'Avatar' Controversy: Did James Cameron Steal the Story?
Filed under: Celebrities and Controversy, Fandom, Newsstand
While geeks the world over are eagerly awaiting Avatar, the return of James Cameron to the original sci-fi territory he's proven a master over with The Abyss and Terminator/Terminator 2, fans of obscure science fiction novellas from 1957 are being struck with deja vu. A reader tipped off genre champions io9 to the story Call Me Joe by Poul Anderson, a story that sounds remarkably like Cameron's supposedly original script that revolves around humans that use the bodies of an alien species via a mental connection as physical avatars, and proceed to use said avatars to exploit the resources of the alien's home world.
From the io9 post, "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."
Read the rest over at SciFi Squad
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
10-26-2009 @ 11:21PM
TheDarkKnight said...
Given Camerons history with plagiarism it wouldn't surprise me. He's good at advertising and special effects but he doesn't have very many original bones in his body.
On the other hand Star Wars was a Dune rip off and it did pretty well. Maybe plagiarism is the movie equivalent of reality shows on TV. Lacking orginality in every regard but still doing well.
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10-27-2009 @ 6:37PM
Bubbameister33 (Confused by Fanboyism) said...
How is Star Wars a rip off of Dune? I've never heard that before.
10-27-2009 @ 12:37AM
Ken said...
Of course, this is nothing new to me. Hollywood should be called "Plagiarism Central." The only times they've made anything original is from low-budget, experimental films. Everything else is either stolen from novels, foreign artsy films, or anime. (With some rare exceptions, of course.)
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10-27-2009 @ 8:00AM
Sour Bob said...
It's not like Cameron's writing reads like Tolstoy or anything...
His ideas for films are elemental and basic (or obvious and generic, if you prefer) enough that I have no problem at all believing these stories and similar ones were developed without any knowledge of each other.
I usually find that, in the case of plagiarism suits against blockbuster films, when you look carefully at the supposed "source material," all they have in common is some incredibly mundane root idea (robots go back in time, for instance) and a few accompanying scenes pursuing that premise that any freshman screenwriting student could imagine off the top of his or head.
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10-27-2009 @ 10:00AM
ML said...
I don't know how many times I look at the movie listings for the weekend and say to myself, "What, yet another robots-go-back-in-time movie?!" It's not like those rare, inspired movies about mismatched couples who start out hating each other but end up falling in love. No offense, but just sayin'. :)
10-27-2009 @ 11:18AM
Sour Bob said...
Throw a rock into the sci-fi section of your local bookstore and it will bounce off of at least four different robot time travel stories. While not quite its own genre, it's a well-tread subgenre.
10-27-2009 @ 9:11AM
Eric H said...
I just can't believe that people want to see this film after watching the trailer, it look awful.
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10-29-2009 @ 12:00PM
Bing said...
I pointed out the similarities regarding Call Me Joe and Avatar on the Marketsaw blog months ago. Cameron grew up on the old-school, golden-age sci-fi masters, (he has said so many times in interviews) so it would not surprise me if he read the short story in his youth and it lingered in his mind all these years. That being said, the premise of Call Me Joe is simply a spring board into a very different story in Avatar. In fact most contemporary sci-fi films owes their origins to the grand masters of sci-fi literature from the 50's all the way to the present. The level of creativity, fantasy, and scope that they delved into was simply astounding. I would wait and see Avatar before passing judgement.
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10-29-2009 @ 2:12PM
Joseph Moore said...
It cracks me up that people think that their stories are original. We've been telling ourselves the same story since we figured out how to communicate.
As far as inventive details for those stories? Did William Gibson try to sue the W. Bro's for The Matrix? No, he said, "Cool, my work is so ingrained in culture that it's become fair game for others to riff." (paraphrasing)
I don't doubt that "Call Me Joe" was Cameron's influence, maybe even direct inspiration, but I can guarantee you he's created a world with his signature all over it.
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1-12-2010 @ 1:55AM
Christine Sherry said...
I actually just wrote a short blog on how it was my concept.
http://ablindarcade.blogspot.com/2010/01/i-conceptualized-avatar.html
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