubrick is clearly superior artistically, technically they share a lot in common.  Kubrick contacted Cameron to quiz him on CGI and effects with regard to A.I. and I believe was appreciative of Cameron's undoubted technical skills regarding cinema and what he'd done in The Abyss and Terminator 2.

The difference I see is in where they focus their  drive for perfectionism and the balance of Art vs Entertainment.  Kubrick while American showed a very European sensibility to that mix, and was really interested in having a higher balance of Art vs Entertainment, although I'd argue he was very savy on entertainment too, always judging his films cost and approach to make sure he would secure a decent profit every time.  In short, Kubrick wanted everything to be as near to perfect as he could get it, the script, the performance, the set, the lighting and of course the complete edited assembly of the film.

Cameron, like Spielberg and certain other US directors, pitches towards entertainment first in many cases and is more willing to settle for a 'good enough' for script, performance and story than say a Kubrick.  Cameron himself has stated this quite openly, and has remarked that he 'makes movies rather than films', calling Titanic his 'accidental film'.

Clearly the guy knows he's targeting entertaining 'movies' with broad brush themes vs the more artistic notion of a 'film'.   As an aside, I sometimes feel the 'movie' vs 'film' classification is the cinematic equivilent of the 'casual' vs 'hardcore' classification in videogames, but I digress.

Both Kubrick and Cameron (and Speilberg probably deserves more recognition in this area) are (or were in Kubrick's case) very focused on the technology of filmaking, and achieving exactly the image they wanted on the screen.

Funnily enough, despite feeling Avatar was a 7/10 movie - I'm now seeing it as more of a 8.5/10, after having seen it again (more by accident than design TBH).

I'd say it's a 7/10 story, but a 10/10 cinematic experience, and the second time around I really got a better feel for just how far he'd pushed the CGI/3D technologies - so balancing it out I've decided it's an 8.5 overall and definately an unmissible experience of you really want to see just what 3D and CGI can offer.

Hey Reasonable, do you think Avatar would be worth the IMAX treatment?

I don't think I've ever seen a movie in IMAX, I'm not sure how that works considering that the screen is bigger than your field of vision.