Okay guys, I'm super sorry for not updating my blog since September--the school year's been pretty crazy and I just never really got around to it. So I figured that now that Christmas break has started, I can kick things back into gear with a good ole movie review of a movie I saw at midnight last night. Ladies and gentlemen: my review of James Cameron's AVATAR.
First, a clarification: this movie is NOT...I repeat NOT based on the Nickelodeon cartoon of the same name. There is in fact a movie coming next year out based on the Nickelodeon cartoon entitled The Last Airbender. But this is entirely different. The original script for this movie was written all the way back in 1994 by writer/director James Cameron, only a few years after his smash hit and action movie revolution film Terminator 2 and only a few years before he created the current box-office record holder Titanic. However, Cameron decided to wait on actually making Avatar, as the budget would have been more than he could afford at the time and he felt that the CGI technology necessary to do the script justice just wasn't there yet. But a couple of years ago, Cameron felt that the time was finally right to make his masterpiece. Using some of the most advanced CGI and 3-D technology seen yet (more on that later), revolutionary filming techniques, and a budget of over $300 million, Cameron has finally brought his dream project to life. So just how good is it?
The answer: simply amazing.
I don't even know where to begin, but I guess I can start talking about the plot. It is certainly a very complex plot that I won't spoil for you, but just to give you the gist of it, Avatar takes place in the year 2154 on the fictional forest planet of Pandora, where an alien race (the Navi) reside. However, humans from the outside world are deeply interested in accessing some sort of extremely valuable mineral located under Pandora's surface, and the Navi living right on top of the largest deposit of the mineral on the entire planet. Using a breakthrough scientific technology, humans have begun creating "Avatars", which are bodies made up of a mix of human and Navi DNA. They have developed a technology that allows humans to actually shift their consciousness into these Avatars, allowing them to live inside these bodies and more easily interact with the natives. The story follows Jake Sully (Sam Worthington), an ex-U.S. Marine, who is assigned to become one of these Avatars and go into the dense forests of Pandora in order to discover what it will take to get the natives to relocate so the humans can access the mineral deposit. However, not everyone agrees with the science community's diplomatic policy: the Military, led by Colonel Miles Quaritch (Stephen Lang), is all in favor of simply wiping out the Navi in order to gain access to the deposit. Without giving too much away, Jake Sully, as an Avatar, is in a race against time to fulfill his mission for the humans, but on the way discovers new things about the Navi, the forests of Pandora, and himself.
It really is an incredible story and is done extremely remarkably. It has close ties to stories we've all heard before, including everything from Pocahontas to the U.S.'s westward expansion to the Iraq War. And it's really one of the only thing that you can fault this movie for: the simple fact that we have heard this story a million times before and it is fairly predictable. But it's really hard to not like the movie because of this fact, as the story is so incredibly timeless and relevant to us today. Though the movie has an obvious bias, it never feels like it gets too preachy, and it really does hold your interest the whole way through, even if you can probably guess what is going to happen.
Now let's talk about visuals. This certainly isn't a movie that you can just brush off the visuals on; the visuals are a MAJOR component of the movie. It's so easy to see why such an incredibly high budget was needed to make this movie. The CGI (Computer Generated Imagery) is easily the most advanced seen in a movie yet. The entirely CGI jungles of Pandora are so incredibly lush and lifelike you'd swear it was a real place (that is, perhaps until you witness the awe that is Pandora's floating mountain range). But where the movie really makes HUGE leaps is with the entirely CGI Navi and Avatar characters. The creatures are so lifelike, their expressions so accurately portraying every last drop of human emotion, that it's hard not to think that these creatures really exist. The way they move and act doesn't look so obviously fake like the billions and billions of other CGI creatures out there. This is the leap that CGI in movies has so desperately needed since it began being used in the mid-90s. We're going to look back and laugh at the so obviously fake CGI that existed prior to this movie. It's really no surprise that such a leap came from James Cameron--after all, the T-1000's morphing ability in Terminator 2 was one of the first major examples of CGI used in movies.
And after seeing Avatar in 3-D, I'm totally convinced that it's the ONLY way to truly experience this film. As one of the first feature films to be fully FILMED in 3-D using special cameras that actually capture depth, it really really delivers. This definitely isn't the gimmicky 3-D where it's blatantly obvious that many shots were catered to making you go "woah!" when you see it in 3-D. Cameron just tells the film the way it should be told, and uses the 3-D effect to greatly enhance it. It really makes it feel more like you're looking out a window into the vast Pandora forest rather than simply viewing it on a flat movie screen. The depth provided by the 3-D is simply stunning. The movie really comes alive in 3-D, and working together with the incredible CGI effects, really transports you into the world of Pandora. I honestly think I would be really disappointed viewing the movie in normal 2-D now that I've seen all three dimensions of it.
The acting is all top notch too. Worthington's character is a really likable guy, and you can really see and entirely understand the conflict he's going through. The villain is also someone that you really really hate by the end of the movie. All of the other actors, including the voice acting and motion capture work done for the Avatars and Navi, is all absolutely top notch.
Overall, Avatar really is a spectacular movie. I really feel like this movie is very comparable to Cameron's original Terminator: a plot that isn't entirely original, yet it just works so well because of the incredible new take on it, combined with some fantastic visual effects. Cameron has already stated that he plans on making sequels if the movie does well in the box office, and it's really one of those movies that I would be totally okay with there being a sequel for. If Cameron DOES make a sequel, I really hopes he does what he did with Terminator 2 and create a sequel that combines an entirely original concept to all of the amazing things done in the first movie to create a movie that will be the standard to which every other movie in the genre is held up to. But for now we have Avatar, which is an absolutely incredible movie in it's own right that may not completely change the way in which movies are written, but will most certainly change the way in which they are presented.
I give it 4.5/5 stars.
