WARNING: The following post discusses key story points in Avatar. They are not “spoilers” per se, because everyone has already seen this movie (if not literally, then figuratively).

Avatar’s story is the one thing that has elicited a near-universal “meh” from the entire world. We’ve all heard it before: hero infiltrates enemy, learns the enemy is his friend and his friends are the enemy, helps former enemy fight former friend, and said fight is a standard progression of hero almost succeeds, then he fails, but then he miraculously succeeds. Archetypes like this aren’t a bad thing; after all, we humans have been telling this same basic story for thousands of years, keeping it fresh with minor variations (i.e. Avatar’s transhuman motifs), and it’s always interesting if not particularly groundbreaking. But with all the love and attention Avatar’s visuals got over the alleged 14 years James Cameron worked on them, the script is admittedly less polished. That’s probably one of the big reasons why Avatar didn’t win Best Picture at the Academy Awards.

There are many little things which Cameron could have done to twist the Hero’s Journey archetype — perhaps Jake Sully should have betrayed the Na’vi willingly before feeling remorse later on, for example — or simply cleaning up some of the dialogue and filling some plot holes would have sufficed. But perhaps the best thing Cameron could have done to Avatar is to make one simple removal, changing nothing else. This one removal would make Avatar’s criticisms of the War on Terror, racism, technology, and destruction of the environment immensely more powerful.

Following the scene after Hometree’s destruction, when we see slow-motion shots of Jake and Grace being wrestled out of the avatar links, Grace shouting “you murderer!” at Parker, fade to black. Roll credits.

Okay, that may be a “simple” cut, but it’s pretty major. Still, it would have made Avatar a much better film. Here’s why:

Let’s look at what occurs up until that point. Jake has gained the trust of the Na’vi, he and Ney’tiri have fallen in love, and he’s beginning to feel “like out there [in the avatar] is the true world, and in here [in his human body] is the dream.” But there’s nothing he can do to stop the military from coming to blow up the Na’vi’s Hometree. The attack is devastating, and the Na’vi know that Jake was fully aware it was coming. Ney’tiri rejects him, says he will never be one of them. It’s heartbreaking. Tragic. The evil corporation with the big guns killed the innocent natives, destroyed the beautiful forest, and tore Jake away from the woman he loved, all so they could mine a stupid rock.

If the movie ended there, everyone in the audience would leave with one thing on their mind: blood for oil is a horrible thing. Look what it did to the Na’vi. Look what it did to our boy Jake.

But no, the story keeps going. Jake escapes and gets back in his avatar body to find that the Na’vi are still alive and well (albeit badly beaten and grieving for their lost people), and all he needs to do to become “one of them” again is to ride on the back of a really big dragon. He leads them into battle against the humans, and apparently their advanced technology is no match for flying lizards, rhinoceroses, and kitty people with bows and arrows (the same kitty people with the same bows and arrows that didn’t do squat just a few scenes before, but now they’re angry kitty people, so it totally works). In the end, the evil humans are defeated, and the kitty people live happily ever after with Jake among them.

So, what is the audience thinking now? Holy shit, we just saw dragons killing helicopters. That was cool. It was like Reign of Fire, but fucking awesome instead of fucking awful.

Yes, the battle scene was awesome, but what happened to the anti-war, anti-corporate, environmentalist message? Oh, yeah, that. Yeah, I guess the whole Iraq thing really does suck. Anyway, remember when that angry cat guy just like jumped onto the ship and shot like seventeen soldiers with his bow? That was fucking sweet!!!!!!

If James Cameron had ended Avatar on a horribly tragic but realistic note, it would have been a bold, ballsy, daring move, and an extremely effective one at that. Most if not all arguments about the story being derivative and cliché would be rendered moot, and its message would pack more of a punch than any recent film of its type in recent memory. It would impress not only with its visual technology, but with its audacious injection of seriousness and maturity into a blockbuster. Here would be a big-budget, spectacular film telling us that a hero cannot save the day; only we, the people, can do so by preventing the horrors just witnessed in glorious 3D from ever occurring in reality. In terms of making pacifists out of us, “war is a drug” has nothing on that.

