Movies with as much hype and expectation as Avatar do not come along every year. The movie has been assigned the duty of revolutionizing cinema and doing for 3D movies what The Wizard of Oz did for color 70 years ago. With such expectations, it is hard not to use superlatives in describing the movie. I made an effort to keep my expectations modest prior to seeing Avatar, a job made more difficult by a daughter who could barely contain her praise after seeing a midnight showing on opening day. Not only did it exceed my expectations on a technical level, it certainly deserves the mantle of a landmark movie as a work of art.
This was the first “RealD” 3D movie I have seen, and it was also the first time I’ve seen a movie in 3D without the annoying ghost double images that have plagued every other 3D technology. The 3D effect is not used to dangle objects over the audience or shoot things toward the camera to make us jump. I did not see a single shot that seemed designed to capitalize on the 3D effect, and for that I thank James Cameron. Instead, for the most part, it worked the way 3D should work and just made the actors and action on the screen look like it was actually there. The effect was subtle, but convincing. Avatar may very well end up being the landmark movie that makes 3D the new standard. While it by no means ruined conventional 2D movies for me, it achieved the technical feat of making 3D really work, without any sacrifices to the quality of the picture or the telling of the story. Maybe soon we will all have our own RealD glasses that are nicer and more comfortable than the loaners from the theater.
Avatar takes place on a moon called Pandora orbiting a gas giant planet around some unidentified star. Our own gas giant Saturn has a moon named Pandora, but it is a puny rubble pile of rock and ice, while Avatar’s Pandora is resplendent with life and color. To the misfortune of its inhabitants, Pandora has a large deposit of - I hesitate to write the name - “unobtainium.” Its whimsical name reveals that what it is and why people need it is irrelevant to the purposes of the movie. It is the classic McGuffin. Humans have invaded Pandora with a sizable military installation and a tiny scientific contingent consisting of Sigourney Weaver’s botanist, Grace, and a handful of assistants. Enter Jake Sully, the identical twin of one of Grace’s crew who died just before he was about to make use of a new avatar - bottle-bred bodies made by mixing the DNA of the native Na’vi people of Pandora with the DNA of the future human user of the body. Jake, a paraplegic Marine, is brought in to take the place of his dead brother.
He, and Grace and another scientist, Norm, enter their avatars by climbing into chambers and having their consciousnesses transported through unspecified means into the minds of the otherwise unconscious avatar bodies. Wisely, Cameron wastes little time on establishing Jake’s past, Earth’s problems, or the mechanics of avatars. He gets us quickly into the avatar and into the discovery of Pandora. Plant and animal life literally glow with a rich palette of blues, greens, and fiery reds that make the paintings of Maxfield Parrish look practically monochrome in comparison. To describe the creatures and the scenery of Pandora in words would be to make them trite, kind of like saying the Mona Lisa is a painting of a woman with an enigmatic smile, or Michelangelo’s David is a sculpture of a muscular man.
The story itself is both simple and familiar, even as the movie’s technology and setting are complex and completely novel and alien. The Na’vi are noble primitives that live in harmony with their ecosystem. They are the embodiment of the most romantic image of Native Americans fighting the noble struggle to keep their peaceful and harmonious existence safe from the invading hordes of Europeans. Jake is granted three months by the military industrial complex, personified by the militarily evil Colonel Quaritch (Stephen Lang - bulging muscles, scars, and an obvious desire to kick some native ass) and the corporately evil Parker Selfridge (Giovanni Ribisi - practicing his putting on the control center floor, twiddling samples of unobtainium, and counting the days until the next quarterly report is due) to earn the trust of the Na’vi and convince them to move off their prime piece of real estate and avoid a bloody relocation.
Jake is first rescued by, and then trained by, none other than the chief’s beautiful daughter, Neytiri (Zoe Saldana). You can imagine the rest if you have not yet seen it. Yes, it is a complete cliche, but I found I didn’t care. Creatures on Pandora have neurological ports as part of their biology - a tangle of nerve endings at the end of a tentacle (concealed by a braid of hair for the Na’vi) - that enables two individuals of different species to communicate telepathically. It is at the heart of why the Na’vi are so connected to their home, and has a lot of interesting story potential on its own that is not really explored in this movie. The idea is a staple of science fiction (think of the ports on the back of the neck in the Matrix movies), but here it is given an entirely new twist. It is just one example of the imagination that is on display on the screen. Not only is the movie a visual work of art, but I found myself totally drawn in, cheering for the overpowered Na’vi, hoping to see Quaritch get his due, and rooting for Jake to succeed in his transformation. I’ll see it again, on the big screen, in 3D.
And I’ll see it with you. On the big screen. In 3D.
I don’t like 3D. It gives me a headache and it takes 30 minutes for the effect to kick in. (I think it’s because I have unbalanced color perception; one eye sees much yellower than the other.) Do you think this method will be any better - which is to ask, I guess, did you adapt to it as quickly as always?
Anyway, my main complaint about the movie was: why do the Na’vi have four limbs and two eyes, unlike every other creature on the planet (moon)? That really bugged me.
I found the Avatar 3D to be very good. I think I saw it in a theater that had a particularly good screen for the RealD technology - which is to say a screen that does a good job of preserving the polarization of the light from the projector. What’s the last 3D movie you saw? If you’ve seen a RealD 3D movie and had problems, then I doubt this would be any better. It’s expensive, and it’s long, so this wouldn’t necessarily be the best movie to try out if you’re concerned about a headache. What I found to be nice was that there weren’t a lot of shots of things coming out of the screen, which I find very distracting.
I can’t remember the last 3D movie I saw in the theater. I tried watching the 3D version of Coraline on the DVD, but it was no good. Of course, the technology may have progressed since … a quarter of a century ago?
I hate the oo-look-3D!! shots, and they’re particularly annoying in a 2D print (yes, Journey to the Center of the Earth, I’m looking at you).