Plot

PLOT OF AVATAR




Comparison with The Boat That Rocked

1)Underdogs versus political/military force

2)One character submerged into another lifestyle

3)Unlikely romance eventually succeeds

British Audiences will always support the underdog, perhaps due to the culture have have here of distrusting establishment figures. Interestingly, the criticism of the American Military in Avatar is not very subtle, which would be approved by a British Audience especially after the controversy over the Iraq and Afghanistan War, but doesn't tie in with conventional American patriotism. Films with romantic plots or sub-plots have historically fared well in the UK. For both these films this is particularly useful, as the crude humour in TBTR and the action element in Avatar mean that the typical audience would be more masculine, so a romantic element encourages women to also see the film.   


1) Comedy / Sci-Fi-Fantasy-Adventure

2) Love of music lives on / Pandora lives on

However, a difference occurs when we compare the outcomes of the two films. Avatar has a happy feel-good ending, as the heroes manage to beat the antagonists, and all the dilemmas are solved. In TBTR, on the other hand, the DJs are ultimately forced to stop working, meaning that their futures are uncertain, but the dream of accessable rock music lives on. Whilst TBTR is engineered towards the British Audience who tend to like realism in their films, Avatar's conclusion is more appealing to a US market, but fortunatly American screenplays are still very well recieved in the UK.

James Cameron - Empire Interview
'There's a lot of very recognisable archetypes in the story: the stories of which Dances With Wolves is one, the story of the American frontier and the conflict between technical, Western civilisation and the very close to nature indigenous populations, the native Americans, and that didn't go too well for them, you know. And of course that story is replicated throughout history in South America, Africa, India.

It has all these various ways in which it plays out but it generally doesn’t bode too well for the indigenous population. I think it’s got its roots in good old-fashioned, adolescent adventure storytelling. The sort of, Rudyard Kipling Man Who Would Be King, Lawrence of Arabia, John Carter of Mars. Anytime that you have somebody who's a representative of another culture, especially a mechanised or military culture, dropped into a completely different culture in an exotic land, and they have to find their place and themselves in the process. It's all pretty familiar stuff. I think from a science fiction standpoint it's got its roots in really classic science fiction of the 40's and 50's, not the kind of necessarily dystopian science fiction of the 60's and 70's. But that's OK, that was by design. You can't have your characters running around through the rainforest with a machine gun these days, it's just not PC. But you can do it on another planet. You can get away with things on Pandora that we couldn’t get away with here'

Richard Curtis - Telegraph Interview
"The genesis of this film was odd," says Curtis, 52, sitting in his office, located in (where else?) Notting Hill. "For a long time I'd been saying to Emma [his partner, Emma Freud] that I wanted to write a film about eight megalomaniacs on one corridor. I kept thinking about this office. If Chris Evans was in here, Chris Moyles was next door and Jonathan Ross was next to him, and Russell Brand and Terry Wogan the ones after that, and we all lived here, that struck me as a very funny explosive situation.