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Penny Arcade - Comic - Avatar I Guess idk
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Penny Arcade - Comic - Avatar I Guess idk
Videogaming-related online strip by Mike Krahulik and Jerry Holkins. Includes news and commentary.
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-Tycho Brahe
https://scryfall.com/card/2ed/200/grizzly-bears
As much as I loved the movie Gravity, I feel most of its success was because it was in 3D. Watching it on a normal TV at home? That seems boring. But in the theater it was visceral.
But can that be okay and not have to be a way to damn a movie? I work in VR now, and that's something where the medium is the message as well. You take something that's awesome in VR and put it on a flat screen and it will probably be fairly tedious. Likewise, it would be a bit silly to take an early movie and say, "Well, it's just popular because it's a moving picture. If it were a play, it would be boring."
Perhaps it's just people frustration with the studios forcing 3D into places where it didn't actually add value, other than increased revenue. But I think the backlash against 3D has overshot a bit. And no, Avatar didn't have an amazing plot or dialogue. I compare it to movies like The Wizard of Oz, Snow White, or Tin Toy. All of those made effective use of their medium/technology to elevate them into something more than the sum of their parts.
It was, on the other hand, a movie that people went to see, often multiple times (twice for me), and just really felt entertained. And I think that's okay.
Story matters. It's critical to the long-term importance of a film. Sure, Avatar was successful, but just because it raked in a lot of dough doesn't make it artistically remarkable. At best, you could congratulate the art director for the CGI team.
More importantly in this context, how many people were interested in an Avatar video game before? How much of Avatar's core demographic actually overlaps with people who play this type of game, and will the game be of sufficient quality in any field to satisfy either, or even one of them?
My experience with (the movie) Avatar was this. About the halfway point, they stopped showing new environments. Then the movie became incredibly dull. I guess it was already a really dull movie, but it looked cool. Once at the MoPop in Seattle, they had an exhibit on Avatar. Costumes, props, filming techniques. Yes, the all-digital movie had physical props and costumes. All of that was more fun than watching the film. The virtual camera rig James Cameron used was really neat. It was a setup like a periscope he used to walk around in the digital space and determine where he wanted to "shoot" from after the actors has recorded their motion performances.
A video game for the bad Avatar could be fun. There have been fun games made from bad properties before. I don't know if it's easier or hard to make a good game from a boring source than a good source. I mean, there isn't anything people care about in bad Avatar to be mad about if you turned into a roguelite-dating-kart racer is there? Spoiler: I'd play the hell out of that game. On the other hand, if they "wreck" the good Avatar, I think a lot more invested nerds would lose it.
While I do see a lot of people equating Avatar to 3d cinema in general I think the real point that Tycho and MarcinMN are making is that there isn't any organic love for that universe, its alright for what it is, but Cameron and the Studios involved are so dead-set on making it as though there is significant demand for it and there just isn't as far I can tell. for the most part I think people just want to let it go, let it be what it is and stop trying to force it, maybe make some new IP that is a bit less problematic and take another crack at it with something new.
This seems like taking personal opinions and assuming they must be the opinions of everyone. A bit of internet groupthink, basically. People went to see it (multiple times) in droves. So it's explained away as "oh, well, they just went to see it because it looked really cool." Okay, that's a weird way to say some people didn't "organically" love something, even though they said they loved it. Not everything is Star Wars/Lord of the Rings/Aliens/Terminator, with huge rabid fanbases. And even with those, the amount of perceived "organic love" doesn't mean you're going to get any good follow-up from it. I mean, just looking at those, you have the SW prequels (and to some people, the sequels), the spread-too-thin Hobbit, the numerous Alien and Terminator sequels that were never anywhere in the league as the second ones, etc.
It just all seems to be the old "overrated" argument all over again. People gripe about something being overrated, and say why people shouldn't like the thing they do. And come up with all sorts of reasons why "nobody likes it", even though, again, they're arguing about something that was extremely popular. So it's already a contradiction.
I'd certainly take another Avatar movie over the ten billionth MCU movie.
Edit: BTW, here's the game trailer:
But, I have also long since learned that my own personal tastes do not in any way shape or form represent the cultural zeitgeist. So, I try to avoid making broad statements regarding what the public does or does not have an appetite for based solely on my own preferences. I found Avatar to be a completely boring and forgettable film. Audiences disagreed with me.
