Saturday 24 April 2010

Avatar Review

Very late in the day, I know, but I spent a while writing it and forgot to post it...so forgive me!

Avatar Review

Much has been written about this film already, and I was quite late to the party so really this is just a collection of thoughts rather than a review intended to alert you to whether or not the film is any good and you should or shouldn’t go and see it.

So, what’s right with it? Well, just as they were in Terminator 2 in 1991, and Titanic in 1997, the visuals in the movie are truly spectacular and genuinely will have moved the goalposts in the field of special effects. The future of CGI has surely been irrevocably changed by what Cameron has done here, and it’s about time too. It’s no secret that personally I hate CGI. Instead of enhancing a story through the use of convincing special effects to transport the viewers into another world, CGI is too often a way of avoiding any real plot development – overused to little genuine effect, it has become a pet hate of mine. If you want to see the way effects should be done, look at movies that Stan Winston worked on in the earlier days or the miniature work of Derek Meddings and others. These films employed a subtlety in their effects work that brought the story to life. The plot of the film always came first. The special effects in Citizen Kane are better than those in Transformers 2, because they actually aid the film, and at no point do they attempt to cover for the complete lack of storytelling capability on the part of the director. Cameron has returned to these halcyon days with Avatar – the effects are absolutely incredible, and the most realistic computer imagery I’ve seen in 10 years, but at no point do the audience feel overwhelmed by them. It’s also true of the 3D in the movie for the most part. How many directors have filmed in 3D just purely to allow a character to throw something at the screen so the audience can jump? It’s alright as a gimmick, but when you’re paying £11.25 for a ticket, you want a bit more than that. This film delivers. Rather than concentrate on the foreground of the scene, Cameron’s use of 3D brings a depth to this world that he has created. I’m still far from convinced by 3D but if it has got a future, it will be like this.

The effects, while incredible, are not perfect yet. Two major problems with CGI (fire and water) have been half overcome, in that the water is beautifully rendered, the fire much less so. The seemingly insurmountable hurdle of motion capture – namely trying to get any emotion into the eyes of the “actors” (something Beowulf, Polar Express et al never quite got the hang of) has been cleared with room to spare. The close up interactions between the computer generated natives of Pandora is unbelievably good. In fact, there is more genuine emotion in the kiss between two characters who aren’t actually there than there was between Christian Bale and Bryce Dallas Howard in Terminator Salvation.

It seems odd that Cameron is so good at creating genuine bonds between characters and emotion we can believe in when he’s so absolutely terrible at writing dialogue. I can’t really understand why he’s still allowed to write his films, because the words are unbelievable in their hollowness, but at the same time, whether it be Sarah Connor and Kyle Reese, John Connor and the Terminator, Rose and Jack, or now Jake and Neytiri – there is a genuine bond created, and it’s one into which the audience buys, invariably. It does leave the audience wondering why the cast are so criminally underused in Cameron’s films. Avatar has a really interesting and talented cast at its core, and while they all do decent jobs, it’s hard to imagine that this group of actors wouldn’t have been capable of more. Perhaps its the skill of the actors in case that help the audience to buy the dialogue, because god knows we wouldn’t if they weren’t so believable in their roles. But where Cameron did manage to make Arnold Schwarzenegger into a legitimate actor, he also managed to make people like Leo DiCaprio, Kate Winslet, Joe Morton, Jamie Lee Curtis, look extremely ordinary. For all his faults at writing dialogue, and make no mistake - some of them are viscerally on show here, by the time the film reaches its climax, we are involved in the world, and believe in the characters.

Sam Worthington and Zoe Saldana, both building on good debuts last year are very impressive here, Worthington especially doing no harm to the idea that he could be the new poster boy for repressed emotion/moral dilemma leading men. The rest of the cast turn in good performances too, Joel David Moore, Stephen Lang, CCH Pounder and Laz Alonso are all excellent either in this world or theirs, and Michelle Rodriguez makes a welcome appearance too. Sigourney Weaver is also a good addition to the cast to add genuine Hollywood gravitas – and it’s hard not to raise a smile as she slips into her Avatar, which for some reason has remained 25 years old when everyone else’s has clearly aged. But that aside, at absolutely no point are the cast in danger of winning any awards for their acting; as with Titanic and Terminator 2, the Best Picture and Director nominations are foregone conclusions, but there’ll be no Oscars for the acting or the script.

The film is long, for sure – the history of people being given utter creative freedom suggests that bloated and over-long are just two of the most commonly used adjectives when their finished product is released. But whereas films like Pirates of the Caribbean feel genuinely bloated in the sense that you could quite easily chop 30-40 minutes of a) pointless plot exposition or b) dull repetitive fight scenes featuring, you guessed it, bad CGI out of the film, Avatar only fleetingly threatens to fall into those traps. It doesn’t make the mistake of trying to fully explain three or four different plot strands and it stays true to the world it has created, two things that sound easy and are yet almost snow leopard-esque in their rarity.

People are saying that this film is a true original, and in terms of the visual effects, there’s no doubt that that is true. In terms of plot, message and other aspects...it’s really not. At first seen by some as a simple allegory for the US invasion of Iraq, a quick watch of the film shows it up as a very very thinly disguised re-telling of the entire history of US foreign policy. Vietnam, Korea, Iraq, Afghanistan, and of course the Native American story are all alluded to here. In fact, the links with the story of the Native Americans are so strong that some people have suggested that the film is simply Pocahontas in space – and having now seen the film, it’s impossible to throw this accusation out. But it’s not just Pocahontas that is re-told here. Dances with Wolves is drawn on, heavily, and there are aspects of Terminator, Transformers, Top Gun, Harry Potter, Saving Private Ryan, and many others in terms of ideas for dialogue and character, and in terms of structure, feel and certainly music, the film owes a lot to Titanic. Structurally almost exactly the same as Titanic (starts in the “real” world, moves to another world for the majority of the story, with occasional jumps between the two to remind us that it isn’t quite real, lots of character exposition, stunning visuals, three clear acts, the exposition of the plot and characters, the building of the romance through adversity that never really comes to anything, and the final chapter featuring the crisis before resolving itself in the dream world after all) the music, written again by James Horner, is very similar too. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but does suggest that Cameron (who has had, let’s not forget, 15 years to come up with a different structure) might have found his preferred storytelling style.

If his storytelling style is going to be this preachy, it may get exponentially harder to stomach his films. I’ve always hated being preached at, and the whole point of a good allegory is that the reader or viewer shouldn’t feel that they are being preached to – and it’s a level on which Avatar fails miserably. This is why Animal Farm is so good; you shouldn’t literally be able to transpose the exact events of the allegory onto the real situation, and while there are ways you could do that with Orwell’s novel, in this case you only have to change a character’s name here or there. Since Cameron can’t write dialogue worth its weight in anything, we should expect nothing less from his skills at subtly infusing his scripts with a moral message. At least nobody will have to do any thinking when they get out of the cinema as to what the message of the film was, which may help to account for its phenomenal success, but it doesn’t add to its quality.

All that aside though, the film is a stunning achievement on so many levels that it is hard to be too critical. Cameron has created a world we can believe in, characters we can root for, and effects that blow us away. When a film is 2 hours 40 minutes long and you wish there had been a bit more of it...you can’t say fairer than that. Gore Verbinski & Michael Bay would have benefitted from being able to do it, so we can only congratulate Cameron that he has done it, again.