[Movie Review] AVATAR (3D)
And so, here we are – finally in the company of James Cameron’s Avatar. A film fourteen (and then some) years and, depending on your source, between $250 million and $350 million in the making. For Cameron addicts like myself, was it worth the wait and, for 20th Century Fox, was it worth the expense? The question should, in fact, be “Was there any doubt that it would be?”
I mean, come on. Let’s look at the stone-cold facts that we have available: The last time we doubted James Cameron in his ‘crazy’ endeavour with Fox he delivered Titanic upon us and, say what you will about the overall quality of that film in terms of script and performance, it was a film of both huge spectacle AND enormous (the word doesn’t in fact cover it) financial success. On top of this, he is the indisputable master of action cinema:
Think about some of the best adrenaline-pumping moments in cinema history in the last twenty-six years – the assault on the police station in The Terminator, the air-duct sequence in Aliens, the submersible chase in The Abyss, the police van versus helicopter escape in Terminator 2, the Florida Keys set-piece in True Lies, the ship going up ended in Titanic…. They’re all envisioned and delivered by James Cameron. To say that he’s a master at his game is an understatement.
I’d followed the possibility of Avatar since it was spoken of briefly (as “Project 880”) in a press interview on the publicity trail for Titanic. I became somewhat obsessed, devouring every morsel of information I could get on the project. For twelve years I have hoped and dreamed of what Cameron’s Avatar would be like to experience. There were periods that I started to wane and believe that it had become just too big to be an actuality, and would only end up resting alongside Kubrick’s Napoleon, Quentin Tarantino’s Casino Royale or a sequel to Kiss Kiss Bang Bang / The Last Boy Scout in the movie multiplex of myth.
When it DID finally get going the casting choices left me underwhelmed, the teaser trailer turned me off ever so slightly and I started to realise that there’s very few directors who are handed the “keys to the kingdom” following an unbelievable success and come good with it: Spielberg followed the double-whammy of Jaws and Close Encounters of the Third Kind with the (it’s really not that bad!) 1941. Michael Cimino followed The Deer Hunter with Heaven’s Gate. As much as the extended trailer for Avatar renewed some faith in me towards the project, I couldn’t shake the feeling that this was going to be the one hurdle Cameron couldn’t leap clear of.
Any doubt I had about this film was ill-informed and presumptuous. I can most certainly say that now. They said that Cameron couldn’t top The Terminator and he did, seven years after the fact. The same people said that Ridley Scott’s Alien could not be bettered so Cameron proved them wrong by giving us Aliens. They also said that integrated CGI couldn’t be perfected and Cameron nailed it out of the gate with The Abyss. We thought Arnold Schwarzeneggar couldn’t do comedy and Cameron handed him a few choice comedic beats in True Lies that he knocked out of the park. And we all know about Titanic right? It’s almost like James Cameron gets hard on taking the unrelenting naysaying and crushing every single syllable of it.
I’m not going to talk about plot details. I’m even going to hold back on detailing how middle of the road Sam Worthington’s performance is and just how interchangeable he is to the entire movie’s thread of existence. I’m even going to brush over what little flaws there are with Avatar where I can because, to put it simply, watching this film in 3D makes you feel that this film is less a movie and more an “event”. It’s George W. Bush finally facing up against Jon Stewart on The Daily Show. It’s being front-row at a Journey reunion concert with Steve Perry on lead vocals. It’s Jessica Biel coming round for tea and staying the night in your bed. I could go on.
Unlike George Lucas – who created worlds on a hard-drive that you were hardly interested in ever visiting for the Star Wars prequels – James Cameron has created not just an entire world, but a complete ecosystem, a full race of indigenous beings and not just made you yearn to go there and be a part of it, he actually puts you right in there regardless. This is 3D done right, finally. It is handled in a way where someone eventually comprehends that it is not about throwing things out of the screen at you, but in creating a depth of field within the screen that immerses you inside the film and not the film spilling out of the screen at you.
