Annalee, I love your cynicism. I'm being sincere. But come on, this is what Jailbreaking is for.
You know exactly 0.9 minutes after this thing is released, some hacker or other will have broken it open to make it do far more than Apple intended - or wanted. So don't worry.
I wonder if Japan's special brand of racism was inspired by Lovecraft as well.
Oh and I'm really surprised to see that Push has such a cult following here. I thought it was terrible - annoying characters, shallow plot, mediocre visuals...and Dakota Fanning. It was almost as bad as Jumper. What did you all see in that movie?
There really isn't any accounting for tastes, huh. Here I am another sci-fi/fantasy fan diametrically opposed to almost everything in this list. I thought Paranormal activity was absolute garbage, perhaps the worst "movie" (if that's what it was supposed to be) I've seen this year.
I love Neil Gaiman and wanted to love Coraline but it was actually a little boring (like Mirrormask) - and while I find many of the themes in Avatar objectionable, I found it mind-blowingly gorgeous. It's absurd (to me) to say that Coraline outshone it visually.
Pandorum was mediocre, but not terrible, Wolverine was fun, if only action fluff - much like Transformers (which admittedly was much worse than the first one).
But we certainly agree on District 9, which I thought was brilliant, and on New Moon, which I refuse to see because vampires...well, they suck.
Am I committing sci-fi blasphemy if I say I enjoyed The Island? ...or that I find Dr. Who painfully boring?
@triage and Diana R. Flynn: I don't buy this, because I doubt James Cameron is a regular forum-goer, such as to use "avatar" in that sense. Not to mention that he came up with this concept when he was like 18, long before the internet even existed. Furthermore, even that usage is based on the one I mentioned - we are the "gods" behind those little images, controlling how they are represented in cyberspace.
@hdgotham: It's about symbolism, not the actuality of the humans or Na'vi's powers. In tune with the planet or not, the Na'vi were getting their asses handed to them for awhile there. Gods don't get their asses kicked.
And to everyone, now that I've seen the movie, I will say that it is breathtakingly gorgeous and that I enjoyed it. In spite of that, I stand with Annalee in her interpretation of the white man's fantasy and my further extrapolation about gods and mortals.
Annalee - I haven't seen this film yet, but I had suspicions about it just after hearing the synopsis. The Pocahontas-revisited theme was obvious, but then something else dawned on me the more I thought about it.
The movie is called Avatar. Avatars are Hindu concepts for GODS taking human form - or occupying a human body. So in the context of the movie, humans are the gods, and the Na'vi are the "humans" (or mortals). Now cross-referencing that with the white = human and Na'vi = people of color analogy, what do we get?
White = God? Everyone else mere mortals? I figured I was extrapolating too far, but...your article makes me wonder just how far the white fantasy goes...
