Slick’s Nit-Picks: Avatar

So, the hype has died down for a brief moment and the aver­age moviegoer’s eyes have shrunk back to nor­mal after pre­vi­ously being big­ger than your aver­age anime char­ac­ter or one of these major play­ers in the hit movie: Avatar, which I am going to try to go into depth with a fair opin­ion. From the out­set, I was anti-Avatar, sim­ply because I watched all the pro­mos, I read all the teaser infor­ma­tion and I asked peo­ple who had seen the film and noth­ing made me mildly inter­ested in see­ing it. My lit­eral reac­tion was: It looks like the mechs from the TV show Exo Squad and the HKs and jets from Ter­mi­na­tor and Halo going up against a bunch of elon­gated Smurfs with bug eyes. I finally broke down and saw it because I had to see if there was some redeem­ing value in the film. Well, they are not smurfs: the “Na’vi,” as they are called look more like the char­ac­ter “Spider-Monkey,” from the TV show Ben 10: Alien Force, and they have nearly the same agility level. That is the bad about the movie: almost every­thing in it is derived from some­thing else and the sim­i­lar­i­ties are so bla­tant that it is hard to think that it was a mis­take. How­ever, to be fair, I am going to exam­ine the movie itself before going into my final opinion.

First, we have to start with what the hype was all about and let’s face it, if you have seen the movie, I don’t care if you are still going oooh and ahhh, this is what made you do it. The movie is beau­ti­ful. Every­time the film steps away from the real and delves into the 3D imagery (which is often) and even when it chooses to blend the two, your eyes are served a heavy over­dose of visual Blue Magic (no pun intended). Even though I did not see the movie in IMAX or 3D, you could tell and thor­oughly appre­ci­ate the qual­ity artistry and work that was put into the Na’vi and their world of Pan­dora, or Eywa as they call it. A quick side­bar: Avatar is nom­i­nated for the fol­low­ing oscar awards — Best Art Direc­tion, Best Cin­e­matog­ra­phy, Best Direct­ing, Best Film Edit­ing, Best Orig­i­nal Score, Best Pic­ture, Best Sound Edit­ing, Best Sound Mix­ing and Best Visual Effects. Best Visual Effects is the only award it wins hands down (only one it really deserves) and it prob­a­bly has a good shot at best art direc­tion and best orig­i­nal score. Any­thing past those is absolute lock­jaw on James Cameron if you get my drift. The sound I heard in Dolby Dig­i­tal, but it was not even 5.1, so I must reserve judge­ment on that for now.

Now we move on to what should be the mem­o­rable part of the movie, namely the act­ing. Like I said, I asked many peo­ple who went out to see the film why it was so great because I have no prob­lem being wrong and admit­ting it but all any­one ever said was “You just gotta see it!” That said to me that there really was noth­ing really mem­o­rable about the film. Unfor­tu­nately, that was true. The movie is absolutely stun­ning visu­ally, but there is no sub­stance behind that flair. The starts out like Star­ship Troop­ers; just see­ing a lot of (in this case) mer­ce­nar­ies unload­ing from drop ships and get­ting geared up and debriefed. The debrief­ing felt like Full Metal Jacket mixed with Police Acad­emy, I just could not take it too seri­ously. Shortly after that point, we switch to 3DCGI and the world of the Na’vi opens up to you. At this point, the act­ing pretty much stops dead and we go to full nar­ra­tive pro­vided by Sam Wor­thing­ton for almost every CG scene. There are of course bits of dia­logue between the Na’vi char­ac­ters but they are few and far between and aside from the very cheesy “prayer,” not much stands out in terms of dia­logue. For me, good act­ing mixed with a good story make a movie. The thing is that I can­not even say this movie had bad act­ing because it did not have a lot of act­ing at all. Yet another group of marines that Sigour­ney Weaver could not save from the aliens.

I am not going to spend a lot of time on this sec­tion because peo­ple will say I am being too crit­i­cal, which I admit to openly. If you want to know the story of Avatar before­hand, watch Fer­n­Gully: The Last Rain­for­est, The Last Samu­rai, Poc­a­hon­tas and any movie with a sim­i­lar story. Cameron waited some twenty years to make this film and in terms of the visu­als he did the right thing. Appar­ently he also spent that twenty years writ­ing this movie with­out tak­ing a look at films that were com­ing out dur­ing that period. There is absolutely zero mate­r­ial that Avatar brings to the table in terms of fresh­ness or orig­i­nal­ity in sto­ry­telling. The only inter­est­ing thing was how all indige­nous crea­tures of Pan­dora had the abil­ity to con­nect to one another.

So there you have it folks, Avatar is still in the­atres and if you have some free time, you should prob­a­bly expe­ri­ence it. If you are a true movie buff then do not expect much from it. If you are an acid user, stay the hell away from it because the pretty col­ors will cause your brain to explode. If you are like some peo­ple I know who are eas­ily dis­tracted by pretty graph­ics then you will love this movie. How the aver­age movie­goer stopped car­ing about a good story is beyond me, but it does not say much for the intel­li­gence level of the pop­u­lous. This is the wrong place for me to get up on a soap box though, so I will say the fol­low­ing to sum­ma­rize: Avatar is far from a bad movie. It has a def­i­nite intro­duc­tory sec­tion and it prop­erly intro­duces and fleshes out char­ac­ters in terms of their roles. It does not do enough to explain why humans are on this world and the sus­pen­sion of dis­be­lief level is insanely high. Still, it does deserve praise for prop­erly visu­al­iz­ing what seems to have been Cameron’s dream work. I hope the inevitable sequels are bet­ter sto­ries than the orig­i­nal and are more deserv­ing of the praise the series has received. I also hope that the blu-ray release (also inevitable) is delayed at least until there is a firmware update to make play­ers 3D capa­ble. The Playsta­tion 3 has a large enough fan­base where this makes a lot of sense and I hope the same way Cameron waited so long to put this on screen that he pushes 20th Cen­tury Fox into hold­ing off the video release until it can be prop­erly enjoyed at home. The movie is aver­age and the only rea­son I dump on it is because it gets way more praise than it deserves. 7/10

Handel

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