Yes, you can hold up Cameron’s occasional clunky mishandling of dialogue (less tin-eared and harmful to your brain here then in Titanic, I assure you!), the fact that the plot presents nothing new in terms of the “going native” story it is trying to tell and that it is essentially Dances With Wolves (minus the indians and plus the nine foot blue aliens), that James Horner’s score has constant echoes of his work on Willow (and Titanic) throughout (the less said about that god-awful Leona Lewis ‘Celine Dion’ evoking end titles song, the better!) and that, in Sam Worthington, he’s gone with an actor bland enough for my own girlfriend to lean across to me early in the film and whisper “Is that Mark Wahlberg?” But the simple fact of the matter is that this film is one of those rare occurrences when none of that matters one jot.
You’re not going to walk out holding a piece of particularly poorly written dialogue in your mind afterwards so you can mock-quote it in the bar post-film. You’re not going to even feel the need to accuse Cameron of heavy-handedness when it comes to the films overall message(s) [he's pushing the environmentally-friendly / anti-war card your way, I assure you!]. Because Cameron’s goal isn’t just to entertain you, it’s to give you a piece of ‘event cinema’ that has not been seen in quite some time. And on this front he very much succeeds. This is a movie, two and three quarter hours in length, where (had it not been for the burning sensation from being immersed in the realm of 3D for that long) you want to stay longer. In a little less time than that Michael Bay handed us the mess that was Transformers II: Revenge of the Fallen when he had nothing to say that warranted the running time. Here, James Cameron creates an entire world with its own rules and wealth of creatures, fauna and the like and never once does it feel cluttered or rushed.
Avatar is helped along greatly by some extremely commendable supporting performances from Sigourney Weaver, Joel David Moore and a surprisingly effective Giovanni Ribisi. Hell, even Michelle Rodriguez – an actress I can barely tolerate in EVERYTHING I have ever seen her in, usually. The absolute stone-cold stand-outs though are Steven Lang as Quadritch, the movie’s villain (one of the best in some time, and evidence of Lang bettering his stellar turn as ‘The Party Crasher’ in John Badham’s insanely under-rated 90s buddy movie The Hard Way) and Zoe Saldana as Neytiri, the film’s heroine. That Saldana is behind the motion capture technology she is and still delivers the sublime performance she does is all the explanation needed as to why industry types feel to not champion her for an Oscar Nomination would be a crime in itself. I could not agree more.
By midway into the films lengthy second act, Cameron delivers the “goods” that a solid 80% of the viewing public are going along to the cinema for. You know what I’m talking about – you’ve seen the trailers filled with winged creatures going up against helicopters, and mechanical gun-heavy human-controlled machines firing into hordes of maurading blue aliens. This is a nigh-on forty minute, unrelenting, pitch-perfectly realised piece of cinema in which… deep breath… unquestionably well designed special effects, live action performance, script, and storyboarding come together in an all-out assault on just what you thought the genres of action and science-fiction were capable of: From Cameron’s evoking of the falling Twin Towers on 9/11 when it comes to the assault on the Na’Vi’s ‘Hometree’ through to the rebels teaming with the planet’s habitants for a brutal defence, this is absolutely fantastic cinema. I would say of ‘the highest order’ but, having experienced it, Avatar‘s climactic battle sits ON TOP of the highest order!
This is a film that builds and builds with expert precision and masterful manipulation. You know going in that a war is coming between man and alien. Cameron makes you ache for it from the minute you buy you ticket but turns things around so brilliantly that forty-odd minutes in you pray for it not to come because of what you’ve come to learn about the Na’Vi culture. And when you’re prepared to hand back the possibility of some kick-ass visual warmongering in order to not see a gaggle of CGI graphics come to harm then you cannot argue that this writer/director has not done everything he has said he would do in terms of a “game-changer” in how we see CGI/motion-capture performances.
