Avatar and the Avatar Cadence (James Cameron, 2009-2031)

[Noiretirc]

I too was brought to tears during Titanic, and I clapped at the end. But for different reasons than you, obviously.

[tajmahal]

I'll post my honest thoughts and reactions...

This movie was just amazing. I was so stunned. I gasped more times in this film than maybe the last 4-10 years at the movies, combined. I was moved to tears. I was (extremely) elated, swept away by some of the sequences. I thought there were a lot of good laughs, too. The two times I saw it, the audience clapped at the end. I know there's a great hipness in distancing from the common audience here, but I was there opening night at Titanic. And the audience was brought to tears - the experience was just overwhelming and very moving. It was not a "total piece of shit." I think James Cameron is an amazing filmmaker for our time, for all time, really - but we're very lucky to have him alive and innovating in our time.

PS - Am I the only one who can't wait to get his hands on the latest Cinefex issue for this?

PPS - Final worldwide gross estimate: between 1 and 1.4 billion.

I'm confused. Did you like it or not?

[Grand Illusion]

James Cameron spent $500 million to build an organic, living, breathing, visually-arresting 3-D blacklight playground. And then proceeded to do the stupidest crap within its borders.

I wish this was merely a Dances With Wolves retread in extraterrestrial 3-D. That's what I was expecting. A simple transplant would've been much better than what we got with, not only poor dialogue and ironically 2-D characters, but also poor performances, an overlong narrative, blatantly cheesy allegory, and hokey New Age nonsense.

The entire film played me like a rodeo. Each element of the film tried to buck me out of immersion, and I had to struggle to keep myself in tune. It didn't take long to fling me into the 70th row of the rodeo crowd when the spirit jellyfish intervened to save a character's life. Deus ex jellyfish?

I never expected the ambiguities of a Battle of Algiers. The New Age stuff, however, was just awful and ham-handed. It would've been as if Allah, himself, had descended in the aforementioned film and actually taken a side. Just ridiculous.

While not a deep criticism, it is worth noting, for a film that ostensibly tries to be "anti-war," only the blue people get close-ups, slow-motion, and music cues when they die. The rest get aesthetically pleasing deaths among the supposedly rousing set pieces.

The motion-capture CG is pretty good for the tall, athletic, broad-nosed, dreadlocked natives. The human actors fare much worse. Particularly bad is the General who spouts verbatim dialogue from W. Bush circa-2002. Filmmaker hint: If it takes you ten years to make a movie, don't try so hard to be topical. The allegory was laughably bad.

It's worth contrasting the General character with the villain in Titanic. While also poorly-drawn, my feeling (true or not) is that the Billy Zane villain spends much less screentime than the General in Avatar. The difference is that one is just another obstacle for the protagonist to overcome (in Titanic), and the other is allegorically "significant" as well as the central antagonist for the epic showdown (in Avatar). There's archetype, and there's stereotype. The line is thin, and the characters in Avatar fall firmly on the side of stereotype.

Visually, there's a lot to say about the lack of gimmickry, which is a positive. For posterity though, I'd like to mention that 3-D filmmakers really need to watch what they're doing with the foreground space. In 3-D and most digital-effects cinema, you don't usually get the really shallow depth of field. This is so that the audience can soak in all the details you spent billions of dollars on.

When you use handheld motion to track with a character, though, it's possible for a perfectly clear object to intrude into the frame. Compositionally, the cinematographer may have been diligent in drawing the viewer's eye towards the subject, but the effect is the same as the gimmick of having something fly towards your face. This is not the same as having an out-of-focus object quickly pass in front of the plane of focus. As a result, I found much of the 3-D handheld work in Avatar to be distracting. And if I may play Armond White for a moment, I'd like to mention Spielberg's War of the Worlds as an excellent example of how to use depth of field in a blockbuster epic.

Because I'm so negative on Avatar, I'd like to mention a moment I did appreciate:

Spoiler

When animals attack! It's one thing for a filmmaker to champion an humanoid group over another humanoid group. It's another thing when the audience is encouraged to cheer the beasts killing the humans. It's a somewhat daring environmental statement in the otherwise predictable politics of the film. I appreciated it as someone that cheers the lions against the hunters on Discovery Channel shows.

