It's a minor point — but didn't companies operate with long (well, maybe not multi-year, but definitely multi-month) lags in communication in Real Life in the past? Think of all the trading companies that operated way back in the Age Of Sail — having your home office in London and many of your operations on the other side of the planet, when the fastest way to travel is a sailing ship, may not be quite as bad as slower-than-light interstellar travel, but there seem to be some interesting parallels, anyway.
Oh, also, they actually supposedly had a limited Subspace Ansible. Its existence was a case of All There In The Manual, though, so yours is still a fair criticism.
Funny enough, i've seen a lot of complaints about Avatar NOT "poking in the eye" :D Some people think THAT is "real 3D" :\ Now to see someone annoyed by REALLY RARE "poking moments" is something new :) As for me, Avatar had excellent depth almost every second of it (especially the flight scenes) only HTTYD ever comes close... UP or Crismas Carol comparison is a joke.
Btw Avatar definitely deserved both Sound FX Oscars more than Hurt Locker. I mean, come on, are the explosions in Hurt Locker THAT MUCH more impressive than ALL sounds of Pandora AND explosions in Avatar? ;)
"They used it for depth, to move into the screen, not to poke out of it."
Thank you, that's exactly my thought on the matter. Most of the time the 3-D was basically saying "Weeee!!! I'm here, look at me! Look at me! Don't you see me! I'm here!" Without actually adding to the visual effectiveness of the movie.
"Whoa" Keanu ReevesLeave a Comment:
Got the Oscars it deserved.
A common criticism of this film is that it is all style and no substance. While I don't think this is all true I do think that the story suffers for the visuals in this story. More than once I went "what is meant to be happening again?" when I could tear myself from the spectacle. The fight scenes are awesome, but don't make a whole lot of sense. The plot too causes holes in the verisimilitude of the Hard Science story, how can a company really be operating with a multi-year lag between decisions and enactment, between projections and reality. All in all, the more I look at it, the more the seams start to show.
And yet I enjoyed it at the time. The ride was good and when things where actually moving forward it was wonderful. It seems that Hollywood agrees with me, this film won for cinematography, visual effects and art direction. This film got 3 Oscars for looking pretty, and none for being entertaining. As well it should. It does look very pretty. Very pretty indeed. And that is no small feat in this age, looking good is HARD and requires lots of work. This is not a bad movie, but not on my top 10 of 2009 either.
One more thing though. Of the three films I saw in 3D last year, this is easily the worst at using that tool. UP was ok, mostly adding to the size of scale but Avatar poked me in the eye with it. Of all the 3D films, A Christmas Carol did the best job. Why? For the same reason that the 3D shots on the cryoship where the best in Avatar. They used it for depth, to move into the screen, not to poke out of it. Not only is this more like how our eyes work in effect (making it look like a window into another world, which a cinema screen is) but it also avoids having HALF a 3D rifle pointed at you.
Oh, and can people stop making the Captain Planet comparison? It's just petty.