I cannot recommend this film more strongly to you. This is not a flawless film, don’t get me wrong. But it damn well feels like one whilst you’re invested in it and that’s all that matters. Many suggest that the film’s wrap-up scenes are rushed and too clipped. I can see that but for me, no final scenes would have been good enough because I simply did not want to leave the world Cameron had placed me inside of.
This is the definition of ‘must-see cinema-going’. Don’t wait to see this on DVD or Blu-Ray. Don’t lower yourself to grabbing a pirated copy from down the pub. Go, go now, see this movie! This is a return to spectacular ‘event’ cinema that I last recall experiencing back on 16th July 1993; skiving off school with huge butterflies in my stomach to see Spielberg’s Jurassic Park. It was a wonderful feeling of anticipation that paid off back then in droves and I never thought would be equalled. James Cameron’s Avatar has proven me wrong.
NB#1: Was it some sort of “joke” to provide a trailer for the poorly animated film Battle For Terra in front of Avatar, when the film in question is clearly a sub-par variation on the very movie people had just paid to see? Check out the trailer here. Tell me that this doesn’t come across as “Avatar – As Drawn By Your Seven Year Old Child”.
NB#2: Roger Ebert lays the details down far more intelligently and succinctly regarding the bad pre-release vibes and lengthy pre-pre-production process on Avatar in his new editorial. You can find that here.
6 Responses to “[Movie Review] AVATAR (3D)”
Looks great, I have a feeling that it is going to dethrone Spider-Man 2 as the best made comic book film. That’s just a hunch, it looks lie Faverau hit it out of the park with this one, and seemed to have learned a lot about shooting action sequences.
Shit wrong one. Disregard the previous post.
As for Avatar, I really wasn’t too interested in seeing it, nothing really caught my eye with the trailers, clip previews etc…
I’m still unsure whether or not I’m going to be seeing it tomorrow or not, but this was a good review and and added a nudge into me seeing it.
Oh, and how was the 3D for it? You seemed to have skipped over that part. Is it worth the extra money to see it in 3D?
I did pay mention to the 3D element in the review. As i said “… This is 3D done right, finally. It is handled in a way where someone eventually comprehends that it is not about throwing things out of the screen at you, but in creating a depth of field within the screen that immerses you inside the film and not the film spilling out of the screen at you…”
It, for me, was an extremely immersive experience.
And the colours didn’t feel at all as muted as they normally do in a 3D movie.
I’m struggling to remember a better movie – ever. The story line is nothing unusual, standard Shakesperian fare, but the way in which it is delivered is truly exceptional. The concept and its execution is breathtaking and involves the viewer totally. By the end of the movie, some 160 minutes, you are left wondering why it had ended so soon. Fantastic. And I haven’t even mentioned how good the 3D was, not overly “in your face” – sometimes less IS more.
Boy oh boy, some folk around heer are gonna slaughter me after I write up my review.
And YES, I will be writing up a review. My computer still has not been fixed, but screw it, I owe you guys reviews and I want to write again, so I’m borrowing my sister’s laptop. It’s been a hectic year, but I’ve got the time to bust out these reviews now. So over the next few days you can look forward to reviews of Avatar, Harry Potter, Where The wild Things Are, Paranormal Activity, Nine, The Hurt Locker, Inglourious Basterds, District 9, Gamer, Law Abiding Citizen, and a couple of surprise entires. Trust me, I got plenty of time to pop these out.
Grundy
I had the same though as well
The first trailer actually looked like a video game, it was such a let down. I had no plans in seeing it
But i guess they werent done with the CGI when i saw those trailers and once it came out, it looked really good.
your comment leads me to this:
Movies should completely finish with the film before they release trailers
For the obvious reasons we stated above (CGI looks like shit in the trailer, movie looks bad, bad advertising)
And so that we dont see trailers in december 09 and have them ****ing say “COMING SUMMER 2016″
I hate that so much ^^^
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