Well, its not supposed to be a CGI overload. You're not supposed to notice it in the first place. Furthermore, the 3D technology is supposed to be some kind of a way to see amounts of depth that had been unimaginable before. I have full faith in Cameron and his work, and I look forward to seeing the film in December. Although I must admit that I'm a little sad that I didn't get "Avatar Day" tickets that would let me see 20-ish minutes of the movie in IMAX 3D.
*sigh*
My only worry is that the hype is too big among Sci-Fi and film nerds, and that it will flop at the box office.
I think we're tip-toeing into the "Uncanny Valley" here with this, that's what I'm most afraid of. I don't think the story will be anything like Terminator 2 and Aliens (my favorite Cameron movies), but, seeing as how we generally know so little about this movie in the first place... Perhaps that's better.
I'm looking forward to seeing it, just for the technology.
I hope they hadn't spent all the money not only on the image and the script will be up to par.
I said this because the trailer seems the typical war story between a technological civilization and another tribal one. And, oh surprise, the solution comes from the love of an interracial couple.
I hope they hadn't spent all the money not only on the image and the script will be up to par.
I said this because the trailer seems the typical war story between a technological civilization and another tribal one. And, oh surprise, the solution comes from the love of an interracial couple.
I'd be willing to lay odds that that was exactly the storyline. From what I can gather from the trailer, you appear to be right on the money. And yet, I'm excited about it. Cool-looking aliens on a strange world - what could be more fun?
I'm going to see this at Imax in December for the UK release. Even if the story is lame, the new CGI/3D effects should be enough to warrant the ticket fee.
I need to see the story, because from what I have heard and the trailer I am confused why the faction using the avatars would chose weird elf alien looking things to begin with.
Well, I'm not going to cry if that's is the true script, but... You know, I'd like something more complex, because sometimes I think, during my life, I'm seeing all the time the same stories, but with better special effects ^_^
What I'm saying is that, yes, the image and sound evolve, but the script nope.
Shyamalan is directing The Last Airbender, which is based on Avatar: The Last Airbender from Nickelodeon. As I recall, Cameron had the rights to the plain "Avatar" title before The Last Airbender was even in production.
So, to put it simply, they're two totally different projects with two totally different goals.
The most interesting points I've heard in regards to the movie, recently...
(A) What kind of effect does District 9 have on the perception of Avatar? By some accounts, it took ten times as much to make Avatar, will it be worth it?
(B) Dan Trachtenberg mentioned that he thinks District 9 was "the end of an era" for the gritty, ultra-realistic Science Fiction movies we've seen of late, and that Avatar will be a return to the more "classical" style of Sci-Fi "like what we used to see" (in reference to Aliens, Star Wars, etc).
(C) How is the "general public" going to react to a trailer that doesn't demonstrate the technology behind the movie whatsoever? Can you sell what is otherwise going to be an "experience" without showing any of it whatsoever?
I think we're tip-toeing into the "Uncanny Valley" here with this, that's what I'm most afraid of. I don't think the story will be anything like Terminator 2 and Aliens (my favorite Cameron movies), but, seeing as how we generally know so little about this movie in the first place... Perhaps that's better.
I'm looking forward to seeing it, just for the technology.
The facial expressions and camerawork are light years ahead of "Final Fantasy: Spirits Within". At the very least, it seems that the production crew did a lot of fine-tuning for weight... something most CGI films miss.
Note some of the close-ups. The first shot of the eyes... the shot of the guy waking up in the tank... the fluidity of motion and expression are dazzling.
Now, I actually liked "Spirits Within", despite its many, many glaring flaws... but the animation therein, despite being photorealistically crisp, was fundamentally flawed in the way they modelled flexible textures, surfaces and motion... while there are still some issues with motion capture here (most notably for the aliens... understandable when you're mapping motion capture from one body type to a completely different one), the animation of the humans themselves seems to be among the best I've seen, so far...
Still falls on the wrong side of the Uncanny Valley in some parts, but it transcends it, in others. I think the first twenty minutes of this movie will be instrumental in overcoming that shortcoming... if James Cameron does a good job of story-telling, he might actually be able to make us forget this is an animation. This being James Cameron, I have high hopes he will.
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I think we're starting to hit a higher level of "diminishing returns"... it'll take a heck of a lot more processing power (and money) to make animations that are photorealistically life-like... something I don't think the movie industry can justify, anymore...
