Fact about this is this is a ground breaking technologies we are seeing before us and once again Cameron has raised the bar!

Yes sure the story may not be so original but guys what an original way to say an old story!

Guys think about it you are presented with a whole alien world that looks real and not cartoonish and your feel that you can almost touch it! After this the next step up would be to actually feel whats going on!

All I can say I have gone and watched the movie. I did not feel bored. It felt like i was on an alien world, sure the story could have been made different better whatever but it was not bad the way it was. So thank you Cameron keep them coming!

I’m making assumptions based on what’s going on at the same time. Luke heads to Degobah at about the same time that Han and Leia go to Bespin from Hoth. The Falcon’s hyperdrive engines are out of order, so we have to assume that Bespin and Hoth are relatively close… like… in the same star system or else they’d be traveling for years. So, best-case scenario is Luke, in the X-Wing with a working hyperdrive, gets to Degobah instantly (and can return to Bespin in about the same elapsed time) and the Falcon travels for months (unless you want to argue that years pass between the time the Falcon leaves Hoth and arrives on Bespin — in which case I argue there is no way that Han & Leia hadn’t either killed each other or started a family), Luke is still learning enough about Jedi-ing to challenge Darth Vader to a knock-down/drag-out in a couple months.

I’m pretty sure in the Star Trek movie universe it’s well-established that a good hyperdrive allows a ship to cross the galaxy in “a few days”. The Falcon, clearly, had a pretty crappy hyperdrive, but I’d still argue that it doesn’t take them more than a couple weeks to get from Tatooine to what’s left of Alderaan.

We can all agree (even Avatar fans, it seems) that the story was rather thin. We also agree that Cameron seems to have cribbed from just about everywhere. Most people cite other major sci-fi works like Dune as his obvious inspiration, but I felt the film borrowed rather heavily from the works of Hayao Miyazaki (which I find ironic, since Miyazaki’s cel animated worlds are decidedly more “2D” in visuals, but whose characters have tremendously more depth.)

I am very surprised to see serious film critics gobbling up the technology here, and failing to really add any serious demerits for the weak storytelling. I would have expected a harsher critical reaction. It seems like when a film has such a massive budget, critics love to swarm over every surface of the film, examining faults.

Rather than detail every one of the film’s storytelling flaws, I will instead state simply that the 3D technology that was so hyped, and which got me to see a film whose story, from the marketing, looked rather uninteresting to me, came off as more of a distraction than an enhancement. Creating more “depth” to the image, encouraged my novice eyes to explore every object in the frame, even when that object was an out-of-focus foreground element instead of the characters (or any other compositional “focus”).

While Dargis and other reviewers may foam at the mouth over the possibility of 3D being “the future of movies,” it’s my sincerest hope that it quickly disappears. I remember a quote I heard attributed to Leni Riefenstahl to the effect that “[the coming of sound spelled the death of cinema.]” Which in truth, it did. The cinema of 18fps silver nitrate with intertitles was forever replaced with sound, color, THX, CGI and 3D. I still think Lang’s Metropolis is better sci-fi than Avatar.

Also, with regard to Saving Private Ryan, was there any memorable dialogue in it? The whole movie is a cheese fest, although apart from the bracketing segments, an extremely well-structured movie.

Don’t get me wrong – I enjoy Die Hard and the damn thing is on roller skates when the crappy supporting characters aren’t talking. Saving Private Ryan has a core hour and 45 minutes that is terrific and a lot of dumb stuff at the beginning and the end. Avatar, it seems to me, will have roughly the same impact as Gladiator and SPR, although the eco-theme will turn off some of the normal macho audience. It doesn’t make anyone forget Aliens…

A Man for All Seasons and Richard III have the advantage of beginning with a relationship to history, so there’s at least the possibility of the audience having certain character and story information already. Richard, for example, lives in England. When he fights the French, we know what that means without spending a scene describing how awful the French are. When King Henry shows up in A Man for All Seasons, that scene is so much more exciting and shocking because we know what it means for Henry to show up anywhere. Yes, he’s set up well in the dialog and in the story before he shows up, but fans of history get a lot more out of his character because of the cult that has grown up around Henry in the real world.

When Boba Fett shows up in Attack of the Clones, we don’t need to see a scene explaining how he grows up to be a bad-ass bounty hunter because we have that information. Those scenes can advance with that advantage, and they can focus on the story because the characters are already interesting. Unfortunately, that doesn’t happen often in the series.