That scene was a hat tip to baraka:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QcVmt5je88M
0:27

edit: found the whole scene:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RkxuP...eature=related

That's pretty ****ing cool.

don't forget the fact that they were saved by a lone white man!

yeah, i'm grunching (except for the last page) and i think you hit every point i was going to PJ, except i wasn't really facepalming in my chair at the "full-on left-wing agitprop" during the movie (after for sure) but i think that has a lot to do with how engrossing the film was.

glass windows/cockpits/windshields were mesmerizing. glass ffs! i'm typing about how mother****ing GLASS looked in a movie!

someone fill me in on this please,

if there were multiple (two dozen???) avatars on pandora already (i'm guessing from the recreational area scene where he first walks) why was it so important that sully take the place of his brother according to the company and b - why on earth did he go out on a 3 man expedition with only another noob and the director of their operation?

what the **** were all those other avatars for???

just came back from the movie. thought it was an amazing experience. the story was exactly what i expected so I'm not angry that it was conventional. i didn't go in expecting it to transcend to new grounds in the natives/white imperialist plotline. the movie did however portray the relationship between man and nature better than any movie i have seen. i was even teary-eyed for some of the scenes.

will not reject an invitation to watch the film again.

Yeah, because we all know aliens are never innocent, strange and magical!

COME ON, guys! If it really was some african tribe instead of the aliens and modern US military instead of a goddamn SPACE NAVY, THEN your criticism would be on the mark...

BUT IT WAS ALIENS AND INTERSTELLAR TRAVEL!!! DONT GO WATCH A FANTASY MOVIE IF YOU HATE FANTASY!!!

If you had no problem accepting all the material lack of realism, why is it so hard to accept all the social and psychological lack of realism?

If anything, my criticism would be that the alien natives and the evil corporation weren't painted black and white ENOUGH. The aliens had plenty of aggressive and hateful urges as well as plain ignorance/stupidity going on among themselves. It was hard to idolise someone who don't place more value in peace, human (er... navi?) life and wisdom, and are so stuck in meaningless rituals and power display.

okay but theres things called analogies and parallelism

Which are something you draw in your head as you watch the movie. A constructive watcher will draw them so that they support the movie. If you draw them in such a way that they start to annoy you, you are ONLY harming your own experience. Seriously. Seriously you guys.

There are no innocent native tribes on Earth? Then don't draw a failing parallel with specific native tribes on Earth!!! Only draw a parallel with the initimate relationship with and respect for nature seen to some extent in some native tribes, and elevate them to innocence in direct comparison. You can do so "credibly", because they are ALIENS FFS, who can be as innocent as you like!

THAT is how you draw parallels, muthas.

i love how cameron makes out the humans to be totally evil and the navi to be these great lifeforms who just want peace. do you like how in the end after getting their *** kicked the humans are let go by the navi? why arent humans getting their heads sawed off with dull knives? does he think that if an army of 10k soldiers got captured in iraq that they would be on a plane home 2 days later?

did you miss the whole part about the movie how the natives value every life? and how are you comparing it to the war in iraq? this movie had nothing to do with it.

Not even close. He makes them out to be about on the level of pre-WWI western world I'd say.

Earlier in the thread TylerMes wrote a post saying how he didn't need to be hit over the head with the politics, and criticized Cameron for thinking we were all too stupid to get it unless he spelled it out for us.

Well, I guess mused01 is your answer, Ty. Even after it was spelled out for us, some people are still inconceivably ignorant.

Cameron is apparently kind of a douche...

The fan is a ****** too imo

when people act like that i just want other insane people to inflict serious bodily harm upon them.

This movie is about 100 times closer to being a remake of Pocahontas than it has anything, at all, to do with the war in Iraq.

So the quotes "shock and awe" and "fight terror with terror" and "pre-emptive strike" and "they have something valuable underground that we want, and the way to get it is make enemies with the people then justify a war against them" were, what... you think it's just a coincidence that those are also quotes from the Bush administration during the Iraq war? Are you people all just leveling us? I can't fathom this level of ignorance if you're being serious.

By the way, yes of course it's also talking about Pocohontas/the Indians and it's got a lot of Dances With Wolves and The New World in there as well. That much is obvious. But if you're ignoring the Iraq stuff I find it hard to believe you're capable of dressing yourself in the morning. I'm not trying to be arrogant here or some know-it-all; it's not like the Iraq stuff is subtle or even up for interpretation. This isn't opinion.

as hyped as this movie sounds -- you'd think the dragons would fly on a course that's linear according to their center of mass. same with those blue people. they all look like they're about to fall over. that is, when they're not looking so stiff as to appear like mannequins. When will we ever see CGI as seemless as Jurassic Park again? The first time I saw that T-REX I wondered how in the world its trainer calmed it down after smashing that car. The CGI nowadays looks so fake. They really need to solve that center-of-gravity issue. Men in Black and Spiderman were notoriously bad for that.

It's not that we ignored/misunderstood those quotations, but rather that I don't think they were significant enough to paint anything but the most superficial and shallow of connections between Iraq and their world. The buzzwords resounded with the American audience because they continue to permeate the political zeitgeist - not necessarily because they were profound or even accurate analysis of the war. The ideas of preemption, civilian oppression and grabbing at natural resources obviously predate the Iraqi war and I'm going to give Cameron enough credit to assume he put in those words for the average bumpkin to understand the movie is a political/imperialist analogy, not a direct reflection on Iraq.

Contrastingly, I think it is an almost literal reimagining of the Pocahontas story. When she starts showing the avatar the beauty of nature in that neon jungle I half expected her to break out into "colours of the wind" and for a birds and raccoons to come dance with them. The initials of the main character's name were freakin' J and S jesus.

Epic. Saw it last night in 3d on a normal screen but will most likely go again to the imax when the crowds die down a bit. Did not feel like a three hour movie at all. The pacing at the first was very quick but didn't feel rushed and enough of the key plot points were hashed out so you didn't feel totally lost after the first 20 minutes which is fairly common in sci-fi. I still feel i need a second viewing on imax or blu-ray when it comes out to decide if it's a great movie or just a good movie with incredible effects.

Don't think those were other avatars, only other natives/children they were helping out and teaching english, etc.

If Sully didn't take the job they would've just had to throw away the avatar they grew for his brother.

The other avatars weren't natives, they were human avatars that never got mentioned again. There was some handwaving about the school getting closed down, but it's a plot convenience just to focus on the Sully story.

Cameron has been very anti-Iraq war for awhile now. I think only a ****** doesn't get the overall message Cameron is trying to sell. Think he's even admitted as such in some prior interviews...saying this is his most michael moore'ish film I believe.

From Vanity Fair:

Edited to add: Cameron revoked his own application for U.S. citizenship (he's Canadian) when Bush was re-elected in 2004.

And here, in this interview with Tavis Smiley on YouTube, he says "I think that was deliberate. It was one of the themes I wanted to explore in this. There are obviously references to Vietnam, references to Iraq, and references to the American Colonial period..."

basically what he said. while I admit there are some references to the iraq war (although I am sad to admit the only one I caught was "fight terror with terror) the overall theme of the movie wasn't about the iraq war but more about imperialism/corporate exploitation. the poster above me made it sound like the movie was drawing a direct parallelism with the iraq war (ie the pandorian natives were iraqis) which it wasn't.