my hope(s) for the franchise's future

[avtrfan]

*** no musicals, please!

and on a more serious note: i do hope that jc will treat script writing more than just than an afterthought as he and his team are making the sequels.

when you first see avatar, it's one h*ll of a roller-coaster ride and you enjoy the film despite a few nagging details. watch it again and you start seeing plot holes, unexplored ideas, intriguing concepts never fully fleshed out, etc.

for the longest of time, after seeing all three versions of the movie and *especially the deleted scenes*, i had the impression that it was as if jc wrote the script as filming progressed. only being pressed for time, not having time to step back and reflect, could explain the errors and other loose ends in the film.

so i was quite stunned when i discovered that jc already had a version of the story, fully written in the form of this "project 880", *for 10 years* before making the hit film we all know.

holy cr*p!

how can you have been sitting on this for so long, have time to refine it, polish it and yet end up with a film marred with countless little problems and silly details ("unobtanium", quaritch's lack of depth, etc.)?

anyway, despite my strong reservations regarding the colonel's return, i do hope that this time, jc and his crew will work at writing better scripts, without any obvious plot holes and no stupid mistakes. there is so much potential in this universe he created that i would love to see sequels that are better than the original.

[Clarke]

Have you actually read P880? It's very different from the final script.

[Moco Loco]

We can hope, but who knows, he keeps pushing dates back like things are being rushed, but hopefully the sequel being years later will be like a fresh start.

[X.,.Pandora.,.X]

Originally Posted by Clarke

Have you actually read P880? It's very different from the final script.

Wait what??? Where??!?

[avtrfan]

@clarke:

yes i actually did.
well, that's assuming that the copy i got off the net is not some fake written by some over-enthusiastic pre-teen. but i'll assume what i read is jc's doing.

as immature as the text i have read can be (clearly in need of a good workover by a copy editor), the final film is clearly "in there". scenes and dialogue lines are easily recognizable. even many of the deleted scenes are clearly derived from "project 880". the overall structure is basically the same despite the differences.

i have found that most of the alien aspects of the universe created by jc make more sense in "project 880", despite some of them being quite over-the-top (i mean, detachable/projectile heads?!?). on the other hand, the human aspect is usually better in the final film. i was surprised to see how idiotic and akin to the "disposable red shirts" from that other franchise the security forces are in the original text. also surprising is how much selfridge can be the cliché uni-dimensional bad guy in "880", compared to the movie. quaritch is almost an after-thought.

there was clearly an extensive re-write before and during filming, that i feel was done in quite a haste. some of it was for the better, but quite a few loose ends, mistakes and other bits that don't quite make sense appeared in the process. furthermore, a certain coherency (not sure if this is the right word, here) that was present in "880", despite that text's immaturity, was lost.

i do hope that, er, peer-reviews (for lack of a better term) are being/were done whilst the sequels' scripts are/were being developed, to ensure that we all see a polished and spotless film when it is released.

@X.,.Pandora.,.X:

just google "project 880 avatar".

[Clarke]

Originally Posted by X.,.Pandora.,.X

Wait what??? Where??!?

Here.

[X.,.Pandora.,.X]

Oel Ngati Kameie

[avtrfan]

re-reading my previous post, i realised i didn't express myself as well as i should have. what i meant to say was that the rewrite was done in such a haste (and apparently without review) that important details were lost during the process. the best examples i can quickly come up with are:

* in "project 880", "unobtainium" is said to be a joke name that stuck. that little detail was lost in the rewrite and the mineral's name, as used in the film, was one of the earliest criticism coming from the reviewers.

* the original text lays out the reasoning behind the idea of building a school for the na'vi, again something that was lost in the final film: to train the indigenous population to do the mining for the humans. like it was said in '880, "welcome to imperialism 101" (quoted from memory). in the final film, the existence of the school, its purpose was not fully fleshed out or explained in a satisfactory fashion, that i recall.

* mo'at's line in "880" when grace dies, is (again, from memory) "the great mother could not save her body". had this line been used instead of the one heard in the film, or actually had jc more or less essentially used the scene from "880", then we would have a good explanation for grace's return in the sequels.

and that's not counting the bits that didn't quite work right or even contradicted others, that crept into the final script.

yes, those are all "just details". but it's details that can make or break an otherwise perfectly good novel or film.

to repeat myself, not all of the rewrite was for the worse. some of it was for the better. it's just that too many good points/ideas that helped "project 880" hold together ended up being lost, something that could have been avoided had a review/feedback loop process been used during the rewrite. stanley kubrick and arthur c. clarke had something similar when 2001: a space odyssey was being written, kubrick playing the part of the nitpicker, finding flaws in inconsistencies in what clark wrote.

hopefully, jd enlisted a brigade of nitpickers to help in creating a script that is as perfect as can be.

now, it also helps if you have a good starting point for your script -- sometimes, you just can't dig yourself out of a hole. i do have ideas about that (who doesn't?), but that should part of another post or thread.

[Clarke]

Originally Posted by avtrfan

hopefully, jd enlisted a brigade of nitpickers to help in creating a script that is as perfect as can be.

IOW, 50 randomly chosen sci-fi fans?

now, it also helps if you have a good starting point for your script -- sometimes, you just can't dig yourself out of a hole. i do have ideas about that (who doesn't?), but that should part of another post or thread.

I think you can revise yourself out of a hole. Avatar has a great story, but it doesn't have the supporting world and character to actually prop up the story. You can fix both of those by communicating more to the audience, more efficiently communicating what the original film got across to them, and refining the characters as people.

[Ja'k Dawsiin]

a lot of times the big studios change certain ideas or controversial parts to suit their agenda or to avoid the controversy. a huge example of this is Warner Brothers changing the concept of human coppertop batteries in the 1999 movie The Matrix. originally the humans were enslaved in the Matrix as a gigantic hive mind neural network for processing power, but WB thought the audiences would be too dumb to understand that, and made the ridiculous decision to make humans into batteries, which makes no sense as there are far more efficient power sources, including cold fusion.

i think Fox shied away from the school training natives to be miners, as too controversial and reinforcing the colonialism aspects, even a potential slavery message, and decided to gloss over it instead, even deleting most of the scene from the theatrical release. fortunately we got the Avatar SE and Avatar CE versions, which contained the full scene. it's still never said in the finished scene, that the RDA would benefit in any way, by educating the locals, it's just hearts and minds outreach between the scientists and the Na'vi.