Film Review: Avatar
“Avatar” Is What Jaw-dropping 3D Can Be
By Rianne Hill Soriano
“Avatar” is a breathtaking flight of fancy using the typical Hollywood formula engaged with titanic technical achievement. Its technical brilliance and interestingly timely and significant concept are truly worth more than a decade of risky, arduous, and passionate work. Watch it in 3D to get the full experience it offers.
As a feat of fearless imagination and audacity, “Avatar” is a bold eco-opus examining technological wonders and morality. Director James Cameron impressively leads us to his Pandora’s box. Predictable story, clichéd dialogue, and logical lapses aside, this film is thrilling and explosive in the right mix. It has enough soul to effectively escape into the new world of jaw-dropping spectacle. This film gets the closest any has to fulfilling the 3D format’s fundamental mission of creating a new, immersive way of looking at movies. So if you have the chance, watch it in IMAX and see it in all its glory.
With its story, I’m hoping that this is not the kind of future humans will have nor will make; but as a form of cinematic pleasure, I would say that this film is indeed leading the future for new big screen entertainment.
The most-hyped movie of the year just about merits it – Cameron’s visionary bearing for his long-awaited pet project, his first film after the historical 1997 hit “Titanic,” is well worth the wait. Personally, I was half-hearted with my expectations upon watching the awesome 20-minute sneak preview in IMAX 3D a few months ago – it may be too high that I would probably get disappointed as how it usually happens with other hyped Hollywood flicks. Apparently, it’s as awe-inspiring as how I initially was back then… Though there is a certain part of me saying now that the technical brilliance kind of overpowered the storytelling. Nevertheless, things still work considerably fine as a whole. And it definitely makes its mark with its incredible special effects – where bringing to life Pandora and the Na’vi definitely becomes a quantum leap in filmmaking technology.
The film’s concept is full of potential. The theme is full of heart. The vision for it is full of challenge. Not everything makes sense; but in the best possible way, things are dealt in well for pure Hollywood entertainment. And every time it runs out of some credibility especially when it comes to the plot, there are still enough on the screen to qualify as entertaining eye candy offers. It breaks the CG barrier by combining elaborate lighting elements and complicated visual details with state-of-the-art motion capture technology and tried-and-tested recreation of the live action parts. James Horner also makes the 3D equivalent of a soundtrack which is something that should also be carefully managed in order to keep up with the 3D visuals. Here, the sound and music are in par with what the visuals offer.
Cameron and his legion of skilled craftspeople have mounted a convincingly realized artificial world ever created from scratch for the screen. They blur the line between reality and CGI by definitively blending animation and live action elements. The breathtakingly beautiful CGI landscape presents you with a story that easily travels from the human world to the fantastical and back. Its sophisticated editing rhythms represent what contemporary blockbuster cinema dictates – which is something to expect for a $400 million film project. The filmmakers seem to aim for sheer wonderment, and this sci-fi epic with gamer-geek sensibility truly delivers for this purpose.
The tale about profit and progress vs. nature’s power and infinite variety has a fancifully detailed vision. However, it is kind of compromised by a rather juvenile story exposition. There is also a certain aspect of it being a totally jaw-dropping technical showdown of audio-visual effects that sort of overpowers the overall storytelling (most of the intricate details would actually take a few viewings in order for you to fully catch everything – which is actually a good way to get more cash in for the producers). And in terms of the intense expectations for it, amidst the very promising concept, it still falls short in putting enough dimension to its plot as compared to its technical magnificence as a 3D film. Though for this kind of film, it hardly matters because of what is actually being offered to the eyes and ears to feast on. You get busy marveling at all the money on display. The photorealistic 3D imagery truly transports you into an alien world rich with imaginative vistas, creatures, and characters; even at the middle of clunky lines, awkward scenes, clichéd moments, and a script that plays it very, very safe. And so, while its cinematic impact may not quite rise to the ultimate expectation of being “a master of all masterpieces,” this bold and imaginative vision gets to the level of such a descriptive phrase as a “stunning masterpiece of cinematic technology.”
I personally like the metaphorical aspects of the film. When trying to go deeper than the jaw-dropping visuals, there are issues and concerns about progress vs. environment. Value is also given to themes about: tribes and races, physicality and spirituality; love and survival; humanity and technology; pride and purpose; responsibility and morality; war and greed. The world of Pandora is very immersive and the Na’vi people seem to resemble the old culture of the world in the alter ego of American Indians. The marines and the scientists resemble the capitalist and fascist thinkings in the modern domain; while the heroes of the story tells you how to become truly human while being torn in between two worlds. Moreover, it is interesting to note that unlike the overall storytelling getting sort of overpowered by the film’s audio-visual grandeur, the well-realized culture of the Na’vi is comparable to a fantasy novel getting the reader engrossed to the value of its world, resources, and people that the special effects don’t exactly become a barrier to letting you feel for them as they struggle against the destruction of their surroundings by the so-called sky people.
A buffed x-marine in a wheelchair turned into an alien warrior through his avatar (his human mind in an alien body), a free spirited princess of an indigenous alien tribe getting into a love triangle, a military industrial complex with machinery and weaponry of the 22nd Century caliber, a potential world filled with exotic life forms and million dollar stones… This decade-in-the-making dream project of Cameron is like the “Star Wars” of this age. And for all the technical virtuosity of its mythical 3D universe, the Na’vi characters seem much more expressive than most motion capture technology creations, and it is then in par with the brilliance of the exemplary Gollum in “Lord of The Rings.” This invented world is comparable to the technical and thematic milestones that George Lucas and Peter Jackson have made for fantasy and special effects filmmaking. This digital world pegged with a video game environment effectively transports you to a world that doesn’t exist – and it is just impossible not to be immersed with the fantastic visuals of such painstakingly intricate details.
“Avatar” is considerably a little hollow at the center as compared to great film concepts and scripts that have become masterpieces; but the sheer scale and ambition of the production look as tactile and tangible as if they were made of real materials and living tissues. At the same time, this 3D epic ironically gets some warmth from that old-time movie feel through some performances while still setting a new bar in computer-generated animation. In order to make a brand new world of the most eye-popping variety, here, the technical wizardry is at the service of a recycled plot that still effectively pumps blood to immerse you with a new level of film watching. It is essentially a movie that you have seen before; but it is boldly made to look like nothing anyone has seen before. The inadequacies of the story are forgivable for the sake of the undeniably beautiful, engrossing, and mind-bending epic that it is. Gorgeously rendered, it is both visually spectacular and emotionally involving.
The creative epiphany for “Avatar” is an extraordinary experience that more than lives up to the hype. Despite its flaws, this epic is a brilliant, visual extravaganza that is simultaneously thrilling, provocative and surprisingly moving. It might be more impressive on a technical level than as a piece of storytelling opus, but it is indeed a rightful approach of creating a good 3D film experience; thus, paving the way for it to become a 3D sci-fi classic in the long history of Hollywood cinema.
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