Alas, dragons killing helicopters is a much more impressive demonstration of glorious 3D technology. It’s not Best Picture material, though.

I know they’ve had closed-captioning and subtitling features for a while, but I never bothered to try it out until now. I suppose if I don’t do the subtitling now, it’ll soon be done for me by Google’s speech recognition robots, and done very badly.

So here’s “Let’s Meet the Lerners” with full closed-captioning. Click the arrow in the control-bar-thingy, then the “CC” button to turn it on. And if anyone reading this is fluent in another language and wants to translate it, download this .srt file, open it in Notepad on Windows or TextEdit on Mac OS X (if you’re savvy enough to use Linux, I probably don’t need to tell you what your text editor is called), and rewrite all of the texty things while leaving the numbers intact. Then send it to me, of course.

That is all.

Sources:
» Ticket Price
» Gross

There have been a great deal of technical issues preventing me from working as quickly as I’d thought I would be able to. These issues, however, are in no way insurmountable, just really, really annoying. Expect to know more in March, and see the final product in April.

For now, here’s a still image of something or other happening:

Yeah, I feel your pain, guys. People don’t pay for movies anymore either, and if they did I’d have a clear-cut business plan that anyone could understand, and I’d be rolling in investment money by now and going full speed ahead on a bajillion-dollar live-action-CGI-blend-extravaganza about space pirates or something. But that’s just not the way the world works anymore.

Now, I understand the need for a coping mechanism. Blame the cheap bastards who just want to download all of your hard work that you worked so hard on for weeks and months and years. Maybe they’ve got a point when they say the big record companies shouldn’t keep making money, but you, nooooo, you’re indie! You make less money than a part-time fry cook at McDonald’s, and if people steal from you, then they’re bad, bad people! You deserve to be paid for your hard work!

No you don’t. You’re indulging in your own creative vision; nobody asked you to, and you’re not providing a service to anybody. You are creating all the pretty music in your head because you feel like it, and you are not inherently entitled to anybody’s appreciation and certainly not monetary compensation.

If you’re good, though, and people like your music, then you don’t have to tell them that you deserve to be paid for it, because they know. They’re your fans now, and they’d love to throw money at you.

So, I’m sorry to break it to you, impoverished indie musician, but if you’re not making money from your music, then you’re either not good enough or you haven’t put a god damn PayPal button on your website.

Slash rant.

You see, Theora and H.264 are shooting guns at each other and Theora is shouting about freedom and H.264 is talking about money and Firefox is a fox and he likes Theora and Opera is a singing fat lady and she likes Theora too and Apple is an apple with leaves and a bite out of it and it likes H.264 and Google is a rainbow and it likes both of them and Dirac is hiding in his room and crying because nobody pays attention to him.

There. Now you know.

The iPad is the first device to use an Apple-designed processor. This is something one could easily have predicted when Apple bought PA Semi in 2008, but now that Apple’s finally gone and used their newly acquired chipmaker to actually make their own chip, the potential ramifications begin to sink in. Now that Apple makes their own processors, what’s to say they’ll still be putting Intel’s in their Macs?

One can see why they wouldn’t want to. Intel Macs are much better for Apple customers than Apple shareholders, because they A) allow people to install Windows or Linux on their Macs, and B) allow people to install Mac OS X on whatever the hell they want. Both are things that Apple would probably like to make more difficult or impossible.

But wasn’t installing Windows on a Mac one of the big features that Apple used to promote? Of course it was, five years ago; back then, it was entirely possible that the average user might still need some of their Windows apps. Well, okay, it probably wasn’t, but over the last five years, millions of people switched to Macs, more and more of what we need computers for has become web-based, and the amount of software for the Mac has grown exponentially. It’s more evident than ever that to the average user, OS X and Windows (and Linux) are, for all intents and purposes, interchangeable. There is nothing you can do with one OS that you can’t do with the other, and it all comes down to personal preference. Even I, a power-user, have no reason whatsoever to boot into Windows except for gaming, and the PC gaming market isn’t perceived as large enough for most companies (like, for example, game publishers) to care very much about.