While the spirituality and allegory play horribly, the other major criticism is that the set-pieces aren't even that unique. Sure, the technology is there, but the vision isn't. Nothing you haven't seen before in other epic battles. Certainly nothing revolutionary. And the real kicker? After all that? Contrary to most here, I liked Titanic. Oh well, you live by the Smurf; you die by the Smurf.

[solaris72]

Sam Strange remembers...AVATAR

[hearthesilence]

James Cameron spent $500 million to build an organic, living, breathing, visually-arresting 3-D blacklight playground. And then proceeded to do the stupidest crap within its borders.

Absolutely. It's nice that his toys are getting better, but the meathead dialogue, the thin characters...none of it's changed in 25 years.

...only the blue people get close-ups, slow-motion, and music cues when they die.

Ugh, those close-ups....you know when it's a big, heavy moment? When the movie slows down, the music swells up and the camera gets in REALLY close to people screaming silently with their mouths wiiiiiiide open. WOW! It's been a while since I've seen filmmaking like that that wasn't DELIBERATELY bad.

[HypnoHelioStaticStasis]

Y'know, this wasn't too terrible. The best I can say is that I wasn't bored to tears like I was with Titanic. And yes, much of the production design was indeed stupendous.

However, my biggest gripe with the film, and the one which ultimately sinks it for me, was the sense that it skirted around the truly interesting themes brought up in the first third of the film. The world in which many of us live, this forum being a prime example, is a world of avatars, of hiding behind the monitor of our computers. We live vicariously through our web identities on the internet, ultimately always presenting a false self-portrait.

Avatar really could have explored the notion of entrenching oneself within a community under flase pretenses/illusions. Instead, we get the same kind of Christ-savior parable seen in nearly every mainstream sci-fi saga (for some reason, I kept being reminded of Dune in the theater... I wish Cameron had the kind of gonzo chops Lynch has in abundance). The final battle is overly reminiscent of every other sci-fi/fantasy franchise, all of which lead to the inevitable showdown of good vs. evil. It's all ho-hum and rote, and so half-hearted that it has a cynical edge.

This very well could have been the flipside of Dances With Wolves. The groundwork on which this film is laid could have led to have a very interesting take on how good intentions don't often help people truly on the margins of Western Society. The environmental messages and one-dimensional Iraq War allusions add up to the director grasping at straws to make his opulent opus relevant, but they already feel badly dated and naive.

And I agree with the poster who sees this as a terrible anti-war statement; Cameron lacks the humanity, both in conception and execution to make any of the corporate stooges more than broad political cartoons. Like Spielberg, Cameron has the clout to make truly daring work; and like Spielberg, he pisses it away on spectacle, which will be topped two years later by the latest flavor-of-the-month saga.

edit: edited for grammar corrections.

[foofighters7]

I also believe that, for a film that is so 'amazing' in its visuals, it has absolutely NO Imagination.

Everything is simply a version of something from Earth.

Also, something that keeps bugging me. I hated seeing the Tie on Giovanni Ribisi.

I hate that it takes place something like 150 years in the future and they are still wearing clothes that look like they are from 2009.
Ties have been around for a few hundred years but today's tie has only been around for about 80 or so years.

Just annoyed me.

Also, the fist bump thing two of the characters did... that is something that has been happening only for the past few years, and I just do not think it fits correctly in a film that takes place that far in the future.

There were many of these type of things that really annoyed me.

Perhaps that was all just me.

[Cde.]

I also believe that, for a film that is so 'amazing' in its visuals, it has absolutely NO Imagination.

Everything is simply a version of something from Earth.

In the earlier treatments the planet was more alien, but I think Cameron decided to make it a more magical version of Earth so as to make an statement about what has been lost on this planet. The last minute shelving of the Earth scenes that would have contrasted with Pandora (which you can see a very brief glimpse of in the trailer) kind of hurt this idea, though.

Also, something that keeps bugging me. I hated seeing the Tie on Giovanni Ribisi.

I hate that it takes place something like 150 years in the future and they are still wearing clothes that look like they are from 2009.
Ties have been around for a few hundred years but today's tie has only been around for about 80 or so years.

Just annoyed me.

Also, the fist bump thing two of the characters did... that is something that has been happening only for the past few years, and I just do not think it fits correctly in a film that takes place that far in the future.

