Is Avatar just Pocahontas in CG?
POSTED BY: Mangolo
UPDATED: Wednesday, June 17, 2026 06:19
VIEWED: 18305
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And Hollywood is out to prove it.
A lot of samurai films made in Japan have been remade as westerns in the United States and Italy as spaghetti westerns.
Clint Eastwood's "Pale Rider" is "Shane" with very little done to disguise the plot.
So Skakespeare may be right. After all are not all these TV series about space travelers who get lost and are trying to find their way back home just copies of Homer's Odyessy. 
http://www.imdb.com/mymovies/list?l=28764731
Traveler
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hitting the nail on the head
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And the reviews coming in all say pretty much the same thing. You have seen this basic story before. But you've not seen it told LIKE this.
The reviews are, generally speaking, very good bordering on ecstatic.
"I thoroughly disapprove of duels. If a man should challenge me, I would take him kindly and forgivingly by the hand and lead him to a quiet place and kill him."
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Quote:
Originally posted by Storymark:
The reviews are, generally speaking, very good bordering on ecstatic.
And they may be right, but the trailer I've seen on TV did not inspire confidence. As soon as I heard, "We're not in Kansas anymore," I groaned and gave up any hope of liking the movie. Not because I am for or against Kansas, but because people who use that line anymore are just lazy, IMO.
"We need to keep our heads so we can ... keep our heads."
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I've not seen it, and I will at some point, but I find the whole concept to be really trite. Doesn't mean it'll be terrible, but it does mean that it'll have to be very good to make up for the lousy premise IMHO.
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A familiar story told with a dash of originality, in charater or execution, can be very satisfying,
I loved Ursula LeGuin's A Wizard of Earthsea (young boy goes to a school to become a magician), and the fact that J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter, Lev Grossman's The Magicians, and Patrick Rothfuss's The Name of the Wind all had a similar theme did not undermine my enjoyment of those books. They all told the story in a different way, with different characters, and different styles.
Hopefully, Cameron has taken a familiar tale and put a new spin on it with characterization and ground-breaking visuals.
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Quote:
Originally posted by Storymark:
The Last Samurai.....
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Originally posted by SAVEWASH:
Quote:
And they may be right, but the trailer I've seen on TV did not inspire confidence. As soon as I heard, "We're not in Kansas anymore," I groaned and gave up any hope of liking the movie. Not because I am for or against Kansas, but because people who use that line anymore are just lazy, IMO.
Yes it is a James Cameron film after all and dialogue is not his strongest point. However rest assured, that line is part of characterisation, there is a purpose to it and by whom it is delivered.
I really urge people to see this film and to see it in 3D. I realise it is maybe not the Shakespearean experiance that for some reason everyone hopes for when going to the cinema (even though we have the theatre for that) but it really is a landmark film. Years from now it could very well be the film that changed the direction of cinema. When I was watching this I kept wondering what Ridley Scott's Alien would look like with this new technology, or Jaws or some BBC wildlife documentaries. It just needs someone's genius to ignite it. This comes close.
It really was fascinating - visually anyway.
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Cameron said he rather enjoyed Jimmy Kimmel's version...
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It could also be Ferngully.
The story of Avatar isn't original, but then no story is.
I made up a species of blue skinned aliens for the Star Wars tabletop RPG three years ago called the Nanba with a mindboggling similarity to the Na'vi.
Pic! Angelfire probably doesn't work with auto-imbed and hotlinks, so add .jpg to the end of this in your url if you want to see it. http://www.angelfire.com/ok5/bytemite/Nanba
The story behind them was that they were once humans, crash landed on a world that atmospherically was unsuitable for human habitation. Through technology they managed to absorb the DNA of some native species, thus changing their appearance, adapting to survive their environment, and gaining some unusual control over the natural world around them...
Yeah.
Coincidences are funny sometimes. Oftentimes we draw without knowing it on previous ideas, stories, or jungian archetypes, which can result in some BIZARRE similarities in stories. I have no idea where my Nanba came from, James Cameron might be able to tell you what inspired his, but likely we both were coming from the same source.
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