In Continuum.

I've watched a great many films in the past year or so, and it is quite a pity that the first film that I review after my "return", so to speak, is this one. By now, everybody has seen Avatar - and I mean everybody. Everyone has watched Avatar, and it is the new "in" thing, because if you haven't watched it, you are weird. It is like Titanic back in the 90s, and curious to note that they are by the same director, no less. Avatar has been touted to be the movie event of, well, this entire decade perhaps. Everybody has been anticipating for it ever since it was announced, and raving about it after they've watched the film. Ever since the first trailer was released onto the internet a few months ago, my reaction to Avatar has been this: Wow, James Cameron is back at last! Not because I thought the trailer was very special, but because James Cameron has had a great track record with his films. I am a huge fan of Aliens, and Terminator 2 is perhaps one of the best action movie ever. Titanic, while it was more like a badly written love story on a gigantic set, it was still a pretty decent watch. Well, it didn't justify people watching it ten times over, but it made sense, if you know what I mean. Now, here comes Avatar, and here's what I think about it.

If you pick out ten people on the streets and ask them if they liked Avatar, nine out of ten people would tell you that they loved it. Expand the sample size, and you ask one hundred people if they liked Avatar. This time, about ninety-five percent of the people will tell you that they loved it. Here's the thing: there is no denying that Avatar is a box office hit, and it is already the biggest film in terms of the amount of money it has earned of this entire decade anyway. Basically, it has nothing left to prove any longer - it is the king of this decade. As it carries on to be shown in the theaters around the world, people will keep flocking into the theaters for this "cinematic experience", something that it has been advertised as. You know, everything we've seen so far has been boasting about its visuals and special effects. Visuals, visuals, visuals, humans are slaves to those, aren't we? We love pretty things, and we are OK with ignoring everything else about it. Now, back to the sample size thing. If you ask me how I felt about Avatar, I am going to say that I am one of the five percent of people who didn't like it. In fact, to be honest, it is a truly over-rated piece of cinema.

Yes, you people can continue reading this blog entry after you have finished gasping. After all, finding a person who doesn't like Avatar is like finding someone with two properly working heads, each with its own personality and the ability to speak. People like us are hard to come by these days, especially when rave reviews are pouring in from every direction in the media. I get it, everybody loves Avatar, but that does not explain my general indifference towards the film. The same thing was said about The Dark Knight two years ago, and I loved it when I saw it in the theaters. I do pride myself as being a very objective audience, and I dislike something when it certainly deserves my disliking. Avatar did not work for me, and I feel like I have very valid reasons to dislike most of everything about. While trying to give a fair and balanced review of it on a forum, I couldn't come up with more than one good aspect of the film. You guessed it: I said good things about the visuals. Beyond the visuals, though, everything fell flat almost completely. I sat through the nearly three hour long film wanting it to end, and the first thing I did was to turn to my girlfriend to ask for her opinions on it. It's true, and we agreed. We shrugged, and discussed what to eat for dinner.

Let's begin with the good stuff: Avatar is the most visually stunning film I have seen in a very long time. Pretty much everything you see on the screen was generated by a computer somewhere, painstakingly painted frame by frame, pixel by pixel. That takes a lot of talented people and a lot of time (and money), and that is part of why Avatar is so awesome to look at. When you have just 40% of what goes on in the movie to be live-action, that's a lot of grounds to cover if you want to digitally insert elements into your film. I suppose that was necessary in the post-production process, considering how the film was made to be watched in 3D, instead of being altered to be watched in 3D like many other films. When you want that kind of control over your film, it is inevitable that you have to go through every single pixel in order to achieve it. You know, paint in elements digitally to give it a kind of 3D depth that cannot be achieved if you filmed something in an ordinary manner. This film is beautiful to look at, no matter how you want to argue about it. This is special effects done right, and you almost forget that you are watching a film that is saturated with computer generated graphics. All of that, though, represents a huge part of my problem with this film.

I remember watching an interview CNN did with James Cameron, and he was talking about how the technology today has enabled him to make this film with ease. He mentioned about how every blade of grass in the film was painted on, and the natural scenery could be altered over and over again until they got what he was looking for. In the past, he said, it was completely different. He brought up the famous kissing scene in Titanic, right after Rose tells Jack that she is supposedly "flying" at the bow of the ship. In the background, we see this beautiful sunset - that's a real sunset, by the way. Apparently, during filming, James and crew had to wait two weeks for the perfect sunset to come up before shooting that scene. Nowadays, all you have to do is to film something first and then digitally insert a fake sunset later. He seemed very proud of the fact that you can insert pretty much anything you want into a film now. If you want Elvis to come back to life, you can probably do that with a few buttons pressed - no problem. However, I feel that this takes away a part of what makes filmmaking, filmmaking. It becomes almost too convenient and too easy, and this isn't about digitally inserting a creature that does not exist, or a plant that is alien in nature. It's a sunset we are talking about, and it occurs 365 times a year. Even something like that, you have to digitally insert it? I guess I am old school, and I like "keepin' it real". That, to me, is just being lazy.

