Movie Review [AVATAR]
I had absolutely no interest in going to see this. None whatsoever. I found the trailers to be laughably underwhelming. Blue cat people? Huh? I found the concept of “Avatar Day” to be laughable as well, compounded by the fact that a couple of my good friends actually got into a car and drove for three hours to an IMAX in Charlotte to watch FIFTEEN MINUTES of footage. Not the whole film…fifteen minutes. A six-hour round trip for fifteen minutes. Jeez. Despite the hype, despite the glowing reviews, despite James Cameron behind the camera, I found myself completely uninterested in seeing this movie. I don’t care about “exciting” new technology. I don’t care about 3-D. I care about a movie with a story, and yet all I seemed to hear about preceding this film’s release was “oh my God, this movie will be revolutionary…for TECHNOLOGY!” If it wasn’t for my aforementioned friend buying me an IMAX ticket for my birthday, I probably wouldn’t have bothered to see it, but off I went to my IMAX last week to check out Avatar.
Let’s start with the good, shall we? For the most part, the movie looks great. It really does. There are some shots in this film where I forgot that I was watching a film. This is a movie that demands to be seen in an IMAX theater. I cannot imagine watching this on a regular screen, and I pity any of you who had to. Those night shots with the glowing plant life is breathtaking stuff. The aerial shots where characters are up in trees and the camera looks down from above made me genuinely dizzy at times. There’s great attention to detail, and taking into account the fact that there are shots where nothing onscreen is real, it could very well be the best CGI that I’ve ever seen. This film is a shoe-in for the visual effects Oscar, so I suppose all of that hype about the technology was warranted. Unfortunately for me, the good stuff pretty much ends there.
My major problem with this film is that the story is a weak rehash of Ferngully, Dances With Wolves, The Last Samurai, or any other of the so-called “White Guilt” films that Hollywood enjoys shoving down my throat. Seriously, if you’ve seen one of those films, you’ve basically seen Avatar. My little sister, who is not a film geek like me and does not visit film sites, took one look at the trailer and told me, beat-for-beat, exactly what was going to happen in the film. When I say exactly, I mean EXACTLY. I’m not going to post a ton of spoilers here for the few of you who haven’t seen this yet, but if you’re over the age of five, you can take a look at that trailer and know the entire movie, too. You can have the nicest designer outfit imaginable, but if you’ve got no body to hang it on, what good is it? The CGI is that outfit, and there’s not a pound of flesh to hang it on. Events happen in this film that are meant to be traumatic and sad. I guessed this because the blue cat people sure looked upset and the music was swelling, but I couldn’t muster up the energy to give a crap. If the movie has to practically flash “CARE! CRY!” in big letters on the screen rather than having a story powerful enough that I care and cry, I know I’m in for a bad night at the theater.
Every single character in this film is a caricature. Sam Worthington (cute!) plays The Guy Who Switches Sides. Sigourney Weaver plays The Bitch With A Heart Of Gold. Zoe Saldana, who is having the biggest year of her career with Star Trekand this, plays The Girl. Giovanni Ribisi plays The Evil Tycoon. Stephen Lang plays The Evil Army Man. You don’t really get much from these people except that, particularly in Lang’s case. If I didn’t know any better, I’d think that this was a Disney movie and he was some weird mash-up of that hunter from Tarzan and the guy who shot Bambi’s mom. I did not care about any of these people, though it was fun to count how many times Worthington’s Aussie accent slipped through. And don’t even get me started on Michelle Rodriguez once againplaying The Tough Girl. Why should I care about any of these people or whether or not they survive? Who are they? They are painted with such broad strokes that it’s hard to care, although Worthington fares the best out of the bunch. He was the one guy who gave me hope that this movie was going to be something special. There are little moments here or there, like the look of awe on his face when he first sees his avatar, that give his Jake Sully some humanity, but I wanted more. It was a nice visual touch that his character, paralyzed and in a wheelchair, has legs as skinny as my arms. Out of all of the visual hijinks going on, it was that visual grace note that stuck in my head when I left the theater.
Speaking of the visual hijinks, there are some moments in the film where I found the CGI to be less than impressive. The ending battle scene looks like outtakes from The Phantom Menace at times. The Na’vi look fine in close-up, but in group shots they look unbelievably fake at times. However, quibbles with the CGI are minor in comparison to the lack of a compelling story. All of the talk about the visuals and the tech may have been warranted, but it is a shame that this nice new tech was wasted on such a pedestrian film. I can see now that my rating for this film is going to catch me more flack than the infamous Pineapple Express debacle, but I want to make something clear: if you want to see some pretty images, this movie won’t let you down. There is plenty of pretty to be had, but when the credits rolled, I knew that I would never have any desire to watch this film again, and that is why I cannot in good conscience hop on board the hype train. Let me off at the next station, please. The bells and whistles are nice, but they aren’t loud enough to get me to ignore the fact that the story is weak, the characters are one-note, and I just couldn’t get into it. Avatar is a beautiful disappointment, but a disappointment nonetheless.
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4 Responses to “Movie Review [AVATAR]”
Its not a dances with wolves ripoff. Im sure any movie from the last decade has the same exact synopsis of some other movie that came out before it, nothing is original anymore. Name any movie from the last 10 years and im sure theres more that came before it with the same ammount of similarities that Avatar had with The Last Samurai or Tarzan
There was ONE part that looked fake. When the “tiger” was trying to claw Jake’s face off and he was hiding under the tree at the beginning. I thought the rest had great effects. Nothing that would make me go bananas but they where great effects
Towards the end i actually really did care, but not for Jake, i just felt bad for the Na’vi. It was a really sad scene (but dont take my word, im a ****ing pussy when it comes to movies, i cry in almost every movie i see)
I think this movie is a perfect example of bad advertising, the hype was so huge that reviews are very nit-picky, the film was NOWHERE in the ballpark close to “BEST MOVIE EVER” like the trailers claimed and itll never live up to the standard they themselves built up to it.
But in my irrelevant opinion i thought it was a really good movie.
BTW
I think the best cgi showed in this movie was Jake’s paralyzed legs. Those looked extremely real. Sure it was a trick but they still looked aggressively real and i dont know how they did that. It wasnt CGI… so how?
Im sure its nothing too tedious to pull off… but i cant get over how real his disability looked
I just couldn’t get into this movie. I sat back and watched from a distance, but I was never invested in what was going on. I didn’t have a violent grudge against it. I didn’t go in hoping to hate it. I was just meh to the marketing and I ended up being meh to the movie.
And yeah, there are lots of Dances with Wolves ripoffs out there, but at least some of those get me involved and interested in the culture they explore and the characters involved. This was a bunch of blue cats with USB plugs for hair. I just did not care at all, even during that big emotional sequence near the end. Like my rating says, it wasn’t a total loss, but it wasn’t all that, either.
You never want to say youre the best movie ever, you never want to be the next Avatar or the blogs will eat you alive and all movies will attack you.
Horrible advertising.
Lol Delgo.
Btw i wonder what happened to that case. I bet they just threw money at Delgo and kept it quiet.
Sorry Kristina I have to disagree here. Avatar IMO was the best film of the year. Sure, it could have had a little better story telling, but the effects are the highlight here. It completely took me into Pandora and I would love to go back.
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