{"id":1815,"date":"2009-12-23T09:41:08","date_gmt":"2009-12-23T14:41:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/hawkdog.net\/wordpress\/?p=1815"},"modified":"2009-12-23T12:14:27","modified_gmt":"2009-12-23T17:14:27","slug":"the-avatar-post","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/hawkdog.net\/wordpress\/archives\/1815","title":{"rendered":"The Avatar post"},"content":{"rendered":"

Saw it. Liked it.\u00a0 There may be spoilers from here on so proceed at your own risk. If you go expecting a great story line, you may be disappointed – on this continuum<\/a>, I’d put it right between Star Wars (classic quest yarn, well realized) and The Phantom Menace (wha?). That may actually be a decent analogy – Terminator was an edge of seat experience when I first saw it, just as Star Wars was; since then both Cameron and Lucas have been having fun with tech at the expense of storytelling. Cameron hasn’t gone all the way – there is a narrative in Avatar. I’ve got to agree with Annalee’s critique of the movie<\/a>, though I do think that Sully’s (easily anticipated) final choice is a variation that helps rescue things a bit. So, what did I like?<\/p>\n

Critters! Yes, they’re bilaterally symmetrical and often look a lot like beasts here (blue space horsies<\/a>, anyone?), but I’m a sucker for just about any kind of speculative exobiology. Cameron could have been a LOT more daring in his critter design without going as far as Eganesque<\/a> info-processing Sierpinski<\/a> carpets (tough to relate to) but you gotta take what you can get . While I’m on the subject, let me recommend a few good specbio picture books – After Man<\/a>, Expedition<\/a> and Worlds<\/a>. When I see Avatar again I’m planning on ignoring the bipeds most of the time and concetrating on hammerhead peacockotheria, tubewormplants and their ilk.<\/p>\n

Tech! The best CG faces<\/a> ever – they avoided the uncanny valley<\/a> altogether. This one worried me – I’ve seen snatches of The Polar Express<\/a> on teevee – it’s horrifying. 3D – I stopped consciously noticing depth about 5 minutes in. Part of my motivation for the second view is to try to figure out whether good 3D makes a difference – I’m going to see the non-3D version.<\/p>\n

Action! Cameron does good action scenes – there were no surprises in the big final battle, but it was quite exciting anyway.<\/p>\n

Neither here nor there – Avatar has the McGuffiniest McGuffin ever – although, unsurprisingly, the thing that motivates all the conflict fades into obscurity damn quick. The name? The notion that anything is worth transporting over interstellar distances given light speed\/energy constraints? Wow.<\/p>\n

That’s it – light entertainment with oodles of ‘ooh, shiny’.<\/p>\n

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Saw it. Liked it.\u00a0 There may be spoilers from here on so proceed at your own risk. If you go expecting a great story line, you may be disappointed – on this continuum, I’d put it right between Star Wars … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[6,22],"tags":[79,80],"class_list":["post-1815","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-creatures","category-scifi","tag-avatar","tag-review"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pdqxx-th","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/hawkdog.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1815","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/hawkdog.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/hawkdog.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/hawkdog.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/hawkdog.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1815"}],"version-history":[{"count":13,"href":"http:\/\/hawkdog.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1815\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1826,"href":"http:\/\/hawkdog.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1815\/revisions\/1826"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/hawkdog.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1815"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/hawkdog.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1815"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/hawkdog.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1815"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}