Review: Avatar (2009)

[Tim Skirvin]

  Aah, big-budget action/sci-fi movies!  Is there anything better?  One
way or the other, you get to enjoy an over-the-top action-fest with lots of
eye candy and miscellaneous silliness; and sometimes, you even end up with
something worth seeing and thinking about later.  Sure, they're also
generally reviewer-proof, but isn't that part of the fun?  And the most fun
comes when you get to see the movie on opening night, with as big and
motivated of a crowd as you can find.  There's just something about getting
home at 3am after a sci-fi blockbuster...

  Of course, that's not quite how I saw _Avatar_.  The good son and
brother that I am, I decided to hold off and see the movie with my father
and brother after Christmas.  I tried to avoid the reviews, I insisted that
we find an IMAX 3D theatre to see it in, and I planned ahead enough to
order tickets the night before.  But in the back of my mind, I thought about
how I'd missed out on the proper "experience" of the movie, and how I'd
converted it to just (just?) a family bonding moment.  I was a little bit
disappointed, but in a "I have done my duty" kind of way.  Family comes
first, especially good family.

  Shockingly, in this case the experience was just as good a week
after the movie's release.  

  Two things made the difference.  First of all, the movie was
*packed*.  Ordering those tickets ahead turned out to have been vital; and
getting to the theatre a half hour ahead of time was just barely enough
time to get our popcorn before the movie began, and even then we had to sit
in the second row (a *horrible* idea in an IMAX theatre).  And second, the
movie really was big and shiny enough to make up for the week's delay.  The
movie took a decade to make; what's an extra seven days at that point?

  The special effects were, of course, the star of the show.  Were
they as good as all that?  Well, yes.  Yes they were.  The 3D was top-notch,
adding to the scenes in every case and never seeming gimmicky.  The
motion-capture characters finally looked *good*, after years of
adequate-at-best experiences with movies like _Beowulf_ or _The Polar
Express_.  The models were detailed, interesting to look at, and thematic.
And the effects as a whole seemed both flashy and *necessary*, a
combination that I haven't seen often in the last few years.

  (But...  revolutionary?  I don't know about that.  There wasn't
anything particularly *new* there; there was just years and years of
*refinement*, the sense that the technology could be used by the filmmaker
for the good of the movie.  The question is not whether the effects have
changed the world; it's whether they show a world where such effects can be
used to advance a story, instead of replacing the story.  I suppose that
could be a revolution.)

  The story was better than I had been led to believe.  Yes, the story
was shallow; presumably the detail were available in the visuals or the
back-story, but somehow even that didn't feel like the point.  Yes, the main
character's story arc resembled _Dances With Wolves_ - but I rather enjoyed
that movie, to be honest, and my personal opinion is that the overall
structure more resembled _Dune_ than anything else (and what more worthy
story is there to copy, I ask you?).  And yes, the other humans were
*beyond* shallow, having a first-degree motivation at best (and sometimes
not even that).  Still, this wasn't *garbage*, which is what I had come in
expecting.  So I was content.

  The acting was, oddly, pretty good.  Some parts of it were
over-the-top, but mostly those came from the humans; the parts played by
the CGI Na'vi were, for the most part, pretty darned good.  The decision to
have the eponymous Avatars look like their actors really did work for me,
even it was a bit odd to see a Na'vi Jane Goodall (Sigourney Weaver).

  And the science and technology portrayed in the movie - well, yay!
I got a little bit of computer interface design, which always perks me up;
I got a lot of organic interface technology, which was fascinating and
oddly plausible-sounding; I got mecha; I got a fairly interesting
ecosystem, including a Protoss-esque alien race; and I got a few
interesting anthropological ideas tossed in that took advantage of the
above.  As an added bonus, I even got a Stanford sweatshirt.

  And so, I came out satisfied.  I'll be a bit disappointed if this
wins any Oscars outside of technical categories, but that's okay.

  That's not to say that I came out *content*.  I wish that the
dangers of the planet Pandora had been *shown* to us, rather than just
told.  I wish that an explanation had been offered for what made
"unobtanium" so important besides sheer economic value.  I wish that there
had been some nuance as to the corporation's motivations, rather than just
"profit GOOD!".  I wish that the final battle had offered some useful
tactics and/or strategies, rather than just consisting of "let's put all of
our forces in a general area and have them fight it out".  I wish that the
time frame had seemed less...  arbitrary.  And, most of all, I wish that
somebody had looked at the movie as a whole, and realized that all of these
points could have been provided with less than five minutes of additional
footage, total.  The mistake was made to cut the movie too much, and that
irked me pretty seriously.



  So, all of that said (with as few spoilers as I could offer): it's
flawed, but it's worth seeing, fun, and a whole lot better than it could
have been.  I do recommend seeing it, and I recommend seeing it in 3D on the
best screen you can see it on.  I don't recommend going in expecting the
next _Star Wars_ or _Titanic_; you're not going to get either, and you
probably don't care.

  ***

                           - Tim Skirvin (tskirvin at killfile.org)
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