Avatar
December 18, 2009
Rated: PG-13 Runtime: 162 min Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
It’s been 12 years since James Cameron’s Titanic, and he’s back with another epic. This one is a science fiction yarn. In the future, humans have managed interstellar flight, and they’ve found life on the moon of a gas giant orbiting another star. They’ve also found an important energy resource (that old standby unobtanium), so they’re mining the forest moon, named Pandora.
Pandora has an atmosphere, but humans can’t breath it without a mask. There are 9-foot tall blue humanoids in the jungle, the Na’Vi, hunter-gatherers. To interact with them, humans have genetically engineered, in effect, biological puppets of the Na’Vi, called avatars, grown in a vat with a mix of human and Na’Vi DNA. Humans go into a tank and are cybernetically connected to their avatar, which they can then use to explore Pandora. Yes, it’s kind of like an avatar in World of Warcraft or other computer games.
Avatar
Jake Sully (Sam Worthington from Terminator Salvation) is a marine who is a paraplegic from a war back on Earth. But his twin brother was a scientist in the Avatar program, so his DNA is compatible with an avatar they’re brewing in the tank. They send him on the next ship in suspended animation to Pandora. So he arrives with little training, but an opportunity: He can explore this strange alien planet, and, through his avatar, he now has legs again.
Sigourney Weaver plays the head of the scientists, Stephen Lang the head of the mercenary marines working for the corporation mining the unobtanium, and Giovanni Ribisi is the head of the mining facility.
Also Michelle Rodrieguez (Lost) is a tough-as-nails hovercraft-warship pilot.
Sully, once he is controlling his avatar, finds himself in a strange alien world. The jungle is a beautiful and dangerous place with life forms of all descriptions; flying creatures, others of dinosaur proportions. Even the grass glows with phosphorescence when you run through it at night.
Now comes the conflict: the corporation, and their mercenary-marines, want to relocate one tribe of Na’Vi from their big tree, because the biggest unobtanium deposit is right under it.
Sully, over time, has gone native. Through his avatar, he’s even fallen in love with one of the Na’Vi, Neytiri (played, through motion capture, by Zoe Saldana, who played Uhura in this summer’s J.J. Abrams Star Trek).
Yes, this is basically Dances With Wolves with blue aliens. Dances With Blue Aliens?
But James Cameron brings those little touches that set his movies apart. Here he’s constructed all sorts of future-tech, and a fully realized alien world. Its jungle planet reminds of the worlds created by science fiction authors I read as a kid, like Joe Haldeman, John Varley, and Alan Dean Foster. And there are a lot of elements of Aliens here (especially in the corporate and military trappings of the humans), as well as The Abyss, and, during one battle scene, even a nod to the conclusion of True Lies.
And I realized how dumbed-down big budget science fiction movies have gotten, with this summer’s Terminator Salvation and Star Trek. Both dumb fun, but not chock full of good science fiction ideas, like Avatar is.
So there’s a lot of exploring of the alien planet, and then an eventual showdown between the human marines and the natives, in the planet’s holy of holies, which oddly looks a bit like the Roger Dean cover artwork on old Yes record albums.
The computer animation is spectacular. Does it look “real?” Well, it looks really neat. It looks like the best computer animation you’ve ever seen, or the best next-generation computer game you’ve never played. There’s still a level of suspension of disbelief required, that’s equal if not more to when they did big-budget science fiction movie special effects with puppets and stop-animation.
But you couldn’t have done this movie any other way, and it creates an alien world unlike anything ever created on film. I wondered briefly, would it have been more seamless if the humans had been animated as well (as in Beowulf, for example). But no, having actors like Sigourney Weaver really there sells it.
It’s playing in some theaters in 3-D, in others in 2-D. Also 3-D IMAX. Is the 3-D worth it? Yes it is, but it’s not mandatory, I expect this will look look good on movie screens without 3-D, and also eventually on DVD and Blue-Ray.
The movie is 2 hours and 42 minutes long, so get comfortable in the theater.
Popularity: 35% [?]
Seen it? How many stars do you give it?
(6 votes, average: 4 out of 5)
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Trailer for AVATAR on YouTube.
I listened to an interview with Wes Anderson about doing the Amazing Mr. Fox and he talked about how the directing chore was so much more intense in animation because absolutely everything that appears in the frame is a conscious decision of the director. There are no auspiciously found locations. There’s no fabric that a wardrobe designer discovered that drapes so luxuriously. Given that reality, AVATAR is an amazing creation by James Cameron as the world is incredibly dense and complete. And so flawlessly realized.
Yes, echoes of Abyss and Aliens, (Vasgez flying a chopper? Ribisi doing Paul Reiser?) but from a basic theme standpoint, the story owes a lot to Clifford Simak’s classic SF novel CITY. The idea that becoming an entity attuned to the environment leads to shifting allegiance is at the crux of both works.
A great amalgam in terms of story and structure, but an incredible visual experience not to be missed.
Jade