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As for whether we're seeing a return to classic Sci-Fi... which focuses less on the immediate future and the gritty cyber-punk vibe Hollywood seems to love... I dearly hope so. I'm happy that there are a lot of new authors out there in the Sci-Fi field who are willing, again, to dream big and write Sci-Fi on a grand scale, instead of treading the thriller/sci-fi interface with drab speculative fiction.
With one caveat... dream big... but don't insult our intelligences. No "Star Trek" technology / deus ex machina / magic boxes... please...
Five Days until this is released, and now we've got reviews out. Word was, there'd been an embargo on review publications until Dec 14th, but Metacritic has managed to get their hands on a few and it's looking good:
Some of the shots in the newer trailers are amazing. The uncanny valley is upside down for me here... I'm trying to figure out if they mixed in real footage for some of the facial expressions here...
There are still parts where the UV applies, but it's a whole lot better than anything that has come before it.
I haven't gotten any Uncanny Valley vibes from the footage I've seen, mainly for the same reasons I didn't get it from Gollum.. they're not human characters.
I'm kind of mixed about it right now. While I'm sure it'll be a tremendous feast for the eyes, I haven't seen anything truly groundbreaking about what they're doing. Virtual camera environments, performance capture, etc.. LOTR did all that already. Then again, it seems Cameron might have saved the best stuff for the film proper.. I read a post on another board where someone commented that he didn't know how certain sequences were done. This coming from a guy who knows most of the tricks of the trade in terms of VFX and such.
The other thing that concerns me is the story.. from what I've seen in the trailers, it looks pretty cliche. It seemed I could telegraph the entire plot from the first trailer, which kind of put me off of it. But, the reviews make me wonder.. if it were as predictable and preachy as it looks, it wouldn't be getting the kind of positive press it's getting.
None of which will stop me from seeing it, of course. The 3D is apparently very well done, and even if it's no Oscar-winner, it's turning out to be one of those "event" movies that you just have to go see in the theater, and in 3D.
I just got back from it. I'll try and stay spoiler-free, but there's a couple of points I want to mention that are in dangerous territory. So I'm going to put this in place; that way, my bases will be covered:
**BLANKET SPOILER WARNING**
First of all, I want to rescind my earlier statement: Avatar leaves Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within for dead; I actually watched a few excerpts on YouTube before I went to the cinema, and I can safely say that this film blows it to pieces. Even when there's composite live-action/CGI on-screen, it works pretty seamlessly. By that I mean that while you can tell which parts are live-ation and which parts are CGI, the CGI is good enough that you can believe it's real. A big plus point here is that the animators never encroached into Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen territory, adding extra parts simply to show off what they could do. When Optimus Prime was introduced in the first film, they did it there, but it worked because the extended pan around him showed just how awesome he was. The difference between that scene and Revenge of the Fallen is that the animators managed to keep a sense of where the scene had begun. In the sequel, they went too far with it and it was a mess. Avatar does exactly this: they always remember where they had come from and where they were going. Ironically, the final battle sequences - especially the aerial stuff - are not unlike the Devastator fight sequence: parts may not be necessary, but it is shot in such a fluid way that you're willing to go along for the ride. In fact, in the entire film, I think there was just one camera slip-up, an odd zoom that took place mid-sentence.
The plot of Avatar isn't the most original: humans try to bond with alien race, but nothing goes according to plan, etc. At the beginning, some of Jake's video-logs are pure exposition and feel like it, while during the middle act the film gets dangerously close to Biodiversity, YEAH! and Spirituality, YEAH! territory, and there's about ten minutes just as the third act is beginning where the human characters run around in circles. Speaking of the themes and the odd bit of political grandstanding, I'm not seeing any of the parallels with Iraq and Afghanistan that I've heard thrown about. If anything, I saw connections to other poor episodes, like the Australian Aboriginals and the Native Americans. What I think Cameron is really trying to do with the film is take the past, the present and the future, roll them all up into one little package and present it with the over-arching idea that the problems that were relevant five hundred years ago are the same problems we're facing now and the same problems we'll be facing five hundred years from now.
James Cameron's strength lies in his ability to foreshadow. You know what I mean: you're watching a film and the characters do something that doesn't quite make sense and you just know that it's going to come into play later on. Avatar does this, too, but Cameron is able to do it in such a way that it's not glaringly obvious, and he manages to throw enough material into the fray in between that you don't really realise how important that early scene was until later on in the film. There's an early sequence that concentrates on Jake, but if you listen to the dialogue from Grace and Norm, important subjects are mentioned in a pretty subtle way. This happens on and off throughout the film with varying degrees of success, but there's nothing that has Plot Point! written all over it. By the end of the film, you'll be able to pick when Cameron is setting something up, but the virtue here is that they don't really serve importance to the overall plot. The film's major strength is its run time. Granted, it's pretty hefty at nearly three hours, but the hidden strength is that Cameron wasn't liberal in the cutting room. He includes scenes that other directors would cut, and so Jake's gradual integration into Na'vi society doesn't feel rushed or forced.
