{"id":6667,"date":"2009-12-30T10:57:55","date_gmt":"2009-12-30T18:57:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/studentfilmreviews.org\/?p=6667"},"modified":"2009-12-30T11:11:53","modified_gmt":"2009-12-30T19:11:53","slug":"avatar-james-cameron-2009-usauk","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/studentfilmreviews.org\/?p=6667","title":{"rendered":"Avatar (James Cameron, 2009): USA\/UK"},"content":{"rendered":"

Reviewed by Richard Feilden<\/a>. \u00a0Viewed at Metropolitan Camino Real Cinema, Goleta, CA.<\/p>\n

\"Avatar\"Well, it\u2019s the season of goodwill and you\u2019ve been a good boy\/girl (delete one, both or neither as appropriate), so my present to you is not one, but two reviews.\u00a0 I\u2019m going to review James Cameron\u2019s Avatar<\/em><\/a> not once, but twice.\u00a0 First I\u2019m going to review the story, and then all the technical frippery that has garnered the film so much attention.\u00a0 Unlike you though, James has been a very bad boy, and the two reviews can be summed up in two words: lazy and excessive.<\/p>\n

Avatar is the story of Jake Sully (Terminator Salvation\u2019s Sam Worthington).\u00a0 A marine, he is shipped out to the planet Pandora, where he is telepathically linked to an alien\/human hybrid body, using it to communicate with the indigenous alien species, the Na\u2019vi.\u00a0 A huge corporation wants to mine the planet for its Unobtanium resources, but the Na\u2019vi, a primitive species with a close bond to nature, stand in their way.\u00a0 As Jake spends longer and longer with the aliens, he begins to question his loyalties.<\/p>\n

At over two hours and forty minutes, Avatar is certainly long enough to warrant two reviews.\u00a0 It is also the first reason why this film is lazy.\u00a0 If the film had been closer to two hours than three, like Cameron\u2019s benchmark films The Terminator and Aliens, it could have been a great, fun romp, but Mr Cameron has decided that this should be an EPIC!\u00a0 It is only sixteen minutes shorter than The Fellowship of the Ring.\u00a0 So, has he made use of that time to tell an intricate tale, or build a close relationship between the audience and the characters on screen?\u00a0 Not even close.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m not going to be able to add anything to the \u2018Dances with Wolves in space\u2019 discussion, nor the awkward \u2018white man meets the natives and within days manages to be a \u2018better\u2019 native than they ever were\u2019 trope that rears its ugly head here, so I won\u2019t bother.\u00a0 Instead I\u2019m going to look at whether or not it is actually entertaining.\u00a0 Cameron opens the film with a voice over, explaining the idea of the alien world, the Avatar program, and the fact that Jake, a crippled marine, has been accepted to it because his brother, was killed in a mugging just before shipping out to Pandora.\u00a0 It is the laziest opening to a film I\u2019ve seen in a long time.\u00a0 Let\u2019s compare it to one of the other animated spectaculars of the year, UP!, managed in ten minutes and with barely any words to not only show two peoples entire lives together, but to move people to tears in the process.\u00a0 Cameron sadly didn\u2019t feel the need to give us an emotional connection to his characters, nor to use the tools that cinema provides him.\u00a0 It seems he just wanted to get the preliminaries out of the way as quickly as possible and get us to the computer generated world of which he is so proud.\u00a0 \u2018Audience be damned\u2019, he cries, \u2018I want to play with my toys\u2019!<\/p>\n

The issues with the story don\u2019t stop there.\u00a0 This is a film with no narrative surprises whatsoever.\u00a0 Every plot turn is telegraphed from miles away with a smaller version earlier in the film.\u00a0 And with the nearly three hour running time, there is more than enough space to get that telegraphing done, with room to spare for pointless scene after pointless scene.\u00a0 The film skips the start, flounders for about two hours with no idea of how to get from set-piece to set-piece, and then launches into the, admittedly spectacular, finale.\u00a0 It just feels like they didn\u2019t try, or perhaps were afraid of either the budget or distracting us from the pretty pictures with something so insignificant as narrative.\u00a0 Uninvolving, bland and boring from start to finish.<\/p>\n

