By tonyleehealey on Saturday, May 08, 2010 - 01:52 am:

Alan, Just wondering what you thought of Avatar? I didn't get to see it on the big screen, but I watched it last night on Blu-Ray and I did wonder if you'd seen it, and if you had what your opinion of it was. Also, I saw District 9 the other day and wasn't impressed with it either. I found it a bit un-believable that there would be a compound of alien beings, without either the US or the UN being involved. Surely, a Childhoods End situation of a ship from another world descending through the sky would be a much bigger event, garnering world wide attention, and the care of the alien visitors wouldn't be left solely to a South African company and a bunch of crazy mercs... Moon definitley the superior movie. Predictable, but refreshing at the same time. Tony.

By adf@alandeanfoster.com on Saturday, May 08, 2010 - 09:44 am:

In re AVATAR: beautiful to look at. Characters, dialogue, science, plot needed work. Too much focus on film technology and not enough on story. Plenty of commentary in re this on the Web. Here are two examples not pointed out elsewhere yet: 1: Main character arrives knowing nothing about his job or what he's supposed to do. Spends years in deep sleep getting from Earth to destination. Seems to me he could have spent those years studying and probably mastering his job description, or at least the basics, instead of...napping...so that he would have arrived at least partially prepared for what he is supposed to do. 2: Bad Colonel has a set of free weights at his disposal. Free weights don't strike me as even a low priority considering the likely cost of interstellar shipping. 3: "Jujubees" are mentioned. I can't find young people today who are familiar with this already ancient candy (or fruit-flavored epoxy...if you've ever eaten them, you'll know what I mean). I doubt they'll be around 150 years in the future. How many people today are familiar with Civil War era candy? I could go on, but....

By Marty on Saturday, May 08, 2010 - 11:07 am:

The rifftrax guys also blasted the Jujubes line, along with some other things in the dialog that are already going of out of date today, let alone 150 years from now. It does seem the bad colonel could get whatever he wanted, totally at odds with the idea that the company running the operation was supposedly doing things as cheaply as possible (the reason I would use for keeping the new guy asleep during the trip, save the cost of feeding him).

By oldgringo2001 on Thursday, May 13, 2010 - 12:41 am:

Gosh, has anyone noticed certain "similarities" between Avatar and Midworld?

By Marty on Friday, May 14, 2010 - 10:34 am:

The Midworld stuff has been discussed here for a long time. There are 2 other threads here about all the other stories Avatar, ah, "pays homage to".