The cast is pretty good, too. I think I preferred Jake when he was in Avatar state, but the rest of the human actors are pretty damn good. Especially the women; I've always liked Sigourney Weaver after Alien (another Cameron film), and Michele Rodriguez finally gets a tomboy part that doesn't feel like it's been typecast. And the villain, while not on par with other filmic bad guys like Hans Landa, the Joker and Anton Chigurh, is still pretty decent. You can tell this is a James Cameron film, because like the T-1000 in Terminator 2: Judgement Day, he never quite seems to finally die. He is, however, probably the most shallow character of the bunch. He's a lot like a human xenomorph: what he wants doesn't matter; it's the part about how he's going to get it that drives the story.
Altogether, it was a pretty good film. I was hesitant about the three-dimensional glasses because I'm red/green colour-blind and they usually give me a headache, but these ones didn't have the usual red and green lenses. They took a bit of getting used to at the start, but that doesn't mean they blunt the impact of the initial scenes. Probably my only complaint about the film was not actually in the film itself: some idiot brought a four-year-old along. Why, I don't know; Avatar has some pretty serious death themes. There's one major part that is really quite distressing, and even if the little girl behind me didn't know how the film had gotten to that point or why it was happening, the on-screen reactions - particualrly of the characters - registered with her.
Am planning to iMAX it on Tuesday. To hell with the Christmas rush... I've just got to get it out of the way.
Many friends are confirming, though, that the whole story is basically as telegraphed in the trailers... but the experience on the whole can survive the weak/typical plot.
I'd watch it right now... but I'm in the middle of a conference... agh!
Compared to most movies: 84
Compared to the best movies: 50*
Compared to most James Cameron movies: 70
Overall: 75ish
*Obviously, this film is crap when held up to giants like 2001, Apocalypse Now, The Godfather, Citizen Kane, Casablanca etc.
I had the misfortune of having to watch it on blurry 24p 35mm film—had it been on a digital projector, I might've been able to actually evaluate the technical achievements made with the CG. I think later on this week when I'm likely to see it with a few more friends, I'll opt for the 3D version. (This really should have been on a digital projector.)
My next point is that this film, while a fun popcorner that seems pretty intelligent, is rife with contradictions and moralist hypocrisy—not to put too fine a point on it or give anything away, you'll eventually find a turnaround and go, "Wait—so Cameron says this is OK now?" and totally abandons whatever message he had initially seemed to infer. Hint: Sigourney Weaver.
Secondly, the pacing and action (drama) I found to be rather off-balance; 2hrs 42 minutes doesn't make a movie bad—it just begs to be justified. And for a good while, it is. Then, while you're contemplating where things are going, they just explode in your face and suddenly you wish you'd brought that popcorn along for the second half instead of carrots—even if only to have that popcorn smothered in masturbatory lube instead of butter.
Cameron is a fine director. We know this; he's proven it. And you'll see many elements of his earlier films (Aliens, especially; visually, there are oft similarities to The Abyss) in Avatar. What you won't see, however, is his self-restraint, or any of his real concerns. It seems to me that this project was lost in the halls of bureaucratic Hollywood production & bombast—something that he used to reign in and control so well.
At the end of the day, Avatar doesn't bring us anything that hasn't already been visited by film (Conquest Of Paradise—or Apocalypto, even), literature (too numerous to list), Television (any docudramas covering the settling of the New World), or videogames. On that note, it is creative. And a visual feast. Unfortunately, Cameron made many great films in the 13 years before Titanic; to spend another 13 producing one so average as Avatar afterwards, is just...vain.
Unfortunately, Cameron made many great films in the 13 years before Titanic; to spend another 13 producing one so average as Avatar afterwards, is just...vain.
His Aliens of the Deep documentary was epically awesome as far as nature documentaries go. His work on those has probably aided NASA xenobiologists in ways that we will never be able to fully see the benefits of in our lifetimes.
He has done more than just this one film in those 13 years, and likely something much more important than all his fictional films combined.