There were many of these type of things that really annoyed me.

Perhaps that was all just me.

I remember someone involved in the production saying that Cameron and the team were aware that culture and language would change significantly over the next 150 year,s but they decided to keep everything contemporary so the film would be as accessible as possible.

[tenia]

I can't be as specific as I could be in French, but basically, I found the movie so dumb that it kept me out of it for most of its duration. Moreover, I've seen the movie in Real D, and there is not much to say about the 3D, which not as impressive as expected.
The universe, the forest (and its Billie Jean grass) and the creatures are really marvelous, but except that, there is not much here to speak about.
If you had all the clichés, the Snyder-slo mo shot, the zooms, the philosophico-green new age blue furries and the fact that everything in the movie is obviously foundable 30 minutes before it happens, it was a real disappointment.

And the Marines...
Oh boy, the Marines. The colonel looks like a boss from MGS. The spaceship crashes at 3" from his face, burning his arms, but "oh, I'm so bad ass, I don't move at all". Plus all his kind of real stupid lines... Sounded like he was coming from a bad actioner from the 80s.

And I forgot, of course, the line about how men destroyed Mother Nature on Earth.
I mean, we are intelligent. We understood that the movie was about how bad it is to destroy it.

But Cameron has the balls to let the sentence, a real nice full and complete sentence, about how men have destroyed nature.
In a $300M movie, that he knows it probably used 3 thermic central just for making, and tons of paper, fuel and energy for the marketing campaign in order to make the movie bankable.
I'm not bashing about the fact that he can't say that kind of stuff cause he has money.
I'm just saying that I found that just a bit misplaced. Plus, the line is so dumb...

[Cde.]

the Snyder-slo mo shot

As one of the biggest haters of Snyder, I take issue with this. I thought the (limited) use of slow-motion in this film was superb. Cameron makes very limited use of slow motion and uses it to enhance the tension in a sequence, while Snyder throws in pointless 'ramping' Snyder every few minutes as if he's afraid he'll lose the audience if he doesn't.

Still, I understand the position that slow-mo aerial action is an overused cliche that should be retired.

[tenia]

the Snyder-slo mo shot

As one of the biggest haters of Snyder, I take issue with this. I thought the (limited) use of slow-motion in this film was superb. Cameron makes very limited use of slow motion and uses it to enhance the tension in a sequence, while Snyder throws in pointless 'ramping' Snyder every few minutes as if he's afraid he'll lose the audience if he doesn't.

Still, I understand the position that slow-mo aerial action is an overused cliche that should be retired.

I found that if the fonction is not the same at all, the look is exactly the same. During the first appearance of Ney'tiri against the dark dogs, I could only think of the tracking shot in 300, her bow replacing the bow-stick of the Spartian.

[jbeall]

The story is quite formulaic--Cameron has apparently been reading the same Joseph Campbell books that George Lucas read all those years ago. I generally didn't have a problem with this, as I was expecting it beforehand, but the use of (human) racial stereotypes in constructing the Na'vi culture--they're Native Americans when it's time to fight, Africans when it's time to pray. On that level, it's not much better than the "I assure you our blockade is perfectly legal" quasi-Japanese trade federation from The Phantom Menace. So the Na'vi are problematic for several (stereotypical and colonialist) reasons, even as Cameron probably has the best of intentions.

I thought that Pandora was an incredible visual realization, however, esp. in 3D. The effects in Avatar simply blow away the effects from state-of-the-art effects-driven films only a couple of years old. As others have remarked, this film is meant for the widest possible audience, so it was always unlikely to be anything but ham-handed in its environmentalism and commentary on recent political issues, but as an effects extravaganza, I think it succeeds admirably. Of course, there's a big difference between being visually stunning and being a great work of art.

[Cde.]

I agree with jbeall's assessment of the film, and also that

the use of (human) racial stereotypes in constructing the Na'vi culture--they're Native Americans when it's time to fight, Africans when it's time to pray. On that level, it's not much better than the "I assure you our blockade is perfectly legal" quasi-Japanese trade federation from The Phantom Menace. So the Na'vi are problematic for several (stereotypical and colonialist) reasons, even as Cameron probably has the best of intentions.

...this is its most fundamental flaw.

