I guess the Morlock sidekick has Progeria, but what the fuck is up with the pixie crackhead girl?

Hello again, friends. Words can’t express how it feels to see warm faces again, as winter-ravaged as they may be.  Please, cast off your cloaks and warm yourselves by my fire.

It has not been the kindest few months for SA Studios, what with the multitude of lawsuits flying my way, and from such a diverse array of plaintiffs! Everyone from Harvey Weinstein to the ACLU found out about (REDACTED) but the truth is (REDACTED), and now the jackals and the parasites, the, the vermin, they all want a piece for themselves. Well, they can’t have it! They won’t!

But all of us must bear our own slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, and our communions in this place have nothing to do with (REDACTED). so forgive me, I will diverge no further.

Now I know right now you’re going to have a little trouble trusting me, since I’ve let you down so many times in the past. But this is, believe it or not, the official 100th Science Adventure Studios post, and there is no time better suited for new beginnings than big round numbers. With that in mind, let me welcome you to Science Adventure Studios…. PHASE 2!

You will perhaps notice there have been some pages added. Explore them. Nothing there that’s gonna change your life, not yet anyway, but you know you can’t get enough. But the real jewel in this shiny new crown? Glorious new MEGASIZED Post-Corporate Life comics. You probably already caught the first one on your way in. You can expect a new one of those every Friday, like clockwork. You’ll see.

And let me also advise you to watch THIS space, because I’ve let the blog wars run fallow without me for too long. I will no longer stare idly down from my soiled tower while the frothing cybermasses cry for leadership, but will once again remind all God’s children exactly what it means to blog. If you remember the last time I took arms against the sea of internet in such a manner, then you’re a liar. None other can recall that day, for none other survived it.

So just a fair bit of warning then. A word to the wise. Prepare yourselves. I’ll be seeing you all again shortly.

What is the President of Space?

Where did he come from?

What is his secret?

I’ve been excited about Avatar for a long time now, since the first rumors of the mythical “James Cameron’s Next Project” started bubbling up from the blog swamps. James Cameron is to Action movies as Hitchcock was to Thrillers and David Lynch is to Weird Stuff, the gold fucking standard, the towering icon of a complete genre. Speed was so good it was “Cameronian.”

…and he’s been gone for so long.

What was most pleasing about Avatar was it somehow managed to live up the hype as a “game changer”. They built an IMAX 5 miles from my house a decade ago, and it never really sold me. I remember seeing Vertical Limit there in all sorts of vaunted 9 trillion resolution 7500mm film blah blah blah but it was just, y’know, Vertical Limit on a bigger screen and a couple extra speakers. It’s not bad but I should have saved 4 bucks and seen it old school.

More interesting were all the 40 minute Digital 3D demo films, cheapo “run from the T-Rex on this runaway mine cart!” technology displays; you’re paying half price just to check out the 3D. 3D that, frankly, wasn’t all the impressive. It always seemed murky and blurry and just off-center, even in the zillion dollar Hollywood releases.

Avatar finally, finally shows what IMAX can really achieve. That early shot with Jake Sully waking up in the endless, zero gravity 2001-ish cryo-sleep chamber is deep and endless and 5 stories fucking tall and for just a moment I really was floating into the screen. It’s gobsmacking, jawdropping, astonishing and massive. You can see smudges on both sides of a dirty window, and the dimensions of the sunbeams filtered through the jungle canopies, all around you are flying little insects and, ugh, floating “seeds of the life tree” For the first time, I was finally excited about 3D in movies.

This is coupled with Cameron’s peerless direction; even at almost 3 hours this sucker moves and is staged with such refreshing clarity. It’s redundant sound bite, but for reals, after Michael Bay being the largest influence in action movies the last ten years, its so great to be able to actually tell what’s going on in a big set piece again. And in three goddamn dimensions to boot!

Also helpful is how immerse Pandora is. I guess it depends on willing you are to get into cartoon cat people living in a black-light reactive wizard painting, but compared to the “I’m just gonna do the whole thing in computers!” movies that have come before, it actually feels real. It had some weight to it. Density. And everything glows in really bright, neon colors, another refreshing change from all the “dark mud and gun-metal” colors of science fiction in the Bush era.

Unfortunately, everything else about Avatar is kind of retarded.

First of all, lets just face it. This is a $300 million dollar movie about blue cat people. They’re really, really, really, really well animated blue cat people, but there’s just an essential silliness there that is done no favors by overwhelming doses of New Age/Native American religion shit that’s both unconvincing and way too integral to the plot.

