Are you a Halo fan? Have you seen Avatar? You're going to want to pay attention to director James Cameron's response to my question about the influence Aliens had on Halo and vice versa.
One of the common responses to the first trailer for Cameron's Avatar was "whoa, that looks like Halo." Of course, moments later, most people realized Halo was deeply inspired by Cameron's own Aliens and Cameron was simply riffing on a style he invented. Bungie has admitted the influence numerous times.
"The funniest thing is when some of the so-called fanboys get up trashing Avatar for looking too much like Halo," he laughed during a recent interview with me that aired on X-Play. "It's like...pay attention. If I'm referencing anything, I'm referencing the source work for Halo, which is my own stuff. So I get to do that. Nobody else gets to do that, but I get to do that. My rule, anyway."
Based on his response, there's no doubt those comments ruffled Cameron's feathers a bit, but since he was laughing and smiling while describing the influence his movies have had on games like Halo, he seems over it. It's not featured in the X-Play segment (look for the rest of the interview soon), but Cameron also underscored his appreciation for his work entering into the "cultural zeitgeist."
I was wondering about this when there was talk of a Halo movie, how they could possibly get away with all of that in a movie. A game, sure, it's a separate medium, but movies are different.
:lol at "referencing his own work"
in that avatar thread, was there an exact count for how many sci fi works he ripped off?
That's not the only stuff he rips off, but good for Cameron to at least admit he's just regurgitating his older stuff.
Jin-Roh looks like Killzone 2
Jin-Roh looks like Killzone 2
lol. I feel stupid. I never made that connection before.
Kinda funny because The Terminator was considered so similar to an Outer Limits episode that Cameron had to give writing credit to the writer of that episode after being sued.
Eighteen hundred years in the future, two foot soldiers clash on a battlefield. A random energy weapon strikes both and they are hurled into a time vortex. While one soldier is trapped in the matrix of time, the other, Qarlo Clobregnny, materializes on a city street in the year 1964.
Qarlo is soon captured and interrogated by Tom Kagan, a philologist, and his origin is discovered. Qarlo has been trained for one purpose, fighting, and that is all he knows. Progress is made in "taming" him; eventually Qarlo comes to live with the Kagan family.
But the time eddy holding the enemy soldier slowly weakens. Finally he materializes fully and tracks Qarlo to the Kagan home. In a final hand-to-hand battle, Qarlo sacrifices his life to kill the enemy and save the Kagan family.
Trent is a man with no memory of his life before the past ten days. His left hand has been replaced by an advanced computer shaped like his missing hand and protected by some transparent material. Three fingers are missing; the computer tells him they must be reattached before it can tell Trent what is going on. Trent is being hunted by a handful of humanoid aliens called the Kyben; they have the missing appendages. The action takes place in a large rundown office building. In his deadly game of hide-and-seek, he enlists the help of Consuela Biros (Arlene Martel), a beautiful, frightened woman who works there.
For reasons unknown to him, Trent was sent into the past via a "time mirror", located in the building. A captured Kyben tells Trent that he and they are from 1000 years in the future. In that future, Earth has been conquered by the Kyben, but all the surviving humans except Trent have mysteriously vanished. The aliens are being obliterated by a "radioactive plague" that is killing all intelligent life on the planet, apparently unleashed by the humans in a last-ditch effort to repel the invasion. In a desperate attempt to find a cure for the plague and to extract whatever knowledge is stored in the hand-computer, the Kyben have followed him back in time with the missing fingers.
Eventually, Trent defeats all of his Kyben pursuers (by ripping off the medallion-shaped devices they wear to anchor them in the past), destroys the mirror, and recovers the three fingers. With the computer now whole, he learns the terrible truth: he is not a man, he is a robot. The human survivors have been digitally encoded onto a gold-copper alloy wire wrapped around the solenoid in his thorax. Immune to disease, he must protect his precious cargo for 200 years after the Kyben invasion, by which time the plague will have dissipated. Then he will resurrect the human race.
Tragically, Trent had thought he was a man; he and Consuela had begun to develop feelings for each other. With the truth revealed, she leaves him, pity mixed with horror in her eyes. Trent is left to face 1200 years of lonely vigil.
