12/29/09 - Avatar

Avatar (2009, 162 min)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0499549/

Possibly the most hyped movie of the year, if not longer is Avatar. I was under the impression that this film was one that deserved to be seen in IMAX 3D so that's what I elected to do. To be quite honest, the trailers for the movie really didn't impress me that much, but the seemingly boundless hype and praise really sucked me in. Going in I wasn't expecting an amazing and original story but I did have high expectations for the whole presentation and experience. Let's see how everything lived up these hopes.

Avatar is directed by James Cameron and stars Sam Worthington as Jake Sully. Sully's job is to take control of an avatar of his recently dead twin brother and use this Na'vi to contact the living Na'vi on the planet Pandora. The planet houses lots of Unobtanium which the marines and "the company" are trying to obtain. This company is represented by Parker Selfridge (Giovanni Ribisi) and the marines are led by Colonel Miles Quatrich (Stephen Lang). Helping Sully learn how to control his Na'vi avatar are Dr. Grace Augustine (Sigourney Weaver) and Norm Spellman (Joel Moore). Michelle Rodriguez also befriends the group as the pilot Trudy Chacon. For the Na'vi there is Sully's new found friend Neytiri (Zoe Saldana). There's a group of other Na'vi, too, to help move the plot along.

The acting here is hard to judge. There's lot of times where Worthington is his Na'vi self and the digital effects play a large role in the acting. This is always the case with Saldana. I'll get to the effects in a later paragraph so this section will actually just deal with the human acting element. For these times, Worthington is very good. He plays his paralysis very convincingly and his conflicting desires to help the humans and the Na'vi in this war. He does a better job than I expected. The other main human actor is Stephen Lang. Lang does a great job as his angry marine hell bent on war and destruction. He certainly looks the role he's playing and that's a huge plus. Weaver deserves some mention as well. Weaver does most of her acting as her human self and there she's fine, but nothing amazing. However, Weaver as a Na'vi seems poorly done. She doesn't seem to have the movement and real emotions of her Na'vi comrades. It almost seems that she didn't really do the motion capture but only the face animation as many times her Na'vi seems so motionless and boring. The final real human character worth mentioning is Rodriguez's Trudy. Rodriguez has done nothing in the past to raise her beyond her typecast position in my eyes and nothing changes here. However, her role really works for this movie.

The computer generated effects are so prevalent here that they are easily worth their own mention. Wearing the 3D glasses for the IMAX I was able to sometimes take them off and see the normal picture. It was remarkable just how much the glasses added to the experience. Even simple shots are given tons of depth with the 3D effects and this is incredible. I can believe the hype and see these kind of digital enhancements becoming the norm for movies (especially of this kind) in about five or so years. I will complain about some of the 3D effects though. It seemed like some shots were specifically created so that they could demonstrate some sort of 3D shot just as a way to showcase it. This was specifically true of the scenes where Sully was "learning" to be a Na'vi with Neytiri (but more on these scenes later). As for the other 3D and digital effects as a whole, I felt they were pretty good. The motion capture stuff for the Na'vi characters were great and incredibly lifelike. Overall, though, I don't think I was impressed with the actual hyped effects as I was anticipating. But the little stuff was great and really made this movie a unique experience and one worth seeing in IMAX 3D.

It is true that Pandora is an incredible element of the movie. Cameron really does create an entire living, breathing world with Pandora. The whole place feels like one entity (which, by how Dr. Augustine explains things, is how it should be) with one "body." The species there were all different but they also seemed so similar with their design. One cool touch was how the ground responded to touch. You could sometimes see the ground beneath the Na'vi as they ran across it and it would change to a lighter green when this occurred, like one of those mood rings. I really liked this little touch. The motif of having the hair braid of the Na'vi connect to various things on Pandora was weird at first but I slowly got used to it. I thought it was an incredible idea but wasn't implemented really enough in my opinion. Or something. I just felt like more could be done with this then was actually done. But Pandora really is great in its whole creation and Cameron did a good job here.

The plot itself was what most people complained about in their reviews of the film. Knowing this I wasn't expecting a great story. However, I feel it worked still. Most sci-fi movies aren't about deep plots, they're simple but timeless - such as Star Wars (the 1977 film as a standalone). The same goes for this. It's simply: humans versus aliens, technology versus nature, etc. I did think Cameron used a cool thing in Sully's character. Sully was a marine that was forced into the science group and was the first one that was able to fully communicate with the Na'vi. A former marine did this before the science people did. I'm unsure what (if anything) Cameron was saying with this but it was an odd story choice that I liked. Sadly, though, there was a big plot point that I hated and that was the huge suspension of disbelief moment for the whole thing where Sully became a real Na'vi. I really don't like the plot where an outsider suddenly gains more trust than the natives and that is central to this movie. For the most part it is handled well except for these specific scenes where the Na'vi must pass tests and what not. They really just seemed like picaresque adventures that were used to highlight some specific 3D effect. But the plot as a whole is good enough for me. Though I said I hated this one element (and it is central to the whole story), it wasn't enough to derail the whole adventure in my opinion.

The characters themselves are for the most part well developed. I think Colonel Miles Quatrich and Parker Selfridge are the most developed, Colonel Quatrich particularly. I think he creates an interesting villain. Cameron saves him as the last enemy to be eliminated - and in a mech showdown no less. He presents himself a formidable foe right up until his demise. I also like how the character was built up as a hardened "good guy" at the beginning only to become the villain. On the other end of the spectrum there is Selfridge who is always displayed as a bad guy. Ribisi did an excellent job on this character making him wholly believable and that really added to making him a great character in my opinion. He was the typical business guy but Ribisi made him more fleshed out and whole. He managed to make him not completely hated which was a good thing. Also, I want to add some points on Trudy's character. I liked the character a whole lot but I felt that her death was lacking and there could have been a lot more there. She just kind of blew up and that was it. She didn't put up valiant enough a fight in my opinion to make her character justified as one that stood up for her beliefs enough. Usually this character really deals their former allies a huge blow and this wasn't done, but, even though it's cliché, I felt this approach should have been employed. This was the only real main character I had a problem with. I guess I would have liked some of the Na'vi to be more explored but I got the impression we were to understand them as a whole just through Neytiri and Pandora as a whole which is fine by me.

Overall, I gave this film an 8/10. The experience of seeing Avatar will forever be remembered. I commented a lot on what it was like to see 2001: A Space Odyssey on Blu-ray a while back and this is a similarly unforgettable theater experience. There were quite a few flaws in the presentation of the movie, but I do believe the hype that we will be looking back in five years at how much this single film did to advance computer generated effects and films as a whole.