Sources Avatar is accused of ripping offFollow

Avatar finally ended its stretch as America's #1 movie, but people are continuing to point out sources that James Cameron borrowed from.

Dances With Wolves
The similarities: A military man "goes native" and takes the side of the natives against his own army.

Pocahontas
The similarities: mostly they have to do with a guy going native and falling for a native woman, while his comrades want to run the natives out. Oh, and the native woman is betrothed to a native warrior guy, but she's not into him.

Call Me Joe
The similarities: Like Avatar, Call Me Joe centers on a paraplegic - Ed Anglesey - who telepathically connects with an artificially created life form in order to explore a harsh planet (in this case, Jupiter). Anglesey, like Avatar's Jake Sully, revels in the freedom and strength of his artificial created body, battles predators on the surface of Jupiter, and gradually goes native as he spends more time connected to his artificial body.

Roger Dean's paintings
The similarities: We ran a gallery of Dean paintings that look awfully similar to Cameron's vision a while back, and it is definitely striking how much correspondence there is — the floating mountains, the dragons, the weird fauna, the arch-shaped rock formations, etc.

Judgment On Janus by Andre Norton
The similarities: There are idllyic forest people, the Iftin, who are in touch with their world and live in big trees. And they bond neurally with their hunting birds, the quarrin. A human who's part of a group looking to exploit the planet goes into the forest and gets the "green sickness," then finds that he's been transformed into one of the Iftin.

The World of Noon by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky
The similarities: The Guardian reports that Russians are up in arms about the parallels between this ten-book series and Cameron's film. They both take place in the 22nd century and feature a planet called Pandora. The aliens in the Noon books are called the Nave. Both Pandoras are idyllic forest worlds, although the Noon books feature two humanoid native species, not one.

The Fire Kind
The similarities: This comic came out in 2000 A.D., just before Cameron wrote his first "scriptment" for Avatar. There's a lush jungle world, where the blue natives ride on big dragons, and an evil corporation wants to mine the rare mineral Hexacrin. And the natives have a psychic connection to their entire world. And there are "weird floating rocks." Also, the main character is a human botanist who goes against his own kind to defend the natives.

So what do you think, did he get his ideas from these movies and books, or just a super cliched plot that has been done to death?

Either or I still enjoyed the movie enough to see it twice in the theaters.

It's hard to have a more generic story than the one in Avatar. The movie was all about the special effects and the 3D. Acting like it was ever about more than that is silly.

QFT. I don't think I've heard a single thing in praise of the actual plot, mostly the visuals and a little bit of the acting (the actress who did voice for what's-her-name, the female Na'vi, I think won some sort of award).

I really enjoyed the visuals, and the vision of a completely different world. I think my favorite moment, though, was when Jake first connected to his avatar. The sheer joy he shows of being able to walk and run again just connected to me. It made me happy. :)

Geek moment: just before that same scene, when the doctors are monitoring the avatar-connection process, one of the doctors is holding a tablet-like device while looking at a readout on a big screen. He says something like, "Hey, check this out," and grabs the display off the big screen and puts it on his handheld device to show another colleague. My inner geek went, "Oooh! I want that!" :)

Edit: Facepalm moment: the mineral they're mining for, that this whole mess is all about? "Unobtanium." [insert Picard facepalm art here]

Edited, Feb 19th 2010 12:50am by Rykhorne

Maybe it's just me, but I didn't really see much of a "completely different world". It looked amazing, no arguing that, but I spent the whole movie thinking to myself, "didn't I see that in <movie/game/anime>?"

Left out Fern Gully.

I've seen it. It's got a plot similar to Dances with Wolves. Some reviews called it "Dances with Wolves 2.0", just like they said Avatar was "Dances with Smurfs".

The plot is by no means unique. And it's been done in many movies before. One group looks down on another, a person from that group is stuck with the other group, and realizes "Hey, these are people too!".

Edited, Feb 21st 2010 1:32pm by TirithRR

Taken from Guardian.co.uk

Avatar fans desperate for a deeper insight into the world of the Na'vi are set for a treat after director James Cameron revealed he is planning to write a novel based on the box office hit.

The prequel, which would mark the director's debut as a novelist, will go into depth about the previous lives of characters. "It would be something that would lead up to telling the story of the movie, but it would go into much more depth about all the stories that we didn't have time to deal with – like the schoolhouse and Sigourney [Weaver's character] teaching at the schoolhouse; Jake on Earth and his backstory and how he came here; [the death of] Tommy, Jake's brother; and Colonel Quaritch, how he ended up there and all that," the film's producer Jon Landau told MTV.

The book will not be a novelisation, Landau insisted. "A novelisation basically retells the story of the movie. Jim wants to write a novel that is a big, epic story that fills in a lot of things," he said, adding that the book should be available by the end of 2010. Cameron himself later confirmed the news to the Wall Street Journal.

"There are things you can do in books that you can't do with films," he said. "I told myself, if [the film] made money, I'd write a book." At the end of January, Avatar took over from Cameron's previous film, Titanic, as the top-grossing movie of all time.

Landau told MTV that if Cameron's novel is a success, they might look at allowing other authors to write books about the world. "We certainly have stories that are set before the movie opens and after," he said. "I think that what we want to do is find out what mediums those stories are best told in. There might be opportunities in publishing to tell some of the backstory, tell some of the earth war stories, what went on in Jake's life before the movie. And we'd have that lead up to the sequel that might take place on Pandora several years after our movie closed."

They may not, however, be approaching any Russian writers, after Cameron was forced to reject claims in Russian papers that Avatar owed an unacknowledged debt to Soviet fantasy writers Arkady and Boris Strugatsky and their creation, The World of Noon, which is set on the planet Pandora and follows the lives of humanoid inhabitants the Nave.

Geez I hope I don't get fired for this...well here it goes......

I really hate the movie Titanic!

Super cliche. But it makes money so whatever.