First Post of the Year: Avatar Review

So, I haven't touched this blog in quite some time, due to holiday parties and me being super busy at work. I also wanted to make the first blog post of this new decade at least something moderately special. So here is my review of Avatar (yes, I know that the movie has been out for some time and you've probably already seen it, but this is my review and if you want to make your own then you can create your own dumb blog to post stupid stuff on).

Pretty lights!

Right off the bat, I will tell you that the visuals were quite amazing. Commercials and trailers online do not do them any justice. It is quite obvious that almost half a billion dollars was spent on this movie's visuals. 3D wasn't exactly worth it though. I don't think IMAX would help the situation that much either. It was kind of disorienting because if your eyes didn't focus on what they wanted you to focus on, things would go into double vision. So if you were looking at the beautiful scenery and some girl walked into view, you would see four boobs. Maybe it wasn't such a drawback after all.

3D was a bit of a waste and didn't exactly help move things along. A few times I actually thought that someone was walking in front of the screen, and it kind of broke the immersion into the movie. In my opinion, and I may have mentioned this before, 3D was best used in the movie Up because it actually added something to the story and visuals. In Up, it starts out very flat because the main character is a dour old man stuck in a depressed state of habit. As the adventure ramps up, the universe expands, along with his personality and you get to visually see the world becoming larger. Avatar made use of 3D in a gimmicky way, but it definitely had more finesse than the My Bloody Valentine 3D movie. Things didn't just randomly come at you for no reason.

Another thing I thought about as the movie carried on, was that there was no real need to have human actors on set. I thought the entire movie could have been done in CG. It was kind of weird to go for extended amounts of time in a CG world (albeit a very realistic looking one) and then plopped back in with real actors. It wasn't so jarring though, but it would just have been smoother to just go the entire route of CG. I'm sure we'll all go back and look at this some day with the same justification that we give Who Framed Roger Rabbit.

Someone actually wrote this movie

"Oh dude, me and my girlfriend just rented Dances With Wolves over the weekend because Neflix recommended it to me after I gave The Last Samurai five stars."

"Oh yeah? Was it as good as they say?"

"Way better than I expected, but I feel like it needs to be retold to a newer audience. But with, like, a better ending. It's been long enough, I don't think anyone will remember"

"You know what other movies people don't remember? Ferngully. And Delgo."

"Tru dat."

"Hey, we should combine those two things together!"

"Ferngully and Delgo?"

"No, DWW and TLS with F and D"

"Yes I understand this."

"Better make it 3D so no one will question us."

"Oh dude, noob tube that dude's ass"

"I am T-Bagging his dead body"

"They are all pwnd"

Yes. They came up with this script while playing Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, Electric Boogaloo.

Anyways, as the script goes, it is unoriginal and doesn't really challenge any perspective of the viewers. You could pretty much predict what everyone was going to do and say. I would have liked to see humans grappling with having to cope with another ecosystem unlike their own. I would have liked to see more character development, not just of the main character. Some people's whole motivation was simply, I'm a bad guy, I like doing bad things. For a 3D movie, a lot of characters were one dimensional.

So, starting from the beginning, Jake Sully is a handicapped marine from some unknown battle on earth (Venezuela, I think is mentioned, but he never said he got hurt from there). His twin brother is a scientist who was working on this project to pilot these avatar bodies that look like the inhabitants (the Na'vi) of a planet called Pandora. Those avatars though are specifically linked to each pilot through DNA and what not. So his twin gets killed in a freak break dancing accident and Jake is now chosen to be an avatar pilot. Fast foreword six years later when he is out of cryogenic stasis and on Pandora.

I'd like to go forward, but I got so bored writing that previous paragraph. Uggghhhh... ummm... he gets into this body... does some stupid stuff... and... geez, just watch the trailer for a plot summary ok?

The script is pretty sloppy at times with characters explaining things for no real reason at all. A scientist who's been working there for five years gets pissed off that Jake is put on her team and she goes to complain about it to the head corporate guy. FOR NO REASON HE EXPLAINS WHY THEY ARE THERE TO GREAT DETAIL. Shouldn't she know this by now? I mean... if anyone's been working anywhere for 5 years, you'd think they'd know the game plan by now. I mean, if they wanted to explain what Unobtainium is (yes, that is really what the mineral that they're looking for is called), then the scientists could have told Jake since he's the new guy or he could have just been debriefed. Hell, they could have just done a star wars thing and had the opening with giant text that floats away into space, explaining everything; it would look great in 3D.

The love story is pretty cheesy and kind of awkward seeing to CG aliens goin' at it. I would have liked to have seen on of those hill billy soldiers stumble upon their mating and just yelled "GET R DUN!" Then get quickly mauled by a salapanther (salamander/panther and yes, there is one in the movie). There isn't really any way around it, but I could have done without it. Like, sacrifice the love story for more character development all the way around. Which, now that I look at it, there is no B story line. The more I think of it, I could care less if any character died. It wasn't all that tragic. The one I probably felt the worst for was that one alien dude who found out that his princess girlfriend totally went off with some other dude, he got beat up by that other dude, had his home is destroyed, and then he dies. And no one even remembered that it was his 16th birthday.

Jake's voice overs, which are random, aren't even needed. The principle of showing and not telling is completely lost on James Cameron. Maybe if his directing were better, the actors wouldn't need to tell the audience "I'm not sure about this" or "What was I thinking?".

