Avatar (James Cameron 2009)
Posted on February 14 at 9.54, 2010 by Eric Mahleb
It would be naive to assume that Avatar only works because of the technology. There is little doubt that, in this case, the 3D aspect enhances the filmic experience. However, as Michael Bay and George Lucas, and countless others, remind us too often, placing most of the focus of a film on CGI and visual effects while neglecting everything else, can have disastrous consequences.
James Cameron, while not king of the world, is probably one of Hollywood’s princes of perfection. His reputation as a very hard man to please make him a respected, yet also apparently often disliked director who is not afraid to ask for expensive sets to be completely redone in a very short amount of time and for staff members to be dismissed right away if they fail to comply. It is somewhat unfortunate that these types, whether in Hollywood or not, are often rewarded for being unpleasant but the positive side is that it is exactly what makes them difficult that also allows them to create interesting works.
Avatar provides a fairly average story with extremely cliche characters. The acting is nothing special, the soundtrack is over the top, even a bit annoying, and some of the dialogues are ‘cheesy’. So what works? As mentioned earlier, despite the fact that the CGI and visual effects are of the highest caliber, this in itself is usually not enough to carry a film. Cameron has succeeded in creating an overall experience that is so enthralling that the mediocre aspect of some of its parts is forgiven. A bit like Star Wars in 1977, a film which after all was fairly amateurish at times, Avatar immerses us in a very believable world of fantasy, legends and myths. The acting may not make much sense but the details of the world do. It is this meticulously crafted visual and non-visual environment that succeeds in transporting us to a very interesting place for 160 minutes or so.
While i like intelligent, cerebral and artsy cinema, i also love when cinema just entertains and when it does it well. Avatar has sucked all that it could from the little book of entertaining cinema and offers perhaps the best visual effects ever created on film. But more importantly, it works thanks to the clarity of an artistic vision and thanks to the perfectionism of James Cameron.
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3 Responses to “Avatar”
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Angie Says:
April 23, 2010 at 10.19Awesome movie!!
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David Says:
May 23, 2010 at 19.36Avatar is really great!
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Konstantin Says:
August 27, 2010 at 21.49Avatar…
I’ve spent a great many hours going over Avatar in my head after I saw it in the cinema back when it first came out, and later on DVD.
I have an great many problems with this film, and when taken as a whole, the film rather infuriates me, but I don’t feel like writing about that now.
What Avatar did for me, what it made me appreciate, perhaps for the first time, is that way of life. A life without technology, a life in hamony with other life, a life with strong family bonds. After seeing this film I felt genuine sorrow, a true sense of loss for what europeans “replaced” in the “new world” throughout the 16th century. And I’m not talking about hollywood heartstring-tucking sadness aided by the soundtrack’s violins. I mean that unplaceable chill that grips you when you think of past relatives, extinct species or the fact that we’ll never know what the Requiem would have sounded like if Mozart had managed to finish it.
The destruction of the “memory trees” was something like that. The tragedy of forever losing the knowledge of past generations rings true to me and made me think of the incomprehensible disaster of the destruction of the Library of Alexandria in 391.
Never before has the age old story of Pocahontas worked on me in this way. Perhaps what was missing was, ironically, the titular technology – that ability to physically become part of a culture that you could otherwise never hope to understand.