"Second Variety" occurs in the aftermath of an extensive nuclear war between the Soviet Union (sometimes referenced as Russia) and the United Nations. Early Soviet victories forced the North American government and production to flee to a Moon Base, leaving the majority of their troops behind. To counter the almost complete Soviet victory, U.N. technicians develop robots, nicknamed claws—the basic models are "a churning sphere of blades and metal" that ambush their unsuspecting victims "spinning, creeping, shaking themselves up suddenly from the gray ash and darting toward . . . [any warm body]." U.N. forces are protected from the claws by a special radiation-emitting wrist tab. Within six years, the sophisticated and independent claws have destroyed the Soviet forces, repairing and redesigning themselves in automated underground factories run without any human oversight.
The U.N. forces receive a message from the Soviets asking for a policy-level officer to go to them for a gravely urgent conference. The U.N. victory was costlier than they had expected. Major Joseph Hendricks is sent to negotiate with the Soviets. En route to the rendezvous, he meets a small boy named "David" who asks to accompany Hendricks. When they near the Soviet bunker, soldiers immediately kill the boy, revealing him to be a robot. The claws' development program has evolved into sophisticated robots, identical to humans, but designed to mimic humans and to kill. The three Soviets met by Major Hendricks — Klaus, Rudi and Tasso — reveal that the entire Soviet army and command structure collapsed under the onslaught of the new robots.
From salvaged internal metal identification plates, two varieties are identified: I-V, a wounded soldier, and III-V, David. The II-V—the "second variety"—remains unknown. The different models are produced independently of each other in different factories. The Soviets also reveal that the U.N. protective tabs are ineffective against the new robots. Hendricks attempts to transmit a warning to his H.Q. bunker, but is unable to do so.
During the night, Klaus kills Rudi, mistakenly believing he is the II-V. The next morning, Hendricks and the other two Soviet soldiers return to the U.N. lines. When they reach the bunker, they discover it overrun: a crowd of David and Wounded Soldier model robots attack, but Tasso destroys them with a very powerful hand grenade. Hendricks and Tasso flee, leaving Klaus to the old-style claws. Klaus survives the claws and the bomb blast and rejoins the others. But Tasso blasts Klaus, sending "gears and wheels" flying. Tasso tells Hendricks that Klaus must have been the II-V robot.
Hendricks, suffering from a wounded arm and internal injuries, hopes to escape to the Moon Base. He and Tasso search for a hidden escape rocket, which is revealed as a single-seat spacecraft. Hendricks attempts to leave, but Tasso quickly subdues him. She convinces him to let her leave and send back help. In his injured state, he has no choice but to agree. Hendricks provides Tasso with the signal code needed to find the Moon Base.
Alone and armed with Tasso's pistol, Hendricks returns to Klaus's remains and discovers from the parts that the robot was not a II-V, but a IV-V. A group of robots then attack Hendricks, including Davids, Wounded Soldiers, and several Tasso models. Tasso was the true II-V. Hendricks recognizes that he has doomed the Moon Base by sending a robot to them, and that he cannot withstand the onslaught of robots attacking him. As the Tasso models approach, Hendricks notices the bombs clipped to their belts, and recalls that first Tasso used one to destroy other claws. At his end, Hendricks is vaguely comforted by the thought that the claws are designing, developing, and producing weapons meant for killing other claws.
And ALIENS is just a rip-off of Heinlein's Starship Troopers. It's not like Cameron's ever been particularly original.
Wasn't there even a lawsuit over the whole thing?Jin-Roh looks like Killzone 2
lol. I feel stupid. I never made that connection before.
Yep, that one's pretty blatant. All the way down to the glowing eyes and respirator.
If you're going to copy someone, at least make it interesting.Cameron basically takes good ideas and makes them awesome.
Cameron's been pretty good at that so far.
Wasn't there even a lawsuit over the whole thing?
Yeah man, he fucking nailed Romeo & Juliet and Dances with Wolves.
Yeah man, he fucking nailed Romeo & Juliet and Dances with Wolves.Nah man, he nailed Pocahontas. :P
Avatar's way more awesome than Dances with Wolves.