Avatar: Why does this movie look so familiar?

I can't wait to get my tier 11 unobtainium set!

though, unobtainium would be eminently appropriate for the frequency of certain items :)

At any rate, I think this movie stole more from Crude: The Real Price of Oil in terms of plot. They should have called it Dances with Spacecats. In terms of spectacle, i don't think it was worth half a billion dollars to eliminate flat eyes in animation.

Art imitates. That's what art does. I think it's great if James Cameron took inspiration from games and I'm sure the artists who made those concept art and made the game's models and environment are equally flattered and pleased. :)

Well originally Avatar was supposed to have an MMO tie in, so how cyclical is this?

Game inspiring movie inspiring game inspired by games which use movie qualities?

The person I saw this movie with described it on the way out of the theater as "Warcraft versus Starcraft."

I can't argue.

My girlfriend wasnt really into the movie itself, but as a big wow fan had a blast thinking about how the wow movie might look based on what she saw in avatar.

Na'vi = Night Elves
dragon bird things = dragonhawks and dragons
Floating rocks = nagrand
freaking huge giant tree = Teldrasil

Hopefully some of that sweet avatar work makes its way down the pipe for the warcraft movie.

Avatar more than once reminded me of Atys, the living planet ( http://tinyurl.com/yjvyfrc ), the Zoraï people on it, and its gorgeously illuminated Prime Roots, for those who know Ryzom. I'm confident that's coincidental though and also Pandora looks light years better!

One would think that the actual thematic elements (I mean, "AVATAR"?! come on :p ) would also factor into folks' comparisons of the films to MMOGs.

The entire concept of the film was about a guy playing an MMO (albeit one in which his avatar was walkimg through a real world rather than one in cyberspace) so yeah, that makes for a great idea for an MMO itself. If the players where basically treated to the same intro as the viewers and the main character was I'd be happy to play through it.

No fantasy game can claim to have invented flying rocks, nor even can the fantasy genre itself. Such ideas existed in many mythologies of the past. As do flying beasties and giant living trees.

Everytime I hear this notion of 'influence' and 'similarities' I think of the book "The Hero with a Thousand Faces" by Joseph Campbell. These same themes, images and myths have been repeated time and again since the beginning of human existence.

The Na'vi are the most godawful Mary Sue race since Twilight vampires.

Actually many of the places in the film look like 1970s prog rock album cover art more than anything else.

Avatar was first envisioned- including the flying rocks from his original sketches. These sketches were made during the 1970's when Cameron was doing trucking duty.

The only issue with the movie taking insperation from a game is that the loading screen of guildwars there was done purely because someone thought it would be cool to have floating rocks.

The movie itself was based around science and everything about the movie can be explained. There's very few things that can be pointed out about the movie that can not be explained through science.

There was a blog post by a astro physis that tried to point out all the flaws in the movie. He had a good list of 7 or 8 things from a science viewpoint that could not be explained and he thought they where done purely for fluff. Then along came one of the designers from the movie and pointed out how the flaws where explained from a science viewpoint. It even went on to tell that the design team of the movie had several different astro physis that where called many times to make sure everything about the movie could be explained from a real world point of view.

Everything from the time of day to the gravitional pull of the planet was carefully thought about and care was put into the detail. Even the planet is a real universe location that one could visit (though little is actually known about what it would look like on the surface but Camerons recreation of it could be close to what it would look like. It's thought that the surface could indeed support some kind of life and its location is in the right spot. Though who knows.

Point being though that most MMORPGs or even games in that sense don't take the amount of time to do such research and try to base things around real world science. I am sure the artist of that loading screen didn't think the time of day about how the mountains would float or anything like that and just looked at it from a visual standpoint.

I for one hope they don't attempt to make a MMORPG out of the IP. Well not unless Cameron is spearheading the game. The action game that was made off the IP was just horrible and it shows the dev team and whoever was in charge of the game design had no idea what the heck they where doing or wanted to do. They just tossed about of things togeather and called it good.

Only people I could think of that would be able to do this IP justice would be Blizzard or Bioware. No other company out there has the right to touch it. Cryptic would just destroy the IP and turn it into some superhero action game and Turbine.. Well Turbine might be able to pull it off but they really like the art style / abilities to do the game world justice.