'Last Samurai' and Dances With Wolves'

I've written before how Avatar isn't quite as much like Dances With Wolves as one might think.  The similarities seem more superficial when one considers the similarities of DWW with other modern film stories. 

However, this is not to argue that DWW has not had its influences on other related plots such as Avatar.  But it may help to compare DWW with a story that may have less superficial similarities but possibly some similarites that run more deep. 

The film The Last Samurai is a somewhat more recent film.  Like DWW, TLS depicts a man who is haunted by the horrors of war and in need of a return to nature away from the industrialized modernity that senselessly mows down the closer-to-nature natives for political purposes.  He starts out with very different loyalties and slowly comes to realize that the ways of the natives are more healthy, natural, and honorable, and will end up siding with the natives' violent confrontation with the people he was once loyal to.  

In some ways, TLS is even more like Avatar than DWW is in that the former warrior actually becomes leader in the violent confrontation with his former people.  However, TLS and DWW are even more about a cultural transformation than a spiritual or physical transformation.  Avatar certainly takes some of these elements, but these other stories are less about greed than about cultural ignorance and a distorted sense of modernity resulting in politicized prejudices.  In these senses one might detect closer sympathies with Pocahontas (which drew more directly from DWW than the later Pocahontas-inspired Avatar)

Got ham?

The young actor who plays Bruce Wayne in the Batman origins series Gotham asks an even more pertinent question than "Got milk?":

Movie Review: RoboCop 2014

Warning: Spoilers!  Not spoilers as in too many plot details, but spoilers about how this is yet another Hollywood Liberal Tomato.

When this movie came out in theatres I didn't go to see it because I thought it would just be another completely lame attempt to cash in on a popular movie.  The original 1987 RoboCop was a fantastic movie- any re-make would necessarily be much less.

I watched the new RoboCop by myself first to make sure it wasn't inappropriate for my kids and was pleasantly surprised. This really is a completely different story than the '87 RoboCop. And as entertainment it's not bad.  It's much more serious than the original, but honestly it's better written.  The dialog is better.

Unfortunately, RoboCop 2014 suffers from the rot of the liberal mindset much much worse than the original.

The basic premise of RoboCop 2014 is that the evil Corporation (backed by FoxNews) wants to replace policemen with Terminator-like robots, but Senate Democrats won't allow it. This is laid out in an early scene between the evil CEO of The Corporation and the heroic senatorial homage to Harry Reid and Barney Frank:

Senator Dreyfuss: I don't care how sophisticated these machines are, Mr. Sellars. A machine does not know what it feels like to be human. It can't understand the value of human life. Why should it be allowed to take one? To legislate over life and death, we need people who understand right from wrong. What do your machines feel?
CEO Sellars: Well, they feel no anger. They feel no prejudice. They feel no fatigue, which makes them ideal for law enforcement. Putting these machines on the streets will save countless American lives.
Senator Dreyfuss: You're evading the question.
CEO Sellars: No, I'm not.
Senator Dreyfuss: Yes, you're evading the question. I asked what do these machines feel? If one of them killed a child, what would it feel?
CEO Sellars: Nothing.
Senator Dreyfuss: And that's the problem. That's why 72% of Americans won't stand for a robot pulling the trigger. 

Somewhere

Thanks to Dog in Space for posting this...  Too true.

What Movie Is 'Avatar' Really Based On? [review]

The following contains plot spoilers for Avatar and for various movies to which it will be compared.  If I mention a movie here, chances are the plot will be discussed.  None are new movies.  Proceed at your risk.

Avatar has been said to be based on so many movies that one wonders whether it is actually based on any one particular story, and instead belongs to a family of related stories.  Avatar is an imaginative recombination of existing themes and story elements, and a visually interesting realization of its story, but I do think it owes more to some movies than others.

So much so, in fact, that I think that certain movies had a noticeable impact on the minds of the story's developer(s).

Click on the picture to enlarge.

I started thinking about this when I first heard Avatar characterized as "Dances With Wolves on another planet."  The more I thought of this idea, the more apparent it was to me that it had much more close parallels with another film.  As I finally started to assemble my thoughts on the matter, I came across the meme above.   If you look at the picture, you can see some apparent similarities between Avatar and some other films.  Some are more superficial than others. 

Premise Problem With District 9

In retrospect, the most basic premise of District 9 falls flat with an audible thud.

Quasi-governmental corporate thugs will do anything for the big bucks.  They want extraterrestrial weapon technology to sell to the highest bidder.  Billions and billions of dollars. They want it so bad that the Big Boss will sacrifice his son-in-law to get it, breaking his daughter's heart, even to the point of having him vivisected to death.

That's pretty greedy, if you ask me.

So how do they try to get these extraterrestrials to cooperate?  They put them in shacks in a concentration camp.  The aliens are reduced to the criminal mindset that we are told must inevitably come to those who live in shacks.  They become greedy opportunists themselves, who will do almost anything for .. cat food.  It seems that a local native crime lord (and why did the evil corporation let him into the District 9 camp?) has a larger collection of alien technology than the evil corporate thugs, because he knows a secret that hasn't occurred to the corporate thugs: bribe them with the thing everybody knows they like: cat food!!!! 

These aliens may be refugees, but they are not sheepherders (or zeepherders or whatever) from planet X.  Many of them are engineers with knowledge of the very technology the baddies want.  Christopher Johnson (the alien who is a quasi-protagonist in the film) never is conflicted about turning over his alien technology, because he is never offered anything for it.

What corporation wouldn't wine and dine our extraterrestrial guests (even if keeping them prisoner, prisoners can still be treated like guests) for such a huge pay off?  What government wouldn't do that, for that matter?

Comparing Elysium to District 9

Spoilers abound here for Blomkamp's two sci-fi action flicks.

I'm not planning here to compare the quality of the two movies, just highlight their plot similarities.

Both movies feature a disadvantaged group living in slums, a state that seems to be attributed to the avarice of corporations. Both feature a protagonist that has some health emergency that they have only days to resolve.  In both movies, the ailing protagonist is attempting to get to a space station in the sky that contains healing machines that can cure his ailment.  He must in the mean time hide from evil mercenaries because he has something in his body that the bad guys desperately want to exploit.  He must at some point escape from a torture table/chair because of this.  He will hide from the bad guys' surveillance in the slums for a while.  He will at some point be battling the bad guys using a powerful exo-suit, a reluctant hero turned Rambo.  He will have acquired the exo-suit from some crime lord in the slums.  He will at first be very selfishly motivated to only care about his ailment, but in time he will come around to deny himself access to that healing machine in the sky in a selfless act which will right some social injustice, since "the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few."

A lot of similarities, I think.