Avatar 2009

Notes: rather than a pre-publicity column, this thread is for film criticism and review, please don't take offense, Johann.


“Avatar” presented in Real 3-D, directed by James Cameron

Rarely in our lives are we present at a monumental moment in the history of film… I can recall a few: the first time I saw “Citizen Kane;” seeing 70mm “2001: A space odyssey” at the Cinestage in Chicago; watching “Animal Crackers” seated next to Groucho Marx; sitting with holocaust survivors during a screening of “Schindler’s List”… these come to my mind.

As I sat in that theater with my son (reluctantly pulled away from his video games), those moments came back to me… for this film is more than just a great technical movie, this is an outstanding film event, a once in a lifetime event, an event that will change forever the course of all film to follow. When you see “Avatar” in the next few days, and you must, you will be a witness to history. One day you will look back and fondly recall the days around this time just as clearly as you recall events around a disaster or wondrous moment in your life. The term “visually stunning” stands as a cliché next to this superb effort by its author, James Cameron. Nothing compares to it. “Avatar” stands alone as one of the greatest science fiction/fantasy films of all time, an achievement I would not have thought possible after “Lord of the Rings.”

The plot is very simple and nearly a distraction. A soldier goes native and saves indigenous people. However, the presentation of that story is everything. This is one instance where criticism of the film based on storyline alone cannot be a valid criticism, as the eye-feast is so unique, so impressive, and a story unto itself, that critical review based on “rehashed plot” or anything along those lines is just plain ignorance. I defy such criticism as baseless and lacking in sensitivity. That is intellectual masturbation at its most self absorbed.

Cameron has created a new world, never seen, never imagined, with such detail and with such depth, it is the true story to this film event. The 3-D effect only enhances the true quality of that detail. This extra film process assists the director in this particular case, by bringing to the foreground the minutia present in the natural world. The scale, the scope, and fertile image surpass anything on record in terms of staying power. In the past, we had seen CGI flyovers meant to impress us with a brief overview of some alien world. In this instance, Cameron moves his camera through the density of this world with such clumsiness that we are most certainly there… we must be there… it is real, this world, this place, it must be real. It feels so real… we feel it, deep, like the roots of a tree that thrusts its life into the ground.

By the end, we believe in the characters, we believe in the setting, and we cheer for their triumph… not the triumph of plot, but the triumph of spirit, that life is precious and needs protecting, a thought not lost on current endeavors. “Avatar” is currently playing in two versions. I highly recommend the 3-D version. This is Best Picture stuff, folks.

(Author’s note: I purposely did not see any previews, interviews, clips, nor did I read critical reviews or the in-depth Filmwurld opinions on this film prior to this review based on my viewing just now…)

FYI: Rottentomatoes.com "cream of the crop" had a rating of 97; while Metacritic (with its graded reviews) had 82, however, Metacritic gave additional negative weight to the one critical review: Salon.com (remember that intellectual masturbation I mention? Just so...) I read most of the reviews. Across the board, every valid critic in America gave Cameron his due... The New York Times review hit it full bullseye.

http://movies.nytimes.com/2009/12/18...vatar.html?hpw

Well, if every valid critic liked it, it must be great.

You've drunk the Kool-Aid, bigt-time, I see. Needless to say, I think you've gone overboard, but as you point out, you are not alone. Neither am I, however.

Your claim that the story is really a distraction makes one then ask: why is there a story, if so? What you say proves the quote I gave earlier from TimeOut London is still germane to our discussionn:

Quote:

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Ultimately, Cameron's signature achievement may have been to prove, beyond a shadow of a doubt, the oldest of all Hollywood maxims: all the money in the world is no subsitute for fresh ideas and a solid script.

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However, you think the images disprove that. I find them ultimately kitsch. But I repeat, this is an enjoyable movie, till it goes on too long, and there are lots of parts I like. I'm willing to consider it one of the best or runners-up for the best of the year's American movies, but it's turning into one of the yesr's most overrated ones.

So okay, I'll post this here too, since it is true, I wrote a review.

James Cameron: AVATAR (2009)

Shock and awe: separating the beauty from the hype

Avatar is a fancy word -- an appropriate one, I guess, for a movie that is both awesome and silly. As the movie explains, it's a Hindu term for the incarnation of a god on earth. But actually, just as in the recent movie Surrogates (which Cameron was involved in) and The Matrix, somebody is lying in a room all wired up while he or she is running a virtual second self doing stuff out somewhere. That's what an "avatar" is. In Surrogates the virtual selves are mainly just misbehaving. In Avatar, we're on the planet Pandora, where a private corporation, RDA, whose boss, a pale nasty named for a British department store, Selfridge (Giovani Ribisi), is aiming to extract major quantities of a super-valuable mineral called (I said silly, remember) Unobtainium. There's a bunch of gung-ho racist military earthling types headed by a Robert Duval substitute called Col. Quartich (Stephen Lang), ready to speed up this enterprise by blowing away the "humanoid" locals, which they refer to as "blue monkeys," who're sort of sitting on the Unobtainium, in a lush forest. As in Duncan Jones' rather intriguing little movie Moon (released in June), earthlings in Avatar's world, set over a century in the future, have run out of terrestrial power sources and gone to outer space for new ones.

