{"id":190,"date":"2010-01-01T21:20:39","date_gmt":"2010-01-02T05:20:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.slimjimmy.com\/weblog\/?p=190"},"modified":"2011-09-12T03:18:31","modified_gmt":"2011-09-12T10:18:31","slug":"avatar-impressions","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.slimjimmy.com\/weblog\/archives\/2010\/01\/01\/avatar-impressions\/","title":{"rendered":"<i>Avatar<\/i> impressions"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I saw <i>Avatar<\/i> in 3-D on New Year&#8217;s Eve with a bunch of my cousins.  Impressions (<strong>spoilers ahead<\/strong>):<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><i>Avatar<\/i> was visually stunning, and although I enjoyed the film, the plot was very formulaic.  I went into the movie already knowing that it was <i>Dances with Wolves<\/i> but with aliens, but I still was hoping that Cameron would add some unique twist to be different.  For example, instead of an epic fight at the end, how about a massive act of non-violent civil disobedience? (Admittedly it&#8217;d probably be less appealing to general moviegoers, but I think it would have given the film a more interesting message.) There were a couple of points that I thought foreshadowed that outcome, but I guess they were red herrings.<\/li>\n<li>Even though the protagonists won at the end of the film, the victory felt hollow.  Come on, if you&#8217;re going to rip off <i>Dances with Wolves<\/i>, take some lessons from history about what happened to the Native Americans and know that winning one major battle doesn&#8217;t win the war.  The humans are just going to return with an even larger military force.  Maybe they&#8217;ll even nuke the site from orbit.<\/li>\n<li>What is it with James Cameron and climaxes with an alien pitted against a robotic exoskeleton?  Or even more generally: organic humanoid pitted against robotic humanoid?<\/li>\n<li>I thought the neural network of the forest with the pretty, glowing fiber optic-like links between everything was neat.  They slightly reminded me of the trees in <i>Speaker for the Dead<\/i>.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I saw Avatar in 3-D on New Year&#8217;s Eve with a bunch of my cousins. Impressions (spoilers ahead):<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,12],"tags":[33],"class_list":["post-190","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-rantsraves","category-reviews","tag-movies"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.slimjimmy.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/190","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.slimjimmy.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.slimjimmy.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.slimjimmy.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.slimjimmy.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=190"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.slimjimmy.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/190\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.slimjimmy.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=190"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.slimjimmy.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=190"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.slimjimmy.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=190"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}