His Aliens of the Deep documentary was epically awesome as far as nature documentaries go. His work on those has probably aided NASA xenobiologists in ways that we will never be able to fully see the benefits of in our lifetimes.
He has done more than just this one film in those 13 years, and likely something much more important than all his fictional films combined.
Best movie ever. None of the tech was overly-fanciful (a lot of it is being developed right now), and the 3D effects combined with the surreal and stunningly beautiful Pandora landscape make it by far the greatest visual piece of 2009. Far more so than even 2012. 10/10.
Epically awesome, and I only watched it in 2D. They should make a 2nd of it. They've created this whole entire world and culture, they should put it to good use, plus I'm sure there are very many more possibilities they could use.
Felt it would be presumptous to make a thread for a review, since there's already a thread for the movie, but I feel compelled enough about it to actually make a thread!
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First off, Avatar is Epic. Truly Epic. Epic on a scale that defies Epicness. I have never, ever been to another movie that tipped the scales at over two-and-a-half hours and left the cinema feeling that the experience was too short. About an hour or so too short, actually.
Second off... fug the uncanny valley. Fug the divide between the real world and the virtual world. Avatar is so immersive that, near the end, I was shocked completely out of my immersion by the realization that a CGI character and a human character actually touch each other, and the "touch" looked so realistic that it only hit me five minutes later that they actually touched and I didn't notice the seam between the real and the unreal.
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Avatar does have its problems, yes. Chief among them is the story.
Avatar is basically the story of Jake Sully, a man sent off to the far reaches of the Human Empire to a remote and inhospitable world where humans mine a very rare, very precious element. He is apparently in a local prophecy, becomes a sort of demi-god for the natives and helps them fight off the Harkonnen.
Wait... that was Dune.
Ahurm... Avatar is the story of Jake Sully, a soldier sent to the high frontier where his people have established a foothold in hostile territory. There he meets a native girl, falls head over heels for her, and betrays his people, risking his life to promote peace between his people and her tribe.
Or maybe that was Pocahontas...
Avatar is the story of Jake Sully, who works for an immoral corporation destroying a magical forest... he gets transformed into one of the natives, meets a local girl, and helps her fight off impending eco-disaster.
Or was that Fern Gully?
Well.. you get the picture. Avatar doesn't tread very much in terms of new ground, plot-wise... and even the technology around which the film's premise revolves has been covered in other movies before (The Surrogates, for one...) but that's not James Cameron's fault. He has mentioned that he has been waiting for fifteen years to do his movie. In that period of time, millions of monkeys have been banging away at millions of typewriters, so many of the plot points and ideas will have been used elsewhere, already.
Still... I kept expecting to hear Michelle Rodriguez's pilot character to utter the words: "In the pipe, five by five..." but she never did.
That said, the worst thing you could say about the script is that much is telegraphed. There are a lot of plot points that are foreshadowed, and a lot of Hollywoodisms and Tropes (okay, so there's no AVATAR page yet, but it'll be coming) are evident, but they don't detract from the movie. In fact, it was only after the movie that I started going back over it in my head to look for plot holes, inconsistencies and illogical plot convolutions. As with J.J. Abrahms' Star Trek, Cameron keeps Avatar moving along well enough that you don't think too much about them.
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The main issue I do have with Avatar is that the exobiology of Pandora's sentients doesn't feel fully fleshed out. When doing xenobiology, you don't always go for the weird, a mistake that many authors and film-makers make... you make sure that weird = functional... and that there's a good reason for how species develop and what survival value certain structures have. That said, most of Pandora is quite believable, from the large ruminants to the small flying lizards (watch out for those... they're outrageous, but still logical). But the natives aren't. They look like humans, they're similar enough to speak human languages, and they have the same number of limbs as humans. And they all happen to look like eight foot tall American Indians, complete with wide noses and corn-braids. This wouldn't be so bad, except that most of the other large Pandoran wildlife is six-limbed and scaly. The fact that the "lemurs" have their two upper sets of limbs joined at the shoulder points at a mutation in their "lemur" line that may have led to this development, but the idea never seemed fully fleshed out to me.
Oh well, it's not as ludicrous as bones laced with naturally occuring carbon-fiber... but that might be grunt speak. For all we know, Pandoran creatures have bones with a naturally occuring graphite matrix, or even buckytubes.
And then there's the issue of the native... instrument (you'll understand when you watch it, and if you've watched it, you know what I'm talking about). An issue which stands out because it has no apparent survival value to any of the wildlife, and the fact that it doesn't play a much bigger role in the society of the natives. I could think of a thousand and one implications of having such a biological structure beyond those explored in the movie. But none of those implications explains how or why such a structure has developed.