There's an opposing group of culturally sensitive scientists headed by the ever-tough and soulful Sigourney Weaver (known here as Grace), who know better. They realize that the tall, thin, and yes, blue indigenous people of the region are in fact the Omaticaya clan of the Na'vi. They, led by Grace, have been learning the Na'vi language and making friends with the Omaticaya -- winning the "hearts and minds," you know? They work with the Omaticaya in the form of "avatars" that are tall, blue, skinny people like them. This allows them to "pass," so to speak, and make up for the fact that the air on Pandora is too thin to breathe. Meanwhile Quaritch and his boys are talking "shock and awe" and "fighting terror with terror." Yeah, the references are as simple and schematic as that.

There's a whole lot going on in Cameron's's Avatar -- and at the same time not very much. It takes a while to explain the setup, but after that it's pretty simple what happens.

Grace is very disappointed when Jake Sully arrives on Pandora. He's a Marine corporal sent to replace his dead twin brother, because he's got the right DNA to operate his brother's avatar, but while his brother was a scientist, he's just a jarhead who's been rendered paraplegic in a recent war. Jake's background makes him appeal a lot to Col. Quaritch, but Grace starts to like him when he takes so well to working his avatar that he connects right away with Omaticaya princess Neytiri (Zoe Saldana) and is quickly adopted by her tribe. It's sort of an Emerald Forest-cum-Dancing with Wolves situation -- Jake goes native. And he picks up a good speaking knowledge of Na'vi -- though the locals, due to Sigourney's teaching, tend to speak excellent English -- which might disappoint Professor Frommer of USC, whom Cameron engaged to invent a complete Na'vi language. Pronunciation of this name varies. Some, with a native touch, say "NA'-vee", with accent on the first syllable and a pronounced glottal stop. But most say "nah-VEE," as in Gilbert and Sullivan's immortal lines, "I polished up the handle so carefully, that now I am the ruler of the Queen's Navee." There are speeches in Na'vi (with rather ornate subtitles, as if it were a medieval language), but the whole cultural thing is focused more on what we might call the neuro-spritual element.

Cameron has spent hundreds of millions of dollars and engaged thousands in making this movie, and the fun of it is, for a while anyway, in the elaborate way the details of Pandora have been worked out. Quaritch describes it as worse than hell, and the six-legged dino-horses, hammerhead rhinos, shell-covered snarling tigers, four-armed lemurs, and so on, as well as the little floating jellyfish creatures, are pretty challenging for avatar-Jake his first night in-country. But since he bonds with Neytiri right away (her name even sounds a bit like Tommy/Tommee's Amazon forest girlfriend Kachiri in Emerald Forest), and learns to turn terrifying flying beasts into his docile steeds by connecting the end of his pigtail to their neural tendrils, Jake's avatar life becomes way more exciting than anything he's ever done before, and in a running video journal he keeps, he admits he's begun to forget what the rest of his life was even like before this.

New York Times film critic A.O. Scott exclaimed recently that Avatar is unusual as a blockbuster in that "it doesn't come from a comic book, it doesn't come from a novel, it doesn't come from a line of toys, it comes from James Cameron's imagination." Well, the material here is very much like lots of sci-fi novels (the kind I used to read as a teenager), comic books, lines of toys, and video games, so there's nothing so extraordinary about Cameron's imagination. What's extraordinary is the mise-en-scene, and the way "motion-capture" is used to give the avatar's expressions and movements, and then they're digitalized to incorporate them in these rather sexy tall skinny figures with their rather corny Amerindian outfits and hairdos; and the elaborate flora and fauna of Pandora.

