Avatar ★★★★½
Full disclosure: one of my favorite people on Earth worked on Avatar for months. 80-hour work-weeks. Breakfast, lunch, and dinner on set. I really, really wanted this to be a decent movie. Still, I had my doubts. Big blue aliens? CGI? 3D for Christ's sake? It seemed unlikely that this one would pass muster. So, when I read Roger Ebert's review I was ecstatic. 4 of 4 stars! He compared it to seeing Star Wars for the first time. I send out elated texts to several other hopeful friends.
Then the haters started in. The movie was cheesy. It was overly didactic. It gave me a headache. And okay, no, those aren't complaints I actually read in negative reviews; they are my own impressions of the film's possible weak points. Therein lies the Avatar debate, one that will likely continue for decades. Do this movie's groundbreaking strides in the very fabric of the medium outweigh any foibles in its basic storyline and dialogue?
I have a feeling the decades will err on the side of Avatar's greatness. Take Star Wars as a forerunning example: its hero is whiny, its villain utterly uncomplex (we're talking JUST THE FIRST FILM here, people). But who cares? The movie remains one of the most widely celebrated ever, as much by the general public as by film geeks like me. Or take Jaws, which (film school taught me) was the first true summer blockbuster. It's about a freaking shark! A killer shark! But do we watch it and think, "What's up with that weird grizzled guy?" No. We think "Wow, this is an astonishingly created film. And to think it was made in 1975!"
Right? Isn't that what you think? Or is that just me?
The fact of the matter is that Avatar has people thinking about entertainment in a whole new way. The story, classically, has clear cut good guys and textbook baddies. It is pretty fantastical, and one must suspend disbelief for nearly three hours to believe that these tribes of giants and their magic tree can fend off the firepower of huge military manned battledroids. There is way too much voiceover, including a few passages so redundant that even the blind could do without their narrative aid. But it takes a lot of energy to even notice these tiny blips on the astonishing and astonishingly real world that unfolds again and again before your bespectacled eyes. The 3D is immersive, not invasive, so each of us in the audience is having our own experience on Pandora. It's a feat that Star Wars Episodes IV-VI can't even boast. Hell, no movie can.
That's why we call it "groundbreaking." No one's built there before.
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