So after a bunch of shit starts hitting some fans, Jake is outed as being one of the "sky people"

and is outcast before the corporate guys start carpet bombing the Na'vi home. So to plan their vengeance, Jake basically goes on an inspirational speaker trip talking to various tribes to rally the troops. What I find hilarious, is that he enlists the "sea people" and... uhhh, they don't do jack shit. They are literally the Aquaman of the story, only coming into play when water is introduced, which is never.

The only twist from the other movies that it copies from, is that the natives win. Oh sorry, I guess I should have said spoiler alert. They actually force the "aliens" out from their planet, which I'm not sure is a good message. Hear me out for a second. The "evil corporate aliens" were trying to offer them schools, medication, hospitals, and other things that could help stabilize their society. They were actually trying to compromise and offer a peaceful co-existence. The film kind of glazes over this idea. The plot is stuck in black and white ideas. Though, there was something that the evil colonel says before he dies though, which I thought would have been an interesting concept if they pushed more with it: "You've doomed the human race."

Was this Unobtanium the last bastion of human hope? Is the human race in desperate need of this? What happened on Earth? None of these questions are answered. So in my head, Jake Sully, the main character just ended any hope the human race had of surviving.

Is this Oscar Worthy?

I don't know if you can tell, but I stopped trying a long time ago.

EUUUUURRRRRRRRRGGGGGGGPPPPPPLLLLLLLLPPPHHHHHHHH. That's the noise I made in my head almost each time someone said something. It was a lazy story fouled up with horrible dialogue. The movie could have done without the random voice over, which in my opinion is pretty lazy because there's definitely somethings they could've just showed and let the audience figure out, was pretty monotone and the opposite of emotional. Don't get me wrong, Sam Worthington is a fairly good actor, but not so great that he could helm this entire thing by himself. A large amount of the time his voice over acting was terrible. Like so bad, I think even a rock in the background was crying. Visually seeing him act though was a different story and it seems he put more effort into that.

Michelle Rodriguez plays Michelle Rodriguez and even utters the typecasted military line "I didn't sign up for this." Which counts as twice James Cameron used that phrase (the first being Aliens). Speaking of Aliens, Sigourney Weaver plays the bad ass scientist with a heart of gold. She played a solid role in keeping things going. Stephen Lang, on the other hand, played probably the best misuse of comic relief. As the war hardened military general leading a group of West Virginians, he utters inappropriate lines at inappropriate times. I would actually watch a show about him tearing down this forest if it was on Discovery Channel and Mike Rowe did the voice over.

If you close your eyes and turn this into a radio play, you would be booing James Cameron right now, forcing him to go on a decade long hiatus where he comes back with another movie about aliens, giant ships, and time traveling robots.

For examples of bad lines of dialogue, go here.

Other things that bothered me:

The main villain is just a Colonel; why is he so high in command? You see him leading hundreds of men into battle. There was no Commander or General to keep him in line. James Cameron likes to assume a lot of the military and his only experience with them seem to be strictly in the movies. I think that the movie would be better if they just got R. Lee Ermy and called it a day.

The Na'vi can speak better english than most people at the UN. Yet they can't pronounce Jake Sully's name to save their lives. Literally in some cases.

They don't explain what Unobtainium is for. Is it fuel? Is it jewelry? They don't explain it except that it is the most expensive material in the universe. I think it would be the one the one thing that would save the human race and that's why their working so hard to get it. Who would they even sell it to? Oh well. Whatever.

Earth = America. It's a bit of a pet peeve of mine when a group of people in the future travel in outer space and they all happen to be from America. You'd think that in the future, we'd all pool funds and pull off some international space exploration/mining project. You'd see some Indian guy, an Asian guy, a surly Russian guy. I dunno. Star Trek is the best example of an international (intergalaxy?) team. Also, why are we only sending American Marines into space? Is it because they're the only military that actually does stuff? Oh well.

Ju Ju Bees and Kansas are still references in the future. Ju Ju Bees aren't even popular with the youth of today. What makes it still popular in the future? "We're not in Kansas anymore" is a turn of phrase that may not make sense anymore in the future. Even the phrase "When in Rome" was starting to fade away, until they made it a TV show.

The future military is still wearing current style camo. Keep in mind we didn't even have the same uniforms 50 years ago. Also, with knowledge that it's a completely different environment, the military would have adjusted for a different kind of camo.

Jake goes to the school of Luke Skywalker's Destroy Stuff With One Well Placed Grenade.

This marks the second time there is a human in a robot suit fighting an alien at the climax of the movie for James Cameron. The first being Aliens. Actually, there's quite a bit of parallels with Aliens. If only H.R. Giger did the art design of the Na'vi.

This movie should have just been called Aliens 2... Electric Boogaloo.

Yes, I know I made that joke earlier... but it was too hard to resist.

That's what she said.

The corporate guy practicing his putting swing in middle of command center. THIS MEANS HE IS HEARTLESS AND A CORPORATE ASSHOLE. Just once I would like to see someone practicing a putt and then donate money to children in need.

"Hey, we need a saucy latina who doesn't play by anyone's rules but her own."

Enter Michelle Rodriguez.

While the music was uplifting and well placed at times, that ending credit song is just laughable. What a terrible way to leave your audience.

Final Thoughts

This is what it's doing to our children

Ok, I know I bashed this movie a lot, but it's visuals alone are the saving grace of this movie. I mean, I've never seen fire effects done so well and the lush scenery is just breathtaking. This skin textures are real to the point of gross. Like I could see the Na'vi's gross pores and pock marks in their skin. But visuals aren't all that a movie is composed of. A movie also has to tell a story and have actors... well act in it.

Breakdown

Visuals - A

Writing - F

Acting - C

Music - C

Overall based on it's genre: B +

As a movie: C