Unfortunately it all ends in a noisy, protracted shoot-out that makes it like the dreadful, but intermittently atmospheric, Terminator: Salvation -- which, lo and behold, co-starred Sam Worthington. Watching this, as the noise and explosions became steadily drearier and more familiar, I realized that Cameron's Titanic, which I loved much more than this, mainly because it had real people and events in it, however romantically magnified, also went on far too long. There are things about Avatar that are very fun and Pandora is gorgeous at first, but the Na'vi, even at their sexiest, still look like plastic-y video game dolls, and those who declare this to be a cinematic spectacle that's wonderful beyond anything since 1915 and D.W. Griffith (David Denby in the same interview) are really falling prey to the hype.


http://img709.imageshack.us/img709/7272/avatarbigo.jpg
JAKE SULLY (SAM WORTHINGTON) AND HIS AVATAR (THE IMAGES ARE GORGEOUS, AT FIRST)

thank you, Chris. Now we can continue our bickering here.

Oh please don't let's call it "bickering." We're discussing the merits of the film.

In addition to the reply I posted on the other four page blog, I'd like to add the following:

From Variety...

Exit polls indicate "Avatar" one of the most positive films of the year

3-D theaters polled higher than 2-D theaters

"Avatar's" one day Friday only (est.) take of 30+ million is highest ever for a December opening

Hollywood reporter:

"Avatar" one day take est. for Friday at 26.7 million which excludes the 3.5 million from the "midnight" take.

L.A.Times film critic Kenneth Turan:

"Think of "Avatar" as "The Jazz Singer" of 3-D filmmaking. Think of it as the most expensive and accomplished Saturday matinee movie ever made. Think of it as the ultimate James Cameron production.

Whatever way you choose to look at it, "Avatar's" shock and awe demand to be seen. You've never experienced anything like it, and neither has anyone else.

Say what you like about writer-director Cameron -- and take it from me, people have -- he has always been a visionary in terms of film technology, as his pioneering computer-generated effects in "The Abyss" and "Terminator 2: Judgment Day" testify. He is not a director you want to underestimate, and with "Avatar's" story of futurist adventures on a moon called Pandora, he restores a sense of wonder to the moviegoing experience that has been missing for far too long.

An extraordinary act of visual imagination, "Avatar" is not the first of the new generation of 3-D films, just as "Jazz Singer" was not the first time people had spoken on screen. But like the Al Jolson vehicle, it's the one that's going to energize audiences about the full potential of this medium.

That's because to see "Avatar" is to feel like you understand filmmaking in three dimensions for the first time. In Cameron's hands, 3-D is not the forced gimmick it's often been, but a way to create an alternate reality and insert us so completely and seamlessly into it that we feel like we've actually been there, not watched it on a screen. If taking pleasure in spectacle and adventure is one of the reasons you go to the movies, this is something you won't want to miss."

Maybe so, maybe not. It's definitely innovative -- but Pandora still looks unreal, and the Na'vi still look like what they are, virtual people rather than real ones. I can't resist quoting again from one of the two Guardian reivews, that "obscure" major London newspaper, by Peter Bradshow:

Quote:

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After a run-up lasting 12 years, James Cameron has taken an almighty flying leap into the third dimension. His first new film for over a decade is in super-sleek new-tech 3D, and it is breathlessly reported to have taken the medium of cinema to the next level. And who knows? When Michelangelo completed his sculpture of David in 1504, he probably thought it made flat paintings look ever so slightly Betamax. Maybe he put a consoling arm round the shoulder of Sandro Botticelli as the two men looked ruefully at Primavera, and murmured caustically: "Little bit eight-track, isn't it darling? A touch Sinclair C5, a smidgen video top-loader – compared to, you know, sculpture?" That extra dimension makes the difference, and a recent village fete in Ilfracombe offered an absolute game-changer of a hoopla-stall in hi-def first-person interactive 3D – or 4D, come to think of it, if you count the time dimension.

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In other words, today's amazing innovation is tomorrow's ho-hum passe' technology. All this is about 3D, which still feels to me like a quaint Fifties idea, with the cardboard glasses people used to make fun of decades ago. They're still basically the same glasses!

You like concluding with a Latin tag; I'll conclude with a French one:

Plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose.

P.s. I prefer John Hillcoat's THE ROAD, a film that I find much more moving and significant. And it's pretty innovative too; any good movie is, except when an artist works in a strict style, like Jerry Lewis or Eric Rohmer (come to think of it James Cameron repeats a lot of stuff too, and remember Johan's quote from Fellini, about how he always makes the same picture?). "Innovation" isn't everything. I've been working on my review of THE ROAD, which is here.

I would also say that COLLAPSE is a film that is far more significant and intellectually stimulating. But then, it's not the greatest thing since sliced bread, like AVATAR -- if you drank the Kool-Aid.

P.p.s By the way, despite my dislike of the association with DANCES WITH WOLVES, a go-native movie that I like a lot is THE EMERALD FOREST. That is a long-time favorite of mine. So I have no objection to this kind of theme. But I forget: you're not interested in what AVATAR is ABOUT. You're only interested in the cool visuals.

