Why is it not fair to compare Star Wars and LOTR because they're so different and yet it is fair to compare Star Trek and Star Wars?

How are Star Trek and Star Wars in any way similar except for half of their titles?

They're really completely and wholly different entities doing entirely different things. Different stories, different genres, different universes, different styles, different values, everything.

They only get compared because on the most obvious and superficial level - their titles and the fact that there are spaceships - are they similar and that's as deep as most people can be bothered to investigate.

I'm sorry, but this has bugged me as a meaningless and pointless waste of time ever since I was a kid.

To be fair, the skill sets separating a voice actor from a "regular" actor are not completely or exclusively different. The fundamental principles of acting truthfully under imaginary circumstances are the same, you're just putting more emphasis on different tools (your voice as opposed to your body). Even then, some of the tools are the same. The "regular" actor will still train his voice, just not as much or in a particular way as a voice actor, for obvious reasons.

And, it should be pointed out, many actors go back and forth between both with differing amounts of regularity, including Billy West.

With all due respect to Mr. West, I think the difference in quality has less to do with training and different skill sets (though that is part of it) and more to do with the fact that in cases like some Dreamworks pictures, they're out to do the biggest business on opening weekend, not finding the best people and talent to tell the story they want to tell, which is the same problem behind all lazy studio storytelling in Hollywood. Thus, you end up getting Will Smith coming in for an easy paycheck, as opposed to Tom Hanks delivering a solid performance.

(Something else I wish I'd remembered to talk about in the commentary:)

It's entirely possible that it's flat out impossible to get human being level higher reasoning WITHOUT a limbic system. Because of Descartes, we tend to think of logical reasoning and emotion as two separate and distinct parts of our brain, or more colloquially, we picture ourselves as "thinking" with our brain and "feeling" with our heart.

Now, obviously we know that's literally not true and all thinking and feeling is done in the brain, but we still consider "thinking" and "feeling" as distinct modes from one another. That's certainly how science fiction has always treated the subject when it came to artificial intelligence.

But I read a book a few years back called "The First Idea," which proposes a model of human thought where higher reasoning develops out of simpler emotions. The authors suggest that as children we start off with very simplified emotional states - we're either happy or absolutely inconsolable, with no in between. They also suggest that we also have a limited ability to have a sustained interaction with another human being.  You get so many moments of give and take before the baby's brain resets like a goldfish. But as we get older, the chain of moments we're capable of doing gets longer - you can carry on a "conversation" for longer and as a result, develop more nuanced emotional states.

Instead of only being able to be happy or inconsolable, you're now capable of being inconsolable, angry, frustrated, and annoyed. Eventually, some threshold of self awareness gets crossed and you're capable of saying, "I know I'm annoyed." And eventually, "Why am I annoyed?" which leads inevitably to, "How do I fix my being annoyed?" And we've arrived at higher reasoning.

It seems to make sense to me, though I'm obviously no clinical psychologist and it does destroy a hundred years of science fiction robot writing, including my beloved Data. And there's some interesting crossover between this idea and the fundamental principles behind acting - or at least a certain part of it - that I can't quite articulate just yet.

This discussion is getting pretty involved for what is off topic.

Maybe we should have a separate thread for "bitch and talk about movies we haven't done yet?"

But, suffice it to say, Jeffrey sums it all up pretty nicely. There's a couple other things that piss me off, like how time travel suddenly works differently than it ever has before in Trek, but you've got most of it.

Not that we in any way condone illegal copyright infringement.

But that is pretty awesome.

That's correct, we only see her tending to his wound wondering why it hasn't healed as much as one would expect.

Of course, if she were tending to both their wounds on a regular basis, wouldn't she have noticed that it went back and forth repeatedly?

You know what, I'm watching this right now on AMC and I don't care if it's the same movie. If you guys managed to reverse my opinion, I think it's reversed right back.

Maybe it's the same movie, but it still makes me laugh, dammit.

Here's the problem:

Replace "filmmaking" with "storytelling" and we're all on the same page, I think.

Crossposted to NP2K

Alright, finally got to see this last night in 3D IMAX with plenty of annoying talkers and even somebody taking flash pictures of the screen, thank you very much citizenry of Atlantic City.