Apple can drop its commitment to Windows-on-the-Mac at any time, and it would have no adverse effect on their business.

So what of the Hackintoshing issue? It’s not legal in most countries — much like torrenting copyrighted movies, going 70 mph on a 55 mph highway because everyone else is, or clicking the “I’m 18″ button on a porn site when you’re actually 17 — but that’s hardly stopping people from doing it. In fact, I’ve long been considering building some Hackintoshes; my Macbook Pro isn’t great for HD animation and video editing, and buying a Mac Pro and a few Xserves for rendering could be almost triple the cost of building equivalent machines. That kind of thing, I would bet, frightens Apple very much: independent filmmakers who will cost-cut as much as they can to get their projects done without blowing all their rent money.

It’s not that Apple wants to bankrupt millions of starving artists. It’s that they’re a publicly-traded corporation, and they have a duty to their shareholders to make the most money that they can. By ditching Intel processors for a proprietary chip, and eventually phasing out backwards-compatibility with Intel chips, Apple could make Hackintoshing virtually impossible.

So, Zacqary, basically what you’re saying is that you’re upset because maybe now you can’t illegally install OS X on a cheaper computer?

No, Helvetica Bold 10 Maroon, not exactly. I’m upset because Apple has gotten used to taking away their customers’ control over the computer-like-devices they purchase, and it’s not inconceivable to imagine them doing just that for Macs too.

Admittedly, building Macs with Apple processors wouldn’t necessarily change the Mac experience all that much; you just wouldn’t be able to run Windows on it anymore. But if they get away with that, what’s to say they’d stop there? Why not move OS X to a locked-down, App Store-ish model? Why not ban Adobe Premiere from OS X because it competes with Final Cut? Hell, why not ban Photoshop because with the amount of Apple vs. Adobe fighting there’s probably a Photoshop competitor being worked on by Apple right now?

But that would piss off the pros, right? Mere “consumers” might be dumb enough to take that lying down, but graphics and video professionals would never stand for such things. Surely Apple couldn’t do that, right?

Of course they can. They’re Apple. They can do whatever they want. And they seem to want to be in complete control of everything, from the moment it is sold until the moment it deteriorates due to planned obsolescence.

Obviously, it wouldn’t work, and Apple would completely fall apart as people begin to remember why openness was a good thing. That doesn’t mean they won’t try. And that very real possibility that Apple might pull this crap is making me very interested in Linux-based alternatives to the Final Cut suite.

You guys.

Look at this. Look at this article by MG Siegler.

Are you seeing this? Last two sentences of the first paragraph:

After all, they were getting great publicity for giving away something that was already free (GrandCentral — which is now known as Google Voice). We wondered if they wouldn’t pull the same stunt in the future. Well, it’s the future; and they are.

MG wrote that. He wrote that. Em dashes and semicolons were the very first things I ever passive-aggressively taught him. And now he just used them the way they’re supposed to be.

Also parentheticals. All three, in the same paragraph. Wow.

And look at this, right at the start of the next paragraph:

Again, this is actually a very nice thing they’re doing, but it’s also an ingenious way to promote what Google clearly considers to be one of its killer products: Google Voice.

Omigod he just did the same thing with a colon too eeeeeeeeee!!!!!!!

MG, you have no idea how proud I am of you; I never thought this day would come so fast. Just think, someday maybe you’ll even spot a place where my own punctuation compromises readability.

Now, all I have to make fun of about you is your Apple fanboyism and obsession with Twitter, making me just like everyone else in the world. Unless, of course, you so much as misplace the acute mark in the word “cliché” (which you have no excuse for because on your Mac it’s as simple as hitting option-E before typing the E). If you do that, I will not hesitate to waste four hours of my life ranting about it in order to get maybe two or three extra pageviews.