this is only good mindless entertainment if you are watching it ironically.  if anyone on this forum became at all emotionally involved during viewing, i am going to slice and dice you.  i am going to look you up in real life and kill you.

guys we are getting away from the main problem with this movie: it sucks.

Here is myself addressing the main problem with the movie:

Movies come out that suck. We all know this to be true, and there's very little we can do about it. To put it in mathematical terms: for any person X that knows about the movie, they'll either watch it, or not watch it. With exception to those that will watch it more times than that.

Okay, the main issue has been addressed. I hope this helped.

yeah but it's an homage that is incredibly hard to take seriously in a movie that from what i've heard of it seems like it wants you to!

I think it's supposed to be a joke for hapless nerds to chuckle at and feel like they're in the know
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kind of more racially centered. i'm quite aware of colonialism, but something more specific would be pretty nice.

Atlas Shruge

I meant any book, it was kind of a joke but I also don't own any books about this and I can't think of any off the top of my head. I know my college library has 1 yours probably does too

kind of more racially centered. i'm quite aware of colonialism, but something more specific would be pretty nice.

edward said

rawdude, i only read parts of orientalism in a class. and i've been wanting to read more of his stuff but i'm not sure which book to read. do you have any suggestions?

nope. i met a woman doing her PhD on epistemological violence of new zealand ethnic groups or something and she raved about him. aside from orientalism i don't know what else he's written by name

all i could think about when watching this movie is how much better the experience could've been if the story and general art direction wasn't so shitty. all the supposed hundreds of millions of dollars sunken into the project and the best they could come up with is humanoid cat people living in the rainforest. nothing about the world felt alien to me. why is it that the entire scifi genre (im not just talking about movies here, i also mean all of science fiction) is incapable of thinking outside the box when it comes to depicting alien life? 

I'm guessing this didn't want to stray too far from relatability or else the whole John Smith/Pocahontas storyline might've sunk hard with general audiences

I enjoyed watching the movie, i just the story hadn't been fucking braindead and on cruise control.

all i could think about when watching this movie is how much better the experience could've been if the story and general art direction wasn't so shitty. all the supposed hundreds of millions of dollars sunken into the project and the best they could come up with is humanoid cat people living in the rainforest. nothing about the world felt alien to me. why is it that the entire scifi genre (im not just talking about movies here, i also mean all of science fiction) is incapable of thinking outside the box when it comes to depicting alien life? 

man i really wonder this too, why is it that sci-fi seems to assume that alien life would be like humans with slight differences (or even worse HUMANS PLUS ANOTHER EARTH CREATURE EQUALS ALIENS wouldn't that be way too much of an evolution coincidence??)

i was going to post a joke about sex with aliens but everyone already said the same thing.

man i really wonder this too, why is it that sci-fi seems to assume that alien life would be like humans with slight differences (or even worse HUMANS PLUS ANOTHER EARTH CREATURE EQUALS ALIENS wouldn't that be way too much of an evolution coincidence??)

i remember alot of my favourite star trek episodes were to do with really strange aliens (like huge space jellyfish - and jellyfish is just an approximation) or stuff like temporal loops and huge areas of space with weird properties. i always liked it when star trek done stuff that was legitimately weird! i also liked the episodes where a member of the crew would fall in love with an alien who's entire society is a metaphor for a tiny part of ours, too, though. for different reasons.

i don't even see avatar as a science fiction film, though. it's just a big dumb movie and the structure of it will be closer to indiana jones and the return of the pyramids than MY science fiction.

there are things to look at if you like to watch and hear a bunch of Cool Geeks hypothesize (fantasize) about what REALLY weird aliens MIGHT look like. i watched a thing on google video a while ago called 'alien planet' which is a mockumentary film where two robot probes go to an alien planet named Darwin IV and send back to Earth some....'Astonishing Pictures' - Johnny C. 'for Cox' McGinley.. there were strange aliens on that thing so check it out if that's what you want to see.

i would like to see a science fiction show have a prominent alien race that isn't humanoid or even really comparable to humans. it would take some thinking about i guess! more work than making a savage jungle people race.

well even though the chanur saga featured (surprise surprised) CAT PEOPLE there actually were some really interesting aliens in the background.  Wikipedia describes them pretty well.  I think that the biggest reason that sci-fi sticks to humanoid sorts of aliens is because the stories are supposed to appeal to humans though.  I mean in the Chanur Saga the methane-breathing aliens are so bizarre that nobody can even understand how they think which is probably what real aliens would be like.  But, it's incredibly hard to read a story about creatures you can't even begin to understand.  Even reading the Chanur Saga I don't have many opinions on those races because they're just these weird things that you can't figure out and you just sort of leave it that way.  On the other hand, the races we tend to have the bigger interest in as protagonists are ones we can relate to and therefore tend to be somewhat human-like.  Even if they have differences, they are at least established via human logic (we can understand why Spock does what he does because we can use human logic to figure out how he makes decisions, but if you have a race of things that you can't do that with you can't really relate to them).

At the same time though you could at least do better than cat people which have been done hundreds of times in the past.  I mean jesus at least the Chanur Saga and Man-Kzin Wars were written decades ago but we've had these stories around long enough to where cat people are dried up.

dances with wolves: the first film to do white guilt

i think the whole sticking to humanoid aliens in sci fi stuff is pretty true. i remember reading an interview with the director of district 9 about how he made the aliens insectoid but had to add human-like features for the expressions because otherwise the audience (us) wouldn't be able to empathize with any of those fooking prawns

Yeah I guess with sci-fi you have to sort of separate what would actually make sense in real life and what makes for a good story but I also think that a lot of sci-fi authors/filmmakers/whatever should at least reach a LITTLE further.  Like I said, Man-Kzin and Chanur are both pretty old so maybe their ideas weren't so overused at the time but nowadays I think that just making people that look like a cat but BLUE isn't really trying that hard.  When your characters look exactly like a thundercat you could try some more.

I want to make a sci-fi movie where the aliens are all cubes that don't move, it will be told from the perspective of one of them and it will be about how humans found them in another planet and used them as raw materials for building flat screen tvs. The movie ends as the last of them is harvested and one of those gadget fairs is shown. Camera closes in on a cell phone and the cube that was narrating the movie says something. It takes place in 2010.

edit: Also the aliens communicate through resonating frequencies and since they had nothing better to do they spent their whole time philosophizing and were about to figure out the meaning of life by the time humans got there.

there was some race on star trek that comprised of two different substances, one that absorbed light and gave off heat, and one that took heat and gave off light or something. i liked that.

I want to make a sci-fi movie where the aliens are all cubes that don't move, it will be told from the perspective of one of them and it will be about how humans found them in another planet and used them as raw materials for building flat screen tvs. The movie ends as the last of them is harvested and one of those gadget fairs is shown. Camera closes in on a cell phone and the cube that was narrating the movie says something. It takes place in 2010.

edit: Also the aliens communicate through resonating frequencies and since they had nothing better to do they spent their whole time philosophizing and were about to figure out the meaning of life by the time humans got there.

you could make this a level in Raimond CE which you promised me you'd start working on again in January by the way.