Next, when I say that the film is visually stunning, I do mean that the specially effects are awesome. However, this film was also advertised to be watched in 3D because it was meant to be watched in 3D. Avatar is my very first 3D movie ever, and I have no way of comparing it with anything else that I have ever seen in my life in terms of 3D. Based on what I have seen in Avatar though, I couldn't help but go, "That's it?". Because really, the only aspects of the 3D graphics that popped out to "wow" me were the plants and the computer monitors that the characters used in the film. Whenever those things were onscreen, you can very clearly see how it benefitted from being 3D, and how everything looked so much better in that medium - that, I get. Everything else in the film, however, didn't seem to benefit from the 3D at all. In fact, I took off my glasses every now and then to see if there is a difference between 2D and 3D. While the image was a little blurred out without the glasses, it pretty much looked exactly the same to me. In fact, the colors were brighter and much more vibrant without the glasses than with the glasses. With the glasses, the film looked dull and boring in terms of the colors, and the world of Pandora was completely drowned out in a scene of, well, dark hues and shades.

Everybody raved about the final battle between the humans and the Na'vi people, and you thought that all the spaceships, all the missiles, all the arrows and explosions involved would somehow take advantage of the 3D, right? No, it didn't. In fact, as you continue to watch the battle scenes, you quickly start to forget that the 3D is even there in the first place. It's not like I expected missiles and arrows to be flying into my face all the time, which would actually make things really cheesy. But one or two wouldn't hurt, right? I thought the action sequence did too little to take advantage of 3D, which meant that visually it was just like any other science fiction battle scenes out there. It kind of felt like the first fifteen minutes of Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith when you have a million things happening at the very same time. Sure, great visuals here and there, but they weren't anything to make your heart race or your adrenaline rushing, you know. The final battle really wasn't as good as what people made it out to be. I mean, especially when you have gunships versus arrows, there aren't a lot of things that could potentially go on. I wanted to get involved in the action, but I couldn't. For the most part of the final battle, it was more like watching a bunch of people with high tech weapons exterminating pests in a jungle. The humans fired rockets, the natives exploded. The humans fired more rockets, more natives exploded. Then, of course, a miracle happened. 3/4 of the final battle scene involved the Na'vi pretty much losing, and then the reason why they won wasn't even because of the Na'vi themselves at all. Mother nature stepped in, and of course our hero threw a few grenades. He saved the day, yay.

That aside first, I want to talk a little bit about the story itself. Avatar is a rip-off of Pocahontas and The Last Samurai combined. We have a human infiltrating into the natives' lives to get to know them, and the natives reject his presence at first. Then, a beautiful native starts to teach this human the ways of the forest, taught him how to hunt with bows and arrows and how to live amongst the natives. Then, of course, the human falls in love with the native, and feels that the humans are doing bad things to the natives. So, the human tries to help the natives, and they eventually win. Avatar is Pocahontas because it follows the exact same plot from the beginning till the end. It is Pocahontas high on steroids, and it has gunships instead of men on horses. It is the same as The Last Samurai because, well, do we remember the final battle in The Last Samurai? Oh yes. The Japanese army, with their guns and cannons, fought against the samurai warriors who rode horses and killed people with bows and arrows. Everything is a rip-off of one another, I agree. But when your copying is this obvious, it almost becomes a little bit shameless, don't you think. James Cameron probably banked on people ignoring the simple story line because the visuals are supposedly so great. They are great, but they aren't enough to cover up the mediocre script that he supposedly wrote more than ten years ago.

According to the story, the way that you find your banshee (those flying dragon things) was to see which one is trying to kill you. So, the Na'vi people brings out protagonist onto the edge of a cliff, and he is supposed to find a banshee that is out to kill him. That all made sense to me until the part when one of them actually tries to kill him. Jake, the protagonist, jumps at the banshee and wrestles it to the ground. According to the natives, the way to properly ride any animal on Pandora is to stick their braided hair, which has tentacles in them, into these tubes on the animals to communicate with them almost telepathically. Now, after Jake managed to properly wrestle the banshee to the ground, the Na'vi princess then asked Jake to quickly insert his tentacle things into the animal's tube. OK, if you guys are not getting what I am trying to say here, here it is: Jake just raped a poor animal. He wasn't using his genital to insert it into the animal's genital, sure, but it sure looked like it. Apparently, on Pandora, it is OK for the natives to rape an animal, just as long as no genitals are involved. Forcefully stuffing your antenna into the animal? That's perfectly OK with the people of Pandora. No wonder the humans thought them to be uncivilized. It felt like the banshee just didn't want to be disturbed, and here comes a native who tries to stuff things into its tubes. It's like a prisoner in a prison trying to mind his own business while picking up a bar of soap. Yeah, the poor banshee was raped and everybody got to watch it in 3D.

