I had fairly high expectations for this film ever since I saw the trailer a few months back. At that point it seemed to me like it was going to be a well-produced, entertaining movie about elves fighting space marines. I was especially impressed with the way they designed the aliens, and I liked the way trailer was produced: an eerie drone as the only sound, except for the words “this is great” spoken at some point by the main character/avatar.
When the movie came out, I heard the usual things from the usual people, like “the special effects were cool, but the story was stupid,” etc. I read similar opinions on rottentomatoes.com. Being totally into movies like this, I was still pretty excited about seeing it.
I think Avatar may be the most important movie that has come out since the original Star Wars.
Avatar is a film that communicates one feeling, one of the best feelings, so clearly – and that feeling is exhilaration. The theme of this film is the breaking out of confines. Our frail bodies, our uninteresting day-to-day lives, our prior movie-watching experience; Avatar catapults us beyond this tedium into a world built for a daring imagination.
The storyingtelling in Avatar struck me as near perfect. Before I saw the movie, I heard complaints that the plot was predictable. But I think there’s nothing wrong with predictability as long as you can relate to the direction in which you feel things are heading. Cameron did a great job with the film’s villains, and the heroes were, at least to me, heroic and likable. Avatar was one of the best paced films I can remember seeing – the 2:45:00 flew by. I know from watching films like the new Transformers that high-budget special effects do not accomplish this on their own. The first person narration really helped create a relation to the protagonist, and the movie felt swift and dynamic as you experienced his changes.
Watching Avatar, I never had any doubt that things would turn out ok for the aliens and their planet. That conflict, which resolved predictably, did not give the film its real tension, nor was it intended to. For me, the suspense stemmed mostly from the main character’s personal story: would he be able to, in the end, live life as an avatar? Real uncertainty clouded this question as I watched the film, and I found myself increasingly invested in a particular outcome.
If Avatar’s ending were to be approved by the today’s mores, the main character would have had to give up his avatar and face the reality of his life. Maybe he would have gotten his legs back, and been shown five years later, happy with a human wife and children after having struggled to regain mobility. This would have made the film a dreary cautionary tale about people who play too much World of Warcraft.
It struck a chord with me that they chose not to end the film this way, and instead allowed the main character to cross that impossible boundary; the event horizon that separates the “real” world from the imaginary. By allowing and celebrating this, Avatar paid homage to the very essence of movie-going. In the film, the drive possessed by living beings to broaden their range of experience is constantly pushing against physical, technical and social barriers. Cameron masterfully transposes this conflict across mediums: from on-screen symbols like the masks that the humans must wear to go outside on Pandorum, into the environment of the theater itself, where the audience must wear cumbersome 3D goggles to experience the movie (if you’re watching it in 3D).
I have heard a lot of complaints that this film was unsophisticated – I just don’t think this is true. Really, Avatar has both sophistication and innocence, in perfect balance such that it kept me completely happy the entire way through.
I am almost afraid to see it again; my first reaction was so positive. I’ll just have to go to a bigger IMAX theater I guess 