Avatar 2009

[Chris Knipp]

Do most people prefer BLADE RUNNER'S Director's Cut absence of voiceover? I don't; I like the voiceover, the way it adds to the hardboiled noir feeling. This is a good point, that Jake's "journal" is in terms of the information it explicitly conveys to us, unnecessary. However it's used to show that he is being spied upon, so that Quartrich finds out he's gone native and sets out to stop him. It also makes the audience feel more intimate with Jake, so there's more focus on his personal experience and we're not too swept away by the rich scenic aspects of the movie. In that sense the voiceover has two values to the filmmakers. Nonetheless you are right that what he says is often too obvious for words.

I think that Cameron has made clear in so many words that he has to dumb down his ideas for his intended mass audience.

But I think a worse fault of AVATAR is that it turns into a video-game battle that even one of its greatest admirers in print, David Denby, admits goes on "forever"; that what early in the movie is a situation with rich enough psychological aspects -- I especially sympathize with how Jake jumps into the avatar life to enjoy being (vicariously) a whole, vigorous man again -- degenerates into a Good Guys vs. Bad Guys balls-out shootout.

Didn't that happen in STAR WARS? While A.O. Scott in his Charlie Rose interview about AVATAR talks about how as a youth STAR WARS defined movies for him and took him into a whole new cinematic world, I can remember watching it with my father (as an adult) while he kept dozing off and I couldn't, but sympathized as the battles and tiresome explosions kept going on and on and on. Spectacular visuals again, turned into boredom.