But then, Cameron's natives are as they are simply because he's taking a shortcut. The natives and Pandora itself are an allegory, simply a setting for the story he wants to tell. And the choice of natives is obviously influenced by the choice of story.
Too bad the setting dominates the story. But then, that's not such a bad thing. You're let into it slowly... on a leash. The movie feels at its most artificial in the first half-hour, where you're given a tour of the human installation. The first scenes with the "Avatars" still seem somewhat CGI, as Jake's first foray into Pandora has him moving awkwardly about. But once he bursts out of the clinic and into Pandora, everything changes.
Pandora's flora is breathtaking in its scope and design. You could spend hours studying it. The native wildlife is likewise engaging and interesting... though incredibly cool touches like the breathing spiracles on many of the larger animals merely serve to emphasize the natives' strangeness compared to the rest of Pandora's creatures... you're hit with such a barrage of sensory stimulation that eventually, you forget you're watching a CGI movie.
The rest of the movie has Jake going native on Pandora... and you will, too. An hour into the movie, Jake questions which world is real, and which is the dream, and the sheer expanse of territory covered by the movie sucks you in to the point where you might ask that question yourself. The animations and expressions of the natives seem fluid and natural once you get past the fact that they're slightly different from humans... all of the action, movement, camera movement and cinematography are as they might be if shot in real life. The only time, after the first hour and half where I even thought of motion capture was a climbing scene set in the floating mountains, but even then, James Cameron has an excuse in the lower gravity of Pandora.
The rest of the time, I sat back, watched the movie, and enjoyed myself... immensely. Never mind the cardboard cut-out villains, cheesy greenie-preachy moral lesson and the fact that the movie was nearly three hours long... with an experience like this, another hour could have gone by and I wouldn't have noticed... at all. All the negatives I've expressed herein only bubbled to the surface hours after I left the cinema... and even then, I plan to watch it again in IMAX by the end of the week.
10/10. Unreservedly. 11/10 for the fact that it's an incredible breakthrough in film-making... on the same level that Jurassic Park was... And like Jurassic Park, this movie changes everything.
For those wanting to ruin their movie-going experience: Trace similar plot points between Avatar and "Battle For Terra" (utterly terrible film) if you've watched it and "Final Fantasy: the Spirits Within". Also, whine aloud in the cinema at the fact that Sigourney Weaver never gets a chance to don an exoframe and beat up bad guys. And raise your hand if you were secretly hoping she would.
Also raise your hand if you thought Michelle Rodriguez was going to "get it" when the base commander took potshots at their chopper... and if you groaned when you realized that she was the bait for the switch where Sigourney Weaver gets shot, raise the other.
And, hell... wouldn't it have been great if they used that "thing" during the alien love scene?
Much apologies, this is the very first epic blockbuster I've watched where you actually have perspective. Before this, most major cinematic releases were only partially in 3D.
It's epic. Flawed, yes, but epic.
But seriously... what major motion picture of the past twenty years hasn't had its flaws?
For Cameron flicks, possibly not up there with Aliens, but definitely up there with "The Abyss" in terms of presentation (and possibly beyond), and just as compelling.
C'mon, those two films, when they were released, were amazing, but in hindsight, one can point out some silliness there, too.
More on Pandora:
This world is purely cosmetic. The physics simply don't seem to work out.
For one, Pandora is a low-gravity world, thus it would need a really deep atmosphere to have the same relative air pressure as Earth, and to keep heat in at night (humans apparently can stay out on the surface at any time of the day)... this deep atmosphere would give enough pressure for large winged creatures to fly.
So it all works... or doesn't. Pandora is actually a moon circling a huge gas giant primary... which would actually strip its atmosphere down.
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Secondly... "unobtanium"... it's metal, yes... it floats... double yes. What does that imply? Why are they mining it out of the ground instead of trawling unobtanium dust out of the sky? No, wait... there is unobtanium dust in the sky... it's the flying mountains of Pandora! You're going to go for a vein directly under a native town instead of those obviously rich sources of unobtanium?
Movie was great, in my opinion best of 2009 by far. It's definitely cracked my top ten list when it comes to films. It's an experience, and it makes you want to be there on Pandora.
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They should make a 2nd of it. They've created this whole entire world and culture, they should put it to good use, plus I'm sure there are very many more possibilities they could use.