So the story is an abject failure, but what about those toys?\u00a0 Well, Avatar certainly is spectacular.\u00a0 In particular, the world of Pandora, from the floating mountains to the gargantuan trees, from the bioluminescent marshes to the rolling seas, is absolutely stunning.\u00a0 The sheer density of the flora makes this a computer generated word that knocks for six any that have come before it.\u00a0 Cameron can justifiably be proud of his realm.\u00a0 The same can\u2019t be said of the creatures that inhabit Pandora. \u00a0Many of the animals have a strange plastic sheen, reminiscent of early CGI creations.\u00a0 Even the Na\u2019vi are never truly believable\u00a0.\u00a0 They are great computer generated creations, but they are always, obviously, not real\u00a0 , particularly in the few scenes where they directly interact with \u2018real\u2019 people.\u00a0 Avatar is, at the end of the day, a high-tech, sci-fi, Muppet movie.<\/p>\n

Unfortunately, with that huge running time, Cameron is determined to fill the screen with scene after scene of high-tech wizardry.\u00a0 Again and again we are bombarded with glowing bogs and soaring cliff faces and, after a while, they all blend together and lose their impact.\u00a0 It\u2019s the Alien versus Aliens argument, and less sometimes really is more.\u00a0 As the protagonists once again ran across a tree branch, leaving yet more little illuminated footprints behind them, my sense of wonderment slipped and I began to wonder whether the film had any new tricks to show me.\u00a0 And as soon as that happened, it lost me.<\/p>\n

The 3D effects also bring problems.\u00a0 Outside of the computer generated world of Pandora, this is the big selling point of the film.\u00a0 Again, Cameron doesn\u2019t seem to think that too much is ever enough.\u00a0 In interior scenes the 3D effects are exaggerated to the point that rooms become nausea inducing, with layer upon layer of imagery placed on screen, drawing the eye through transparent display screens to people and objects behind.\u00a0 The same is true outside, where dirty windows and carefully rendered.\u00a0 The problem is that, in reality, you can only focus on one plane at a time.\u00a0 If you are looking beyond a smeared piece of glass, you no longer see the glass.\u00a0 The dirty windows and computer screens do nothing but confuse the audience.\u00a0 Well, nothing apart from show off yet another tool at Cameron\u2019s disposal. \u00a0\u00a0Oh, and for all of Cameron\u2019s claims that this would be a film that uses 3D in entirely new ways, that eschews the old \u2018wave a pointy thing at the audience\u2019 effects for an \u2018immersive experience\u2019, he is incredibly fond of sticking spears and arrows in things, then having them stick straight out of the screen\u2026<\/p>\n

This then is the problem with Avatar.\u00a0 We\u2019ve been told that Avatar is the herald of a new age of cinema.\u00a0 But it is all messenger and no message.\u00a0 It is more showboating than showpiece, as insubstantial as its virtual protagonists.\u00a0 It\u2019s a lump of coal in my cinematic stocking and I\u2019m sorry, but if this is the future of movies, then count me out.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Reviewed by Richard Feilden. \u00a0Viewed at Metropolitan Camino Real Cinema, Goleta, CA. Well, it\u2019s the season of goodwill and you\u2019ve been a good boy\/girl (delete one, both or neither as appropriate), so my present to you is not one, but two reviews.\u00a0 I\u2019m going to review James Cameron\u2019s Avatar not once, but twice.\u00a0 First I\u2019m […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6667","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-films"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/studentfilmreviews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6667","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/studentfilmreviews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/studentfilmreviews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/studentfilmreviews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/studentfilmreviews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6667"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/studentfilmreviews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6667\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/studentfilmreviews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6667"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/studentfilmreviews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6667"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/studentfilmreviews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6667"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}