The 3-D is poorly managed, and this was my only real interest in seeing the show - as Grand Illusion dissects very well above. Foreground is simply misunderstood in compositional or kinetic terms. This is probably the most annoying thing about wasting 3 hours on this - we saw it in Imax 3D. We need real artists to explore the immersive vs distancing, stylistic possibilities of 3D.

I didn't really have any problems with following the 3D. I saw it on a regular digital screen, not an IMAX, but I assume that their field-of-view filling screen could actually worsen the 3D experience, since one can not easily see the whole image at once like they could in a regular theater. Being able to take in the whole frame, rather than having large chunks that may be set at different planes of depth thrown in our face, is something that I suspect is essential for the effect to work properly.

It's easy to make snide comments about it, but regarding the second part of the quote, the concert film U23D was a fascinating experiment with the potential stylistic pathways 3D opens up for cinema. I would recommend it to anyone who believes that 3D offers nothing more than gimmicky cheap thrills. Some of the editing techniques made possible through the perceivable onscreen depth are extraordinary. Matt Zoller Seitz wrote a good piece about it here and ruminated on the potential of such techniques in the comment section here.

[godardslave]

James Cameron spent $500 million to build an organic, living, breathing, visually-arresting 3-D blacklight playground. And then proceeded to do the stupidest crap within its borders.

This should be no surprise to anyone, it has been going on for about 100 years in its general form.
To generalize the statement to its root:

Hollywood spent huge amounts of money to build an organic, living, breathing, visually-arresting playground. And then proceeded to do the stupidest crap within its borders.

[tavernier]

Finally what sort of a lunkhead would decide to bury someone as cute as Sam Worthington behind a small nation's budget worth of CGI.

Ditto Zoe Saldana.

[domino harvey]

Well, Avatar dropped only three percent from last weekend. Proved me wrong, I guess it'll have legs okay enough

[Noiretirc]

Cameron writes dialogue that Ed Wood would have torn up.

I just want to say that this put me into piss-myself territory. OK thanks, carry on then.

[Noiretirc]

King Kong 33, it had epic lines like "Say....I guess I love you....", and it endures. Maybe Avatar is one of those monumental movie turning points, with warts and all.

[exte]

AVATAR OVER $615 MILLION WORLDWIDE AFTER 10 DAYS!!!!

Could Avatar break 2 Billion? Holy schmoly...

[domino harvey]

Could Avatar break 2 Billion? Holy schmoly...

Well, no

[perkizitore]

I agree with Dom, but i predicted it will make a profit probably breaking $1 billion. Considering what it costed it's NOT a great success, but Cameron will still have money to make his docs.

[MichaelB]

I suspect there's a real future for 3D in the hands of an artist. But not this meretricious Pop New age crap. Both Sternberg and King Vidor have talked about starting to use color, and the need to immediately re-see Black and White in terms of an infinite gray scale, and then apply the aesthetics of so called monochrome filming to color, in particular to the old dye transfer printing methods which resembled lithography more than film and allowed substantial manipulation of color tone and density; something we can now do in the digital domain of course. 3D is a hugely promising challenge to film aesthetics and film malking. It's of course unsurprising it's making a comeback with bloated pop/scifi extravaganzas - I just hope the technology becomes cheap enough in thenhear future for real film artists to take it up.

During the early 1980s 3D revival, the most tantalising of the unmade projects was a biopic of Nikola Tesla directed by Jerzy Skolimowski. Christ knows what it would have been like (this would have been his Success is the Best Revenge period), but I'd be first in the queue for it in a way that I conspicuously haven't been with Avatar.

[exte]

I think you would enjoy it, Michael.

[MichaelB]

I wouldn't bet on it - I loathed Titanic with almost every fibre of my being, and aside from the one-two punch of The Terminator and Aliens I haven't much enjoyed Cameron's other films either.

[exte]

A comparison of two blockbusters and their respective first and second non-holiday Mondays:

Avatar $16,385,820 3,452 $4,747 Monday 12/21/09
Avatar $19,418,139 3,456 $5,619 Monday 12/28/09

The Dark Knight $24,493,313 4,366 $5,610 Monday 7/21/08
The Dark Knight $10,518,116 4,306 $2,443 Monday 7/28/08

Avatar is doing the Dark Knight's initial Monday average in its second non-holiday Monday, with 910 fewer theaters. Source.