TRAPPSTR

TRAPPSTR.com Movie Review: Avatar

Posted on 19. Dec, 2009 by Brett in Etc

(No spoiler alert needed here. If you haven’t seen the movie, it’s okay. Read on.)

Ok, let me get my critiques out of the way first.

1. The storyline is a little cliche. High tech brutes overrunning indigenous natives isn’t exactly a new concept.
2. One scene of bad dialogue at the beginning as project leader explains Unobtanium.
3. Liberal themes run thick like pudding–environmentalism, New Ageism, and demonizing of the military. The story is powerful enough to soften the most hardened conservative. I imagine this movie will have a strong polarizing effect on the super-left, and protester numbers may triple at next year’s G8 Summit (haha). Let me tell you: If you can’t get past these themes, you will not enjoy this film because they are unveiled and in-your-face.

Now, with that behind me, let me say this: Avatar is the one of the greatest, most epic movies of our generation. The film was much ballyhooed for it’s ground-breaking use of 3D technology. And if you can see it in 3D, do it (I had the privilege of seeing it in Imax 3D). It took my eyes a few minutes to adjust, and I actually felt a little nauseous during the first ten minutes of the movie (of course, the pungent smell of vodka vomit from the guy who upchucked in front of me might have had something to do with it). But during one of the opening scenes when character Jake Sully walks through a lush, luminescent forest, I realized that I was watching something truly special. One of those milestone moments in movie-making that I’ll tell my grandkids about. The only thing I had to compare it to was the first time I saw Jurassic Park and that famous scene of the grazing brachiosaurs. Hello, Computer-Generated Imagery (aka CGI).

This is the first movie that I felt I was inside of. Literally. Dirt flies in your face. Campfire ashes flutter about. Tropical canopies tower overhead. There were times when the action is so intense, the colors so vivid, and the 3 dimensional effects so jaw-dropping that I felt like I was a character inside of Cameron’s alien world. This film will push movie-making into a realm where the human imagination is increasingly irrelevant in entertainment experiences. Where our grandparents huddled around the AM radio listening to dramatic readings of big tales, we are now transported to full-dimensional worlds more real than our own. Several times I thought, “Man, Earth seems so boring now!”

By far the most spectacular element of the graphics are the CGI characters. In other block-buster CGI flicks like Lord of the Rings, there is a clear distinction between characters played by actual humans and characters created by computers (ie. Frodo vs. Gollum). Avatar makes it impossible to tell the difference. My jaw dropped in the opening scene in the Pandoran bush when Jake Sully’s avatar first interacts with the angry Neytiri. The authenticity of the facial expressions were unbelievable.

However, if Avatar was just a gussied-up tech flick with a video game plot (paging Resident Evil…paging Resident Evil), it would be an epic failure. Thankfully it’s not. It is a rich story with exquisite character development. Australian actor Sam Worthington does a flawless job portraying the role of a blue-collar, no frills Marine. The love story that is present in all epics is there, but it’s not overdone. Producer James Cameron does a great job of letting that relationship simmer and evolve at just the right pace. Epic themes run throughout and of course the messianic theme that we find in all great films emerges strong at the end.

Can you tell I liked this movie? Haha…inner sci-fi geek exposed.

Go see this movie. Let go of yourself. Immerse yourself in a story fantastic enough to vault the Avatar franchise into a category all of its own and sure to be mimicked for generations to come.