Anyway, I was surprised at how weak the story was. No, I wasn't expecting revolutionary storytelling, I knew it was going to be Fern Gully in space and was completely fine with that. I also knew it was Cameron so I wasn't exactly expecting subtle. But even though Cameron isn't especially revolutionary when it comes to storytelling, he's usually more solid than Avatar was. Everything was exceedingly straightforward, even by Cameron standards; things got picked up and dropped pretty willy nilly, and there was never a point where I didn't feel like I was three steps ahead of the story. And - again, even for Cameron - man were the antagonists one dimensional, especially Paul Reiser - I mean Giovanni Ribisi.

Also, I understand the MacGuffin is just a trick to justify the story, but one quick and poorly setup As You Know scene is not enough to get me on board with what these characters are doing. Maybe I just missed it, but all I remember is Ribisi talking about how incredibly expensive Unobtanium is without a mention as to what it actually does or why it's so valuable. Was there something that I just missed?

But that's the story. And the story of this movie isn't its story, obviously, it's the experience. This movie is about putting you on an alien planet for two and a half hours and at that it succeeds exceedingly well, probably the single greatest example ever put to film.

The quintessential problem behind any artist working in science fiction is imagining an alien world. Really, it's a task beyond the capability of our feeble imaginations, already so prone to anthropomorphizing to truly imagine anything that could qualify as “alien” – that is to say, something completely and utterly foreign to anything we have ever thought or experienced ever. This is especially so when nature repeatedly puts our best efforts to shame. How could we possibly conjure creatures weirder than what crawls across the earth and swims in the depths of our oceans? It might very well be the single greatest act of imagination a human being can undertake, and while Cameron doesn’t break the surly bonds of Earth, he (and all the other imaginations involved) probably comes closer than most anyone else, and that alone is worth putting Avatar in the annals of cinema history.

That being said, I was disappointed and distracted by how obviously African all the various tribal touches on the Na'vi were, from Zoe Saldana's ear spacers, to the stick through the nose guy, to the big multi-ringed collar thing, etc. etc. Maybe it was some kind of idea of intentional primitive culture parallelism but it seemed to me like they took National Geographic's greatest hits and called it a day, and that took me out of it now and then, especially in the beginning.

I think I talked about this in the "Revenge" commentary, but I for one would have liked to have seen a story that explored the idea of how messed up you could get when everyone around you believed you were the savior of the universe.

Matrix had the opportunity and dropped the ball as well, it's kind of an implied part of Harry's character in Harry Potter (at least in the films, I haven't read the books) but not as central part of the story as I think it deserves to be and certainly not explored to its fullest.

It actually examines the question from the Jedi perspective: if you had this kid that you thought the whole future of everything rested on, would you tell him that's what you thought? Would you keep it from him, hoping things will play out naturally and you won't screw it up by making him self conscious? Or would you feel compelled to be honest about a truth of that magnitude and tell him?

Imagine the Jedi choose the former and we see Anakin growing up in the Jedi Order, training and otherwise living the life of a Jedi. But for all his life he can sense that he's treated just a little differently than the other Jedi. The other Jedi and the Masters and the Council in particular have some kind of feeling about him that he can sense, but which they hide too well for him to pinpoint. We, through the course of the story, know that this is the result of the Jedi believing he's "The Chosen One."

Over time, Anakin becomes more and more suspicious, knowing that his family is withholding something important from him but unable to find out what it is. Along comes Palpatine, who takes advantage of this already existing suspicion, preying on it to drive a wedge between them (Obi Wan in particular) and Anakin.

Eventually, Anakin discovers this belief of the Jedi, is seemingly saved from the precipice of falling to the Dark Side, but now has to deal with the burden of being the savior of the galaxy. Is he up to the task? Is he strong enough? Powerful enough? Wise enough? Will he know what to do in that one crucial moment? Will he be able to do what's necessary or will he choke? How does he know what he should do? How can he be sure that what he does is right?

It's very much the Oedipus story (at least from the Jedi's point of view): trying to avoid a situation ends up causing the very situation you were avoiding in the first place. And it's definitely a recipe for screwing a guy up, even a very noble good guy with the best of intentions. And it justifies his start down a very slippery slope from noble and good to uncomfortable means justify good ends to Force choking people for the fun of it. And it gives the Jedi a way to be wrong without being complete blind fools about the whole thing.

And ultimately, it's a much more interesting and compelling story. I admit, I don't have answers to all these questions the way Dorkman has worked up his, but these are the questions I would like to have seen asked.