The characters in this film are bland and, well, nothing really develops in terms of the characterization. Jake does, though, because he went from a non-believer into a believer of "the force" that resides in the forest. Everybody else seems to be unnecessarily one-dimensional despite the three-dimensional film. The main bad guy seems to be bad for the sole reason of being bad. He shoots at innocent natives and kills them all just because he can, and you start to wonder if people give out military ranks randomly in the future. Then we have Giovanni Ribisi's character, the guy who is there for the mineral, and he suddenly decides that it is bad to kill the natives for no apparent reason. Out of nowhere, he decides to look guilty and sorry for the natives, but all he does is to stare helplessly at a computer monitor at the end of the movie. Michelle Rodriquez's character as the tough female pilot is even more puzzling. She doesn't do anything and, out of nowhere, decides to go against her authorities and act on her own. When she died, nobody cared - at least I know I didn't. She could have been out of the film and we wouldn't have cared for her existence at all. She was completely redundant, and I do not blame her for it at all. The script probably did not dictate a very heavy role for her, which caused her character to be almost utterly useless. Oh yeah, she can navigate the flying ships very well... and? Nothing else. She's really there to pilot planes and look tough.

Next, the usage of Deus Ex Machina at critical moments of the film. Deus Ex Machina is latin for "God Machine", and it is plot device where a previously intractable problem is suddenly solved because of some miraculously occurrence that is out of the story's internal logic. For example, there is a scene in the film when you see the princess being stuck behind a tree with all the humans and robots coming behind her. She wants to shoot at those human bastards because they blew up her home, but all she had were bows and arrows - not very smart. Jake is trying to stop her from doing it, but all she wanted to do was to kill some humans. However, by doing so, she'd expose her hiding place, and she'd probably be shot to death soon after. Then, out of nowhere, all the animals of the forest comes to her rescue and tramples all over the humans! How in the world did that happen? Oh yeah, mother nature told the animals to. Seriously, mother nature commanded the animals to come and kill the humans. Suddenly, all the previously ferocious animals become tamed little pets, and they even allowed the Na'vi princess to ride on its back at one point. Then the flying animals swoop down to destroy the flying ships, they start eating the humans, and everything is resolved. The natives win! Woo! Suck it Pocahontas, you didn't have mother nature on your side. The natives have mother nature and a bad plot device on their side.

The next thing I want to talk about is the entire first half of Avatar. From the very beginning of the film up until the sex scene (which really isn't a sex scene), it is basically a combination of a National Geographic episode and Al Gore's Inconvenient Truth. James Cameron seems to be in love with the world that he has created so much that he wants to spend the first half of the film showing you everything there is to show about it. This is what happens in the first half of the film: Oh look, these plants look funny and they act funky. Do as I say Jake you idiot, you are supposed to shoot arrows like that. That is the Na'vi way. Oh, more plants to look at. Don't touch that, try this, no Jake! You idiot. Plants! That animal is dangerous, it can eat you if it wants to. PLANTS! Waterfall. This is the Na'vi way of talking to our ancestors. CATCH A BANSHEE! Floating islands, a lot of minerals in those. PLANTS! Glowing plants. Strange monkeys, strange horses. Tree of Souls! Tree of something. PLANTS! Cute. Oh look at this, this is a sign that you are "the one". Stop doing that, idiot. Plants! Let's mate. It is almost like a documentary feature of Pandora on its own. I understand if you want to show off all your amazing creations, and I get that. However, noticed how Peter Jackson tried to show off Middle Earth, an entirely fictional world? He doesn't spend half of the trilogy talking about where everything came from. This time, it almost feels self-indulgent while he spent all the time he spent showing off everything. Look! I created this weird looking monster thing! Me! And this plant! It glows in the dark! Like those Twilight vampires the sun? Only, we are in the dark, and they glow! Look! Plants! More plants! No, that is not the Na'vi way. Let's come up with a new language so that the Na'vi can speak that way. Insert Na'vi speech here. HEAR THAT?! I created a language! I'm the king of the world! Woo!

Avatar is James Cameron's moment to show off what he has been wanting to do, and people lapped every inch of it up. Aside from the special effects, there really isn't anything to rave about. Notice how I couldn't even be bothered with going into details about the story. You, as the audience, are always going to be about forty minutes ahead of the film, because you know how it is going to turn out for sure. I almost wished for the Na'vi people to lose just so that there'd be some element of surprise in me - no, they won, because mother nature had a divine intervention. Avatar is nothing more than a bloating effort on James Cameron's part to show off what he can do with special effects and 3D. While those were great, he didn't have the story or the characters to match up to it. But humans, like I said, are visually drive creatures, and we create this halo effect when it comes to films as well. If a film looks good, then we can forgive a lot of other bad things that come along with it. It's good that my 3D glasses were uncomfortable and screwed up, because that allowed me to really study the film without being completely distracted by the visuals. I initially gave the film a 7/10, but I think I'd like to lower it to about 6/10, or lower. The more I think about Avatar, the more it feels to me like an overblown film about James Cameron's own little fantasy world badly executed.

6/10