Avatar (2009)

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Abigail Nussbaum:

Let's get this out of the way: Avatar is a beautiful movie.  Stunningly, even shockingly beautiful, and not in the inert, static way of Watchmen or the more recent work of Tim Burton, which emphasize the creation of detailed, meticulously crafted tableaux.  Avatar is beautiful in a cinematic way.  The individual details of its locales are lovely, but it's the movement--walking, running, swimming, flying--within those locales that takes one's breath away.  And breathtaking as its beauty is, Avatar isn't eye-popping.  The film encourages you to forget that you're watching computer generated characters in a computer generated environment, and its use of 3D technology is subtle and thought-out. [...] So having established just how beautiful Avatar is, let me pay it the greatest compliment that its beauty will buy from me: Avatar is beautiful enough that for most of its 160 minutes, that beauty is very nearly sufficient to distract from the fact that it is such a boring movie.

It was the first movie I'd ever seen in an IMAX theatre -- at UA MegaBox, Kowloon Bay -- and the novelty of a screen that size, so large that it filled my field of vision, heightened the effect. On a small television, or worse yet, a hand-held media player, the film would not survive: it's gorgeous to look at, but it's all surface.

I don't care about the racist overtones inherent in Pocahontas-in-space, or that so little of the film seems original (an overrated concept). It's the clumsiness that irritates: Stephen Lang's absurd caricature of a military commander, the corniness of the romance; the modern touches, like earnest environmentalism, that keep the common tropes from seeming like immortal archetypes -- they're just clichés.

To prove the rule with an exception, as a spectacle -- spectacular spectacular! -- I remain in awe.

- Sam - 2009-12-29 12:24:35
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Interesting take from Metafilter's Pastabagel:

Avatar strips bare the archetype that all these other films are built around. More precisely it strips away all the equivocation and ambiguity of context and bias that any discussion of analysis of those films is plagued of. All of these other films, like Pocahontas, DWW, or even the Iraq War, are clouded by their historical context. We are the product of the trouncing of the natives. The food we eat comes from land stolen or cheated from the Native Americans. We are the people who killed the natives sitting on the shit we wanted. So all of the earlier films of this archetype we're subject to the criticism that, while what was done back then was bad, the product of it, us, is good. Therefore, the criticism goes, those films are biased because they don't present the good that came out of it. [...]

What Cameron has done in Avatar is constructed a story in which none of that equivocation is possible.

- Sam - 2010-01-18 13:00:24
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Rewatched on Blu-Ray in preparation for the sequel and it remains remarkable how little there is to it: a magnificent fantasy world used to tell (via vaguely disquieting appropriation of Noble Savage tropes) the most generic possible story. Aged like water: it can neither improve nor go off when it's so lacking in life or chemistry.

- Sam - 2023-01-30 07:28:54