I mean, the blue cat people’s Space God literally comes to the save the day because the human prayed hard enough. For real, that’s the end of the movie. Spoilers.

The script is obvious and lazy and unfocused and silly as shit. It’s the Ewok’s Battle for Endor writ large. (I mean, for real, why would you build a 3 billion dollar mech-suit straight out of Robert Heinlein and keep the visor made out of such fragile glass? McDonald’s Commemorative Glasses have stronger glass than these crazy future tanks) It was thrilling when our characters are in actual peril during the epic, show-stopping final battle, as running towards the coolest Heavily Armed Space Marine Robot Suits ever put on film with just a spear and a loincloth ends up as you would expect it to. There are lots of dead blue cat people.

But then Space God gathers all the Space Beasts and has them repel the Monolithic Corporate Marines back to die on their wasted planet Earth. And then the human hero gets to have his brain placed into his blue cat person clone for good through the magic genitals of the Space God.

I hate it so much when God, and not necessarily our God, but any God, literally shows up in movies. It’s a little different when movies that are actually about religion do it, like the Matrix sequels, those sucked for very different reasons. But its so lazy and safe and completely unsatisfying.

What most interested me about the story is the Space Marines. Not surprising, since I consider Aliens to be not only James Cameron’s best movie but also the best action movie of all time. It wasn’t hard during Avatar to imagine these are the same Space Marines from Aliens just, say, another 100 years further into the future. The Starship Trooper mech-suits, for instance, are obviously several generations down the line from the Power Lifter Ripley uses to fight the Queen at the end of Aliens. There’s a ton of echoes like that, and Avatar can accurately be called a spiritual sequel to Aliens.

Think about it. “In the future, and evil mega-corporation sends a squad of heavily armed space marines to a distant planet where a mining facility has been attacked by mysterious aliens. Although ‘primitive’, the aliens prove too great a threat and the marines must retreat”. The only difference is, the Marines are the “good guys” in Aliens, and 25 years later, they’re the “bad guys”. There’s of course a world of difference between the kinda sexy blue cat people that ride glowing pterodactyls of Avatar and the terrifying rape-nightmare monsters of Aliens, but both movies are really the same story, just with the point of view, and thematic content, flipped.

The echoes continue with the presence of the always classy Sigourney Weaver in both movies, and Giovanni Ribisi is clearly channeling Paul Reiser’s corporate slime ball Burke character from Aliens. Remember Vasquez, the memorable Latina ass kicker from Aliens? She’s back, complete with explosive martyr’s death! Avatar’s most interesting character is the Marine Colonel Miles Quaritch, and enormous jug-head bad-ass with bitchin’ scars and, especially in earlier scenes, represents all the seductive fist-pumping jingoism the made the Space Marines in Aliens so ingratiating.

The similarities to Aliens are obvious, intentional, and, if you ask me, totally awesome. I fucking love Aliens, I’ve seen it 500 god damn times and it never fails to entertain the piss out of me. Having Avatar envelop me in 3D IMAX, I was okay with calling it a worthy spiritual sequel to Aliens.

The thing is, the first time I saw Aliens, it was a UHF broadcast on a fuzzy 18 inch TV on a bright Saturday afternoon, cut up with commercials and all the really good violence taken out. Even still, that movie pulled me in like no other movie ever has. To be fair, I was just a kid, but under the worst technological conditions for watching the movie it still became one of the most profound entertainment experiences of my life.

There are big portions of Avatar that are just as immersive and exciting as Aliens, so long as you’re seeing it in the IMAX. But the idea of watching Avatar on an old TV sometime down the road just does not excite me in the least. Avatar is a stunning, must-see achievement in movie making, but what separates really good movies from the great ones is how it plays on a TV, or a laptop, or an iPod. Because they truly transcend the media. After you strip away the bells and whistles, it’s the soul of a movie that sticks with you. Were any of the hyper-realistic battle-mech sequences in Avatar a fraction as cool as Ripley’s fight in the clunky, technologically limited fight with the Queen Alien​? Not really. They were as awesome as anything I’ve seen in a movie, but “Stay away from her you bitch!” is going to stick with me a lot longer than… see, I already can’t remember any of the dialogue from Avatar. But I will remember finally feeling like it was worth going to the movie theater again. It’s good to have you back, Jim.