1. The only thing I really took from Tycho's line was that it's been more than a decade since the movie came out, and yet we hear every so often about the sequels that are supposedly coming. There's usually an indication that there's a huge amount of anticipation for these movies and I am skeptical regarding just how much of it is truly out there. That's why Tycho's "we're still doing this" resonates with me. I mainly want to see another one released just to see how it does in comparison to the first movie. I'm not sure if I would see it myself.
2. I bring up the subject of 3D when I talk about Avatar because it was the first big movie in the most recent 3D movie fad. I have zero doubt that MANY people went to see the movie for the 3D alone. I mean, it even worked on me since I eventually went to check it out for that reason. If it had been a regular 2D sci-fi movie, I probably would have skipped it. As far as Dennis's point about many people seeing it multiple times, and how that couldn't just be because of the 3D gimmick, I'm sure it wasn't. I'm sure there were plenty of people who simply enjoyed the movie and wanted to see it more than once. On the other hand, I could also see the 3D bringing people in multiple times as well. It was a new spectacle for many people, and some likely wanted to experience it more than once. Or they told their friends they needed to check it out and then went with them to see it. I don't really consider multiple viewings to be that great of a metric for measuring the worth of a movie anyway. I wonder how many people who now hate it saw "The Phantom Menace" multiple times. Heck, I went to that a second time just to see the 40 seconds or so of Obi-Wan vs. Darth Maul at the end, so a person can definitely see a movie multiple times just for some tiny part of it.
3. I don't dislike the movie just because it's 3D and I see it as some kind of fluke success story. When I said that it wouldn't be at the top of the box office list, that was just basic math. 3D tickets at the time of Avatar cost more than regular 2D tickets (they probably still do...if we even have 3D movies anymore?). I'm not going to go to the trouble of figuring out what the cost of 3D vs. 2D was in 2009, but let's just say 3D was $15 and 2D was $10. If you do the math, that would drop Avatar from #1 down to like #6 on the Box Office list (not adjusted for inflation). That's all I was saying there. I don't consider it "overrated" because I don't really encounter people who are still raving about how amazing Avatar was. For me to consider something overrated, I have to see people talking it up all the time.
4. The main reason I don't like Avatar is the story of the movie itself. I'm going to preface this by saying that I haven't seen it since the original theatrical run, so I don't recall minute details about the story. However, I seem to recall that the broadest strokes of the story boiled down to "Humans are awful, amirite?" and I dislike all movies that play that particular angle. I don't mind if you throw in some evil individuals, corporations, or governments, provided it's done well, but going for the sweeping "humans = bad" approach is lazy imo. The movie just clubs the audience over the head with how the horrible humans are greedy and out to destroy the blue-skinned space Native American's way of life. It was the heavy-handedness of it that turned me off. Maybe I was just expecting more from James Cameron. As I was digging around today, I even saw a quote from James Cameron saying that the Native American connection "isn't meant to be subtle." Well, maybe it should have been, Jim. I'm sure actual fans of the movie will tell me I'm missing all kinds of subtleties that make the movie great, but for me the subtleties don't always make up for irritating broader statements. It certainly wouldn't be the first time that I disagreed with a great many people for reasons like this. I still consider "The Dark Knight" to be the weakest of the Nolan trilogy because, for me, the Joker's message boils down to, "Human are awful, amirite?" At least with that one, I know that many, many people would disagree. I guess I agree with v2Micca's sentiment that Cameron took some great ideas and then threw them into a mediocre story. If the sequel ever sees the light of day, perhaps I'll watch the original one more time and see if it can convince me to watch the next one.
That's all I've got to say about that. If you enjoy the movie, good for you. I hope you get your sequels someday.
EDIT: After I wrote this, I remembered that Avatar was also released in 2D, so some people might nitpick item #3. A cursory Google search didn't tell me exactly how many of each type of ticket was sold, but I found an article from February 2010 that stated the breakdown at that time. If I just count 3D and Imax 3D as "3D tickets," then the breakdown at that time was roughly 75% 3D and 25% 2D for ticket sales. Assuming that trend continued through the theatrical run, that would mean roughly 2.1 billion of the global haul was 3D and 700 million was 2D. Using my $15 vs $10 approach, that would come out to around 2.1 billion if it was only 2D. So, not all the way down to #6, but still down to #4 based on the list I looked at. Obviously, I'm making some assumptions here, but I'm only writing this edit in anticipation of anyone who might say, "Well, it wasn't ALL 3D tickets stupid...." Besides, this wouldn't even account for all the people who saw it in 3D but wouldn't have bothered to see it in 2D.
