Posted on 12/21/2009 9:56:56 AM PST by AreaMan
James Cameron's "Avatar" is the most amazing ... no, wait: the most staggeringly amazing, jaw-droppingly triple-awesome unbelievable movie ever made. That's the feeling among the reviewers aggregated at Rotten Tomatoes, anyway. I quote:
"An overwhelming feast of visual artistry unlike anything you have ever seen before."
"Much more than a film. It's a prescribed cinematic experience."
"An entertainment to be not just seen but absorbed on a molecular level."
"Cameron has achieved no less than a rebirth of cinema."
"Make sure you can say you were there when the future of cinema began."
What, are we all techno-fanboys now? Or just unpaid studio publicists? "Avatar" without question represents a new high point in motion-capture technology — the digital technique whereby the movements of human actors are used as the armature for animating fanciful characters. (Peter Jackson's Gollum in "Lord of the Rings" was the breakthrough in this area.) And the movie offers deep 3-D panoramas of computer-generated imagery that really are stunning. (For the first two hours, anyway — at which point there are still 40-some minutes left to go.)
But all of this expensive tech has been put at the service of a story so triflingly generic, you wonder why anyone would bother to tell it. Briefly: Paraplegic ex-Marine Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) gets selected to participate in the Avatar program, a sort of military-industrial project engaged in plundering the natural resources of the faraway planet of Pandora. Of particular interest is a mineral called "unobtainium" (yes, really), which could be the solution to the apparently eternal energy crisis back on Earth. Unfortunately, Pandora's inhabitants, the Na'vi — who are bright blue and 10 feet tall, with long, whippy tails — are settled on a vast field of this stuff, and they don't want to move. The humans are of two minds about this problem. Dr. Grace Augustine (Sigourney Weaver), who heads the science team to which Jake has been assigned, wants to befriend the Na'vi and negotiate with them. To this end, "avatars" have been created — Na'vi-like figures fabricated out of human and Na'vi DNA that can be remotely powered by human "drivers" in the base headquarters and sent out among the natives to make friends and learn their language and their charmingly primitive ways.
On the other hand, the project's snarling security chief, Miles Quaritch (Stephen Lang), and resident corporate greedhead Parker Selfridge (Giovanni Ribisi) would just as soon exterminate the Na'vi ("fly-bitten savages who live in trees," as Selfridge puts it) and seize their land. To this end, Quaritch secretly recruits Jake to bring back useful military intel from his nice-making science explorations among the Na'vi. Jake is okay with this at first, until he really gets to know the locals — especially a Na'vi princess called Neytiri (Zoe Saldana). So the plot boils down to this: Can Jake win Neytiri's heart (or whatever) and foil his fellow humans' plan for corporate conquest? Even as the movie's long, unhurried opening sequences are laying out all the relevant info, you can hear those questions answering themselves.
Fortunately, Cameron is a great action director. There's a lot to look at here: the luminescent glow of the jungle in which the Na'vi live, the ancient Tree of Souls with which they commune, a spectacular range of mountains hanging high in the sky up above Pandora — and there's a lot going on. The director and his battalion of digital technicians have cooked up a fantastical bestiary of Pandoran creatures — futuristic hammerhead rhinos; dogfighting battle dragons; and, in one virtuoso sequence, a vicious six-legged thingy that chases Jake through the jungle and off the edge of a cliff (see trailer). The meticulous detail in which these creatures have been rendered, and the complexity with which they're arrayed in the film's exotic environments, are undeniable marvels of moviemaking art.
Unfortunately, whenever the action lets up and we're returned to the piddling story, the picture slumps like a failed soufflé. It's also heavily laced with political instruction of a most familiar sort. Cameron, who's now 55, is a self-acknowledged aging hippie, and his boomer worldview is strictly by-the-numbers. Quaritch and Selfridge are evil Americans despoiling the Na'vi's idyllic planet in exactly the same way that the humans have (we're told) trashed their own native orb. The invaders are armed with deplorable corporate technology (an odd animosity in a major-studio movie that reportedly cost more than $300 million to make), and they speak the familiar — and here rather anachronistic — language of contemporary American warmongering. ("We will fight terror with terror!" "It's some kind of shock-and-awe campaign!")
The Na'vi, on the other hand, with their bows and arrows and long braided hair, are stand-ins for every spiritually astute and ecologically conscientious indigenous population ever ground down under the heel of rampaging Western imperialism. They appear to have no warlike impulses themselves, and they live in complete harmony with their environment. (They even talk to trees.) Why, the movie asks, as if the question were new, can't we be more like them?
The central question that "Avatar" poses, however, is whether expensively advanced filmmaking technology is enough in itself to carry a whole film. The story here is a simple mash-up of every old cowboys-and-Indians and jungle-adventure movie of the 1930s and '40s. And while Saldana manages to project shadings of emotion through her digital carapace, and Worthington and Joel David Moore (as a friendly biologist) bring nice-guy appeal to their roles, the characters are blandly conceived. We watch them go about their business advancing the predictable plot and uttering Cameron's sometimes clunky dialogue ("The sky people have sent us a message!" "This land is our land!"), and we wonder when the battle-dragons will come swooping back in to break the tedium. In the story, the machines don't win, of course; but in the tech-centric scheme of the movie, they conquer all.
