Luke
stu-kicks
CibbuanoAvatar
January 8th 2010 11:26
For a film that James Cameron has been working on for pretty much over a decade, Avatar kind of snuck on the world before exploding like a bomb full of hype. In the wake of Lord of the Rings and other CGI-heavy films it's easy to stop feeling excited about special effects, it's like I got to a saturation point where I just didn't care about how realistic computer generated effects could look... it felt like there was nowhere else to go in science fiction and fantasy movies. As you might expect, I was wrong. Avatar exceeded the bounds of my imagination. The computer generated wizardry is more realistic than anything else we have ever seen, and you'll forget that it's not real. Anyway, here are some further thoughts on the movie...
First of all, it's quite long. I love the fact that this is a stand-alone movie (well, so far it is) and I understand the financial reasoning behind producing it as one movie rather than two or three, but I really think it would've benefitted from being a bit shorter and snappier. Also, I saw this film in 3D... it seems to be a kind of 3D that Cameron had a hand in developing and (judging from the trailers before the movie) there's a whole bunch of other films coming out at the moment that use the same gimmick. The 3D in Avatar was very impressive but maybe I'm too much of a wuss for it because I actually had trouble adjusting to the glasses... the vision hurt my eyes a bit and it wasn't until about an hour into the movie that I could watch it comfortably. To be honest, I wish I'd seen it in 'normal' vision instead of 3D, and I don't think I'll be watching any other 3D films in the near future.
There's a lot of debate amongst critics (professional and amateur) at the moment about the strength of Avatar's plot. I didn't feel like the plot sold anything short in the slightest. I've seen films before where it's far too obvious that the plot is just something to hang a few pretty conceits or special effects around (Pathfinder, Daredevil, too many others for me to even bother remembering) but Avatar - despite it's groundbreaking special effects and predilection for worldbuilding - still feels like a story first and a visual feast second. Sure, it feels derivative of Dances with Wolves and Fern Gully, but it's also a timely subject and I was actually impressed with the film's ending... it didn't feel like a deus ex machina or a cop out because it had been set up from the start and was actually the central theme behind the philosophy of the Na'vi. Also, anyone expecting a radical or unusual plot is probably ignorant of just how much this movie cost to make... Avatar was a ten year labour of love estimated to cost something close to $300 million. If you're going to pour that much money into a movie you better have a story that the majority of the audience is going to be able to identify with and understand! I'm the first person to complain when films deliberately pander to a mainstream audience, but I also understand that we would never have gotten the spectacle of Avatar if it wasn't financially viable, so I guess it's the lesser of two evils.
The design of the world of Pandora and it's wildlife is fantastic. I loved the hexapodal basis for all the animals and the level of thought behind the flora and fauna was evident throughout. The Na'vi themselves were a bit uninteresting but there's enough going in Avatar for the audience to never truly be bored. The history/concepts behind it all put me in mind of Robin Hobb's recent series of fantasy books, The Soldiers' Son trilogy, and the cat-design of the Na'vi felt a little remniscent of Isobelle Carmody's picture story Dreamwalker. James Cameron seems to have written Avatar from scratch by himself though, so I'm not sure if he deliberately or directly pulled influences from anywhere.
The cast was decent... Sam Worthington did a good job as the lead, and Sigourney Weaver brought to mind her Academy Award-nominated role from Gorillas in the Mist. Giovanni Ribisi plays a character not too far removed from Paul Reiser's company stooge in Aliens, and does a really entertaining job of it. My only real gripe is the villain character, Colonel Quadritch... he's played adequately enough by Stephen Lang, but all I could do was imagine how much cooler the movie would be if it had been someone a bit more distinguished, like Christopher Walken. It would've pushed it into truly memorable territory.
Avatar is definitely worth seeing, and you need to see it on the big screen. It's such a huge spectacle that I'm unsure if it would even be worth watching on the small screen when it eventually gets a DVD release. It's not just a whole bunch of pretty images, it's a grand adventure with something to say.
LOWLIGHTS: There's a point in the movie where one of the characters refers to the Na'vi as the "aboriginal inhabitants" of the planet Pandora. This isn't the fault of the movie, but as I live in the rather low-cultured Western Suburbs of Sydney in Australia (Penrith, to be exact), the mention of the word "aboriginal" inexplicably resulted in some snickering from the audience. I guess it's not really a lowpoint of the movie, more a lowpoint of the audience.
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