-Tycho Brahe
4. I took it more as "Corporations are awful, amirite?" Because the scientists humans were universally good guys. It's a pretty common trope, especially in scifi, running through such fine films as Alien, Robocop, WALL-E, Jurassic Park, Soylent Green, District 9, Blade Runner, and plenty, plenty more (not to mention plenty of books). In addition, there's the same trope but with "corporations" replace with "government" (1984, ET, Stranger Things) or "military" (Short Circuit, Super 8, many others where the military is hand-in-hand with government) (I classify Avatar as corporations, since it seemed all their military were private security, even if some of them were ex-military). Sometimes it's not so much evil so much as uncaring. It taps into a primal human fear of the faceless, heartless, inhuman or simply mechanistically apathetic.
"Humans are the awful, amirite?" is definitely a trope, showing up in well respected tv/films, with the one that pops into my head the most being The Walking Dead. Though it goes back much further and wider, showing up in pretty much anything post-apocalyptic. And yeah, you can say that, by extension, the other tropes are a subset of this because they're all made up of humans, right? But I'd draw the distinction in that there are always different camps of good guys and bad guys in those tropes, based on some kind of identifier.
On another note, I find the talk of "there's no fanbase for this movie" interesting from the standpoint of it applying to any movie before it was released and developed a fanbase. That a movie does well without a built-in fanbase that will go see it because they're already on board is something that shouldn't just be dismissed.
There's also the category of movies that people felt positively about, but didn't become "fans". I would say Terminator didn't really kick off a fanbase until after the second one, for example.
EVERYBODY WANTS TO SIT IN THE BIG CHAIR, MEG!
Is it a black bear or a grizzly bear? How to find out?
Simple!
Punch it in the nose and then climb a tree. If it climbs the tree and eats you it was a black bear. If it knocks the tree down and eats you it was a grizzly bear.
Somehow it's a black hole of relatable images
It's the most successful film with the least cultural penetration. It has no famous quotes, no famous scenes, no popular characters, no iconic moments, nothing.
It probably also doesn't help that it's from 12 years ago, before Instagram even existed. Or the same year the facebook "Like" button was created. When twitter was a distant third behind myspace. Meme culture hadn't really escaped from 4chan, Something Awful or I Can Has Cheezburger. You went to sites for memes, rather than had memes pervade most every other site.
And sure, other old movies get memes. But I'm sure you could find a lot of them that didn't. Even high grossing ones. But apparently, there are memes:
https://knowyourmeme.com/editorials/collections/reject-humanity-and-embrace-tall-blue-aliens-with-these-18-avatar-memes
I mean, I get it. I still don't understand why a James Cameron movie grossed such obscene amounts of money, either, and that it's only lasting cultural impact seemed to be making fun of it. I'm pretty sure everyone just went temporarily insane.
Unobtanium
Like JFC, really?! That was the best you could do?
That just encapsulates how lazy the whole thing was.
See that worked for me. X rays have that name because it was "x" for "unknown" and the name stuck.
I can totally see it going like
"Well we'd need an impossible element to get this to work, might as well be looking for unobtanium."
*cut to finding element with exactly that property*
"....I'm going to spend the rest of my career trying to get people to call this something other than unobtanium aren't I"
If you can't use it to craft massless frictionless pulleys, it's not Unobtanium.
Only if you assume the pulley is spherical.
Also, what space-faring civilization travels across a galaxy to then attack a planet with the equivalent of futuristic helicopters and humanoid mech tanks? It seems like some form of orbital/kinetic bombardment would have been easily achievable for them.
If you look at our history, bombardment campaigns have often been thought to be an easy way to victory as well. Often they are not.
Also, unless you think they are completely and totally above the law, orbital bombardment would be a fairly easily provable war crime. You have to think they're doing what human corporate colonizers usually do, which is to go and take stuff and then claim they are only fighting back to protect themselves once the "natives" rightly resist. It's pretty hard to make that justification when you're sitting cozily up in orbit with no possibility of attack.