I would classify myself as an "Avatar hater". I agree with many of your takes on the film, but not all of them. I do think it had a very bland story with bland and underwritten characters, zero standout performances
I do believe that he was not at all interested in originality when it came to a storytelling POV. The story is very similar to Dances With Wolves, Pocahontas, and Ferngully. You can boil this down to a basic premise or trope: imperialist character unintentionally develops bond with natives and joins them in their struggle
Here you have the "skeleton" or pre-made structure of a story. I have to believe that Cameron's main preoccupations when making this film were primarily technical, not creative. The creative aspects of Avatar which Cameron seemed to be genuinely interested in seem to be mainly those centered on world-building: creating a new "planet" (or moon, w/e), new humanoid, sentient alien species, new sci-fi premises ("avatars" and "unobtanium")
By "new", here, I do not mean to say that his ideas are very original. They're really not, but they are HIS own takes on Sci-Fi/Fantasy tropes. They are "new" in the sense that they are his own Intellectual Property, even if its all derivative. Aside from world-building, I think Cameron basically just wanted to fuck around with new filmmaking, blockbuster technology
I think attributing his career trajectory to changes in his personal ethics is silly. His films have always reflected his penchant for simplistic moralizing. Terminator is just good guys trying to prevent apocalypse vs. emotionless killer robot. Aliens is just good guys trying to prevent alien "apocalypse" vs. ruthless corporation bent on profits over people. Titanic is just good guys trying to let love prevail vs. the time-period's forces of class rigidity
T2 is the only film of his which I would say ever showed any appreciable moral complexity, but even in that film, it raises interesting questions but doesn't provide concrete answers
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Drooch (5333)
3 years ago
Actually it makes perfect sense to see how Cameron’s personal ethics infect his films, and I strongly suspect he has withheld True Lies and The Abyss from Blu-ray because they don’t gel with his new woke ideology.
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cyberbob (3488)
3 years ago
IF he has a woke ideology, I don't think it is "new" at all. The themes present in Avatar are present in pretty much all of his films. They are all "David vs. Goliath".
The resistance of humans against, not only the machines (and Skynet), but also against the greed and hubris of mankind as exemplified in Cyberdyne, which created the system for the U.S. government's Department of Defense. One can easily see an undercurrent of anti-imperialist thought running through such a story. In T2, Schwarzenegger sacrifices himself in the end to ensure that the last-remaining microchip cannot be harvested by Cyberdyne as a financial security measure against the apocalypse. Tell me that this isn't a cynical view of mankind, that a machine has learned to feel and to love, but must kill itself because humans absolutely can't be trusted to not bring about their own apocalypse
In Aliens you find a similar contempt for imperialism. You could argue that this is just a continuation of Ridley Scott's original film's ideas, but Cameron hammers down the point and dumbs it down. In Alien, the corporation was an ominous presence with secret motives. Their only agent within the film was an android who creepily found "beauty" in the nature of this alien organism.
In Cameron's Aliens it's just a matter of simple economics. You have the weasily human corporate shill who only sees the organism as a chance for his own career advancement. He makes it clear that this corporation will expend not just one space crew, but an entire colony of people in order to protect its profit motive
In Titanic, the "SJW themes" are as plain as it gets. Jack and Rose belong to different socioeconomic strata. It's absurd how far members of the "first class" are willing to go to keep Jack and Rose apart. A movie based on a true-life disaster has a scene where a rich guy goes Terminator and tries to kill Jack and Rose with a pistol
His current ideology is far from new
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Drooch (5333)
3 years ago
Those are all films he has been happy to restore and re-release, he has not allowed True Lies and The Abyss to have blu-ray releases because they breach his new woke ideology.
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cyberbob (3488)
3 years ago
Who gives a shit about Blu-Ray? It's not a "new" ideology. He's always been essentially the same person. I don't know how many times I can explain the same thing without dumbing things down to a level that a Blu-Ray collector can understand
HE HAS NOT CHANGED. HE HAS ALWAYS BEEN THE PERSON THAT HE IS NOW. YOU CAN GO BACK TO HIS FIRST FILMS AND FIND THE SAME MORAL IDEAS PRESENT IN HIS CURRENT STUFF. PLEASE STOP REPEATING PROTESTATIONS ABOUT NEW WOKE IDEOLOGY, YOU SOUND RETARDED. JUST STOP BUYING BLU-RAYS OR KEEP BUYING BLU-RAYS, NO ONE GIVES A SHIT, BUT STOP USING BLU-RAYS AS AN ARGUMENT FOR ANYTHING OTHER THAN WHO HAS THE BIGGEST COLLECTION OF $0.10 RELICS TO SELL AT GARAGE SALES/PAWN SHOP
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Drooch (5333)
3 years ago
I and other film lovers care deeply about owning our favourite films on blu-ray, which offers the highest audio-visual quality (I of course include 4K blu-ray in this), you wouldn’t understand.
Oh don’t confuse your all-caps mindless apologetics for Wokism as an ‘explanation’, we know what your evil ideology is all about and you’re not fooling anyone.
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