Let me start by admitting that I don’t know why this sticks in my craw so much. But it does. And what is a blog if not a place to exorcise these sorts of demons?
I have ranted from time to time about the outright theft of intellectual property and plagiarism in the James Cameron film “Avatar.” When I watched this film in the theater it was clear he’s simply stolen the planet name Pandora from the Frank Herbert novel “The Jesus Incident”, and gotten the term “Avatar” from the name of the planetwide collective intelligence in that film called Avata. Other elements of the novel were also clearly influenced if not stolen from the Herbert novel.
As I read Midworld there are similarities that could very well have been influences on the film, but nothing that is just outright theft.
Then I read the entire Wikipedia article on this film. The section on Critical Response has even more clear examples where he just lift stuff from other films and novels with essentially no attribution. Amazing. Is this common? I was astonished.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avat…#Critical_response
I don’t fault a director for reading SF. Hell, I think it is good. But man, why not at least acknowledge the novelists in the credits?