You tend to assume, and rightly so, that the visuals overwhelmed me. You are right. They did. The three-dimensional view helped significantly. However, as I watched, I realized that no filmmaker had ever tried to create a completely different alien world from scratch with such splendor. There is a point during which most filmmakers move to the studio, mostly due to cost. Cameron threw off those impulses and took us into the heart of this jungle. He made us feel it was worth saving. Therefore, when they attack the big tree, this moment alone becomes a heartrending moment in the film. You might say this was expected, because you and I are jaded by past films whose similar themes have played out on a less grand scale. But for my son, this moment was as painful as me watching Kane slowly reject his beautiful wife in that brief yet poignant montage Welles made to reflect his changing attitude. We are moved by those images. I let go of my learned mind and let Cameron take me away during a "child-like" moment, where I had not seen a thousand movies, studied film, film theory, and film criticism... where I was just a boy, seeing something new and wonderful. That scene tore my heart out, for I discovered I still had one, one not stiffled by cynicism.

Good comment. However, if you think this movie will ever be spoken of in the same breath in future with CITIZEN KANE, you may be disappointed.

Originally posted by cinemabon
From Variety...
Exit polls indicate "Avatar" one of the most positive films of the year

3-D theaters polled higher than 2-D theaters

"Avatar's" one day Friday only (est.) take of 30+ million is highest ever for a December opening
Indeed. AVATAR is doing extremely well at the box office. What I find most impressive is that exit polls show that the film was equally liked by teenagers and senior citizens. And that the weekend take would have been much higher if the Northeast had "normal" weather this weekend.

When you started this thread, cinemabon, you said "this thread is for film criticism and review". But now it's drifted into statistics and hype, like the one you labeled as a "pre-publicity column."

Well, we need an editor. But this is the Web, where those are hard to come by. And that's the fun of it, I suppose.

AVATAR is a fusion of DANCES WITH WOLVES (1990), ALIENS (1986), ROBOCOP (1987), STAR TROOPERS (1997), JURASSIC PARK III (2001), and the novel DRAGON RIDERS OF PERN by Anne McCaffery (1988). In my mind, in order for a movie to be a classic it requres that ALL the elements work together and be of exemplary quality and as such AVATAR, however, does not meet that threshold.

What AVATAR has demonstrated is that live actors may not be necessary in less than a decade as the distinction between animation, special effects, and real human actors appears to be close to being negated. Such a transformation of the medium will have both serious positive and negative consequences of which is an entirely separate discussion.

The problems with the visual imagination and cultural immersion of Cameron's AVATAR is that for whatever reason, perhaps public acceptance and marketing. The hard core sci fi elements have been popularized for the general audience consumption and the true grounding of this movie is overtly human in origin, not extra-terrestial in nature. All the visuals and all the aliens have in their essence not extraterrestial characteristics but obviously earthly derivations. the aliens are humans with added size and different looking features, but are strongly humanoid with strikingly similar native-American cultural and linguistic backgrounds. The alien animals and plants are also just merely variations of earthly insects and animals on earth of which most of us can relate to the rhinos, dragons, jelly fishes, and such.

More serious flaws occur when the lead character supposedly becomes native, but the narrative continues mostly in English, whereas, with DANCE WITH WOLVES, there is a strong commitment to using the native language to promote authenticity and coonsistency with the native culture and nuance. Another technical incongruity is that continued existence or use of machine gun and bullets in the year 2154, which is somwhat incredible to believe that in more than a century, advance military weaponry hadn't advance further along with the more than convenient failure of the the enemy/millitary troopers bullet-proof windshields when the same transports convenient are resistance to such damage when the "good" characters steal one.

The storyline is, in my opinion, important and needs to be considered for any classic, for an overly simplified, overstereotypical characters as found in AVATAR are also imbalance to the rich and fabulous setting in which we find such characters. If this movie was to be a classic, the story must hold up its end of layered sophistication of plot and character as much as the detailed landscape and beauty of this alien world or else this partial "classic" will be easily surpassed by a production that encompasses in its entirety the whole theatrical experience in its surperb totality.

Even though I'm in the minority when it comes to enjoying and embracing Harrison Ford's voice over in BLADERUNNER, the use of the voice over in AVATAR for the most part is so talking down to its audience as if we were children needing spoon fed explanations that personally I felt it distracting and in many instances unnecessary, a lazy device that could have been eliminated and incorporated more authentically in the directing and acting and actual dialogue of the movie instead of having a lot of the background being offered in part as a recording and in part as a director's device to supposedly help the audience in knowing what's going on. But I would hope that the most of the audience members would be more sophisticated than this.