I saw the movie with my kids, and it was an amazingly beautiful project. When I saw Walle with them, the message was very clear Humans=bad, Humans=stupid, Humans=greedy. I found walle hard to stomach. This movie is different, Yes, humans are a threat to this planet but in the end, it is a human who becomes the hero. I think that this is one of those movies that can supply whatever opinion you are looking for. I would see it again.
Especially with a double dose of ACID man.......KILL THE EVIL AMERICAN SOLDIERS!
The human doesn’t become the “hero” until he commits treason against the human race and kills countless humans.
Oh, yeah, “Unobtainium”. Scrooge McDuck used to look for this stuff in the Walt Disney comic books.
Story extremely shallow, characters all cookie-cutter....hyped beyond all reason.
The last half hour I kept thinking "when will this drivel end"?
Maybe these questions will be answered when I see it.
Ditto here, so what if its propaganda? Sometimes, a movie is simply a movie to be enjoyed...or not.
Escapism comes in many forms. I was amazed at the new technology shown in the film, and willing to overlook the “revisionist history”, (if one can call it that as it takes place a few hundred years in the future).
Not all movies I watch have to have a perfect plot, this one falls into that category. IMHO it was a visual and auditory experience worth watching.
Earth First! (We’ll mine the other planets later)
Granddaughter loved it!
But it wasn’t the human race that he was against, I thought it was the human race that he was representing. I even drew paralells to congress right now and the people brave enough to fight the establishment for what is right. The hero in this movie did not sit down and shut up, he chose to stand up for what was right (like us, like the tea-parties). I likened the “bad guys” to the congress and senate who will sell their soul for a buck or a million bucks, and the hero as those brave enough to stand up against it. That is what my children and I got out of it. I guess it will be different for everyone. This is just my opinion.
Some people said the same thing about “Triumph of the Will”.
In other words you subverted the producers message to fit your own sensibilities...I can get down with that!
Tell him Kurt Loder most likely isn’t a FReeper, so I’m pretty sure he’s going to be massively disappointed after y’all see this movie.
EXACTLY!!!!! ...and Thank You! When I discussed it with my kids (9 and11) that is precisely what I said the movie meant to me. They were “down with it” too!
...Merry Christmas :)
This movie is all kinds of idiotic.
There are holes in the movie, but here’s what they tell you in the film:
Fixing a spinal cord CAN be done. But it costs a bundle and the VA in 2154 won’t cover it. The hero’s _brother_ is the guy who was originally supposed to go Pandora to “drive” his very own (human) DNA/Na’vi DNA hybrid/clone. (VERY expensive! More expensive than a spinal cord repair.) But brother is killed on the street before he can ship to Pandora. His identical twin, Jake (the movie’s hero), is induced to step in as driver after being discharged from the Marines.
Jake agrees to the gig as a challenge, he’ll be doing something he knows how to do (basically being a body guard for the teams that interact with the Navi) and because he’ll get a decent bonus for stepping into his brothers shoes—otherwise the clone is a complete loss of time (it’s a six year passage to Pandora on a sub-light cryo-ship), money, and resources, because the Avatar can only be driven by an individual with an identical twin-type DNA match.
Once on Pandora and he’s quizzed by the Colonel, who admires his moxie for taking on such a big job and promises him that his spinal injury will be repaired if he gives him all the intel he gathers about the Na’vi. From there, the movie really takes off
...So the whole spinal cord thing is covered by “the VA won’t pay for it.” But it can be done and it’s dangled as a prize in front of Jake for doing what he’s told to do on Pandora.
I agree that the film takes some not-so-subtle swipes at the Bush, business, and the American military But...it’s still pretty amazing. You root for Jake. He’s a likeable guy who wants to do what’s right. And he takes some big gambles in the film. Some pay out. Some don’t.
In films like this, the military enlisted man (sometimes junior officer) is trotted out as a well meaning and likable person but ultimately a dupe and a pawn of larger and sinister forces embodied by Col. Quartich and the evil yuppie.
I am reminded of how the soldiers are portrayed in the vomitus that is Lions for Lambs, likable and well meaning but the movie practically screams....CHUMPS.
I really wasn't concerned about the holes in the story as much as the parts that were completely filled in.
Also, nice how in the future the VA is still screwing over the troops.
I read a review that suggested that the movie was racist because of that. It took a human to lead the "Indians"...sort of a paternalistic taking care of the lessers sort of thing. Not having seen the movie I don't have an appropriate perspective to comment on that but I thought it was an interesting take on it.
I don't go to movies much anymore...probably one or two per year these days. I remember when I went to Happy Feet I was so ticked that I'd been tricked into paying to watch propaganda I nearly marched my kids out of the movie and demanded our money back.
Yeah, I don't get that gimmick, either. Maybe it's to soften the jabs the film makes so folks can say, "Yeah, but..." It is weird that way and I think it's a weak device, but it's not the first film to do that.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.