Avatar (2009) and 3D-O-Vision
December 29th 2009 11:58 pm by Matt
Starring
Sam Worthington, Zoe Saldana, Sigourney Weaver
In Brief
In 2152, humans are mining the elusive ore “unobtanium” from the faraway planet, Pandora. Unfortunately, the resident Na’Vi, who have a spiritual and cultural link to all the life on the planet, live atop the largest deposits. The miners turn to a paraplegic marine, Jake Sulley, and the Avatar program, which uses a remote link to control living Na’Vi bodies to gain the trust of the indigenous population. But once Sulley goes in, he doesn’t want to go back.
The Beef
Do you think they’re trying to tell us something? The undertones in this movie aren’t so much “under” as “in-your-face”. It’s all one giant reflection of the displacement of Native Americans and, to a lesser extent, war in the middle east. It honestly makes me wonder whether they actually wrote the story first or just kept tweaking history until they got something cool.
Still – the end result is hard to argue with. James Cameron’s face is in the dictionary next to the word “Epic”. I can’t think of any movies off the top of my head that match this in the sheer scale of the undertaking. The entire world is animated, and animated well. It’s beautiful and foreign and fascinating. Without a plot the movie could survive on its splendor alone, but it does have a plot. It works too. Sure it’s familiar and predictable, but it’s engaging and fun to watch too.
Unfortunately the characters weaved into this story aren’t particularly likable though. They’re all dramatizations, like they were lifted from the pages of a comic book. The shrewd businessman, the “kill-em-all” general and his goons, the die-hard passionate scientist, and so on and so forth. Despite quite a lot of screen time, none of them really generate any particular depth. The story is engaging and the visuals stunning enough that it carried me through the insane 162 minute runtime, but on pure movie credentials alone I can’t put this movie up with the ratings it’s getting elsewhere.
See it, for sure, and do your best to see it in a great big Digital or IMAX theater, because the visuals will blow you away. Just don’t expect the rest of the movie to keep up.
4/5 (Good)
3D-O-Vision
Avatar was also the first recent movie I’ve seen in 3D, and I was a little apprehensive. My experience until this has been that directors use it to make things shoot out at you in obnoxious and distracting ways, but not to add any depth to the picture itself. Nothing is further from the truth in Avatar. I think there are only one or two instances where something truly jumps out at you – the effect is instead used to great effect in slow panning shots of the amazing world that Cameron has created.
Still – I never quite felt like everything was in focus when it was in 3D, and quicker shots blurred and made focusing even more difficult. I think 3D has a lot of potential, and I’m no longer as pessimistic about it as I was, but I don’t think the technology is at the point yet where it’s something that adds more to the film than it detracts.
I hope they keep working on it, because I see a lot of potential in what they can do with this.
So I saw this one opening night, also in 3D, and have been waiting for you to post a review so could throw in my own little addendum.
As far as the plot goes, I don’t think they ever really tweaked anything. To be honest, what we have here is almost 100%, point-for-point, Pocahontas in space. The humans (Europeans) come to an alien world (America) looking for some extremely valuable mineral (gold). One of the humans gets tangled up with the locals (Native Americans), starts hanging around the chief’s daughter (Pocahontas), who is more or less betrothed to the village’s top warriors (Kokoum, not gonna look up the spelling, and I’m surprised I even remember his name). This human decides he likes the girl/locals more than his own people, switches sides, and fights them off in the big climactic battle. It’s all there. Honestly, though, it didn’t bother me at all, especially because they completely downplayed the whole betrothed thing. I think there were about 2-3 lines of dialogue that actually dealt with it. Since it really wasn’t an especially important part of an already lengthy movie (the tension between our human and the natives is already plenty high from other areas), I was happy to see that it wasn’t given much screen time.
I want to say, what you said about the 3D was true, but I question how valuable the technology as it exists today really is. What was added to the movie was decent, but given the strain that the glasses put on my eyes (they were watering about an hour and a half in and I had to take them off for a second) I question how much it was really worth using. I almost feel like the gimmickiness of the popping out is what the whole thing is meant to do, so until we get a better way to make things 3D, I just assume see it without.
Everything else you said I completely agree with.