(no subject)
Dec. 26th, 2009 10:37 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dsrtaoLet's suppose we have a piece of schlock that calls itself an SF movie, but it's really crap. Nobody much cares, except to poke fun at it. See the SciFi Channel movies for the last ten years.
No, it's the movies which come so close, but fall short in easily avoidable ways. which make me most annoyed. In The Matrix, changing Morpheus's speech explaining why humans are farmed by AIs in the real world from:
(wrong): as a source of energy, now that they no longer have the sun
to
(right): as the only cheap-enough source of biological computers to run the AIs themselves on
would have instantly upgraded the movie at a cost of a minute of voiceover and a very few script changes.
Which brings me to Avatar,
There are some great things in this movie. The sense of wonder conveyed by the gas giant in the sky is breathtaking. The design of the interstellar spaceship seems to be extrapolated from a fairly realistic intrasolar cargo-and-manned-exploration ship. Many aspects of the alien ecology are well-thought out. The language of the Na'vi is satisfyingly complex.
Every bit of CG in the film -- and that's the vast majority of screentime -- looks real or hyper-real. The physics are almost, but not quite, perfect -- there's a persistent sense of weightlessness. I think the ground doesn't move enough under the characters, or their joints don't compress enough. It's easy to forget about this for long stretches.
We see several kinds of alien fauna close up: an arboreal spider-monkey thing, a herd of large ruminants with hammerhead skull extensions (apparently for brush clearance), several sizes of predators, horse analogs, and two kinds of major aerial raptors. All of these share common body plan features: they are basically six-limbed (hexapodia is the key insight), have multiple bilateral sets of eyes, separate digestive and respiratory orifices (mouths on heads, two large nostrils at the top of the chest) and an odd nervous system. The Na'vi, on the other hand, only have the odd nervous system. Their anatomy, otherwise, might as well be giant blue human.
Here's what they could have fixed, relatively cheaply, to make this a much better movie:
No macguffin mineral should be called unobtainium. The listed cost of unobtainium is way too low. It's not obvious that it does anything, or has any use.
There should not be any floating mountains, no matter how cool James Cameron thinks they would be.
And I don't care how unlikeable a yuppie-scum MBA industrial manager is, it seems highly unlikely to me that he gets to tell Marines to go and destroy a minor city of noncombatant sophonts. He needs a mustache to twirl.
No, it's the movies which come so close, but fall short in easily avoidable ways. which make me most annoyed. In The Matrix, changing Morpheus's speech explaining why humans are farmed by AIs in the real world from:
(wrong): as a source of energy, now that they no longer have the sun
to
(right): as the only cheap-enough source of biological computers to run the AIs themselves on
would have instantly upgraded the movie at a cost of a minute of voiceover and a very few script changes.
Which brings me to Avatar,
There are some great things in this movie. The sense of wonder conveyed by the gas giant in the sky is breathtaking. The design of the interstellar spaceship seems to be extrapolated from a fairly realistic intrasolar cargo-and-manned-exploration ship. Many aspects of the alien ecology are well-thought out. The language of the Na'vi is satisfyingly complex.
Every bit of CG in the film -- and that's the vast majority of screentime -- looks real or hyper-real. The physics are almost, but not quite, perfect -- there's a persistent sense of weightlessness. I think the ground doesn't move enough under the characters, or their joints don't compress enough. It's easy to forget about this for long stretches.
We see several kinds of alien fauna close up: an arboreal spider-monkey thing, a herd of large ruminants with hammerhead skull extensions (apparently for brush clearance), several sizes of predators, horse analogs, and two kinds of major aerial raptors. All of these share common body plan features: they are basically six-limbed (hexapodia is the key insight), have multiple bilateral sets of eyes, separate digestive and respiratory orifices (mouths on heads, two large nostrils at the top of the chest) and an odd nervous system. The Na'vi, on the other hand, only have the odd nervous system. Their anatomy, otherwise, might as well be giant blue human.
Here's what they could have fixed, relatively cheaply, to make this a much better movie:
No macguffin mineral should be called unobtainium. The listed cost of unobtainium is way too low. It's not obvious that it does anything, or has any use.
There should not be any floating mountains, no matter how cool James Cameron thinks they would be.
And I don't care how unlikeable a yuppie-scum MBA industrial manager is, it seems highly unlikely to me that he gets to tell Marines to go and destroy a minor city of noncombatant sophonts. He needs a mustache to twirl.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-12-28 12:09 am (UTC)I have multiple problems with this movie. It's a gorgeous documentary of a fantasy universe, which is about what I was expecting. Or, it's a great tie-in to a first-person shooter that lets you fly lots of cool craft and ride lots of animals!
I am also greatly saddened. Because in the real world, the Indians/Africans/Inca/etc. did their dances, and sang their songs, and no nature spirits helped them, and they perished and were forced off their lands.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-12-28 03:36 am (UTC)