Happiness For Blessing

I will be reviewing all of the Best Picture nominees in the days leading up to the Academy Awards on Sunday, March 7, just as I did last year. (You can find those reviews by clicking "Academy Awards" under "Labels" to the right.)

It would be very easy to pigeon-hole Avatar as a movie that is heavy on special effects with a story that seems to be borrowed from other well-known works. I did that very thing with The Curious Case of Benjamin Button last year. While that description would not necessarily be untrue for Avatar, I don't think it's fair.

First, let's talk about special effects, which almost seems like a misnomer. Effects implies that something was added in post-production, and nothing could be further from the truth here. According the The New Yorker (link NSFW - language), Avatar is "the first big-budget action blockbuster [shot] in 3-D." James Cameron wrote the script in 1994, but the technology wasn't good enough to actually shoot the idea. It wasn't until he saw Gollum on screen in one of the LOTR movies that he was convinced that the technology was ready, and even then he basically had to invent his own camera to accomplish what he did.

The result is absolutely breathtaking. Cameron is quoted as saying (back in early 2007!), "Ideally at the end of the day the audience has no idea which they're looking at," and in my opinion, he accomplished just that. There were only a couple of instances in the entire 162 minutes that didn't ring true to me, but those were very easily overlooked. (An example would be at about 2:56 of this video, where one Avatar pushes another and it just doesn't look quite right - understand that I'm really nitpicking here.) Have I said enough about the technical achievement yet? If you haven't seen it, go watch it in 3-D at the theater while you still can. This will probably be the first movie that's done an injustice by putting it on Blu-ray.

The vast majority of the criticisms I've heard about Avatar concern the story. Let me summarize them for you: it's not completely original. A simple internet search led me to comparisons of Dances with Wolves, Delgo, Dune, FernGully, The Last Samurai, Pocahontas, and many, many others. While it is true that Avatar and several of these movies share common archetypes, I don't think that this really diminishes the story arc at all. Cameron's screenplay challenges militarism and ethnocentricism (among many other topics), and since we apparently aren't getting the message, I'm okay with stories that attempt to engage these topics in a fresh way. If anything, the message is a little heavy-handed. Note to Mr. Cameron: Using the phrase "shock and awe" is the opposite of subtlety.

My quibbles with Avatar concern more of the same problems that affect other Hollywood blockbusters: too many shallow characters (especially Col. Quaritch and Trudy), cheesy one-liners, monologues given by the bad guys before they die, and plot twists that exist solely to justify more explosions. In a regular action flick, it's easy to overlook these flaws, but not in this case, at least not for me. Avatar aspires to be included among the Pantheon of Great Movies, and while I certainly agree that it will go down in history as a hugely influential work, it falls short of being an all-time great. 4.5/5.