Directed by:
James CameronScreenplay:
James CameronCinematography:
Mauro FioreComposer:
James HornerCast:
Sam Worthington, Zoe Saldana, Stephen Lang, Michelle Rodriguez, Giovanni Ribisi, Joel David Moore, CCH Pounder, Wes Studi, Laz Alonso, Sigourney Weaver (more)VOD (6)
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Set in the year 2154, Cameron's sci-fi epic chronicles the U.S. military effort to mine an extremely valuable mineral from a tiny distant world called Pandora whose natives are a race of blue creatures known as the Na'vi. Sam Worthington stars as wheelchair-bound former Marine Jake Sully who becomes an Avatar to Pandora. Taken in by a feisty female Na'vi (Zoe Saldana) and taught the customs of this new world, Jake soon falls in love with both - and finds himself at the center of a battle for control of Pandora. (Home Box Office)
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I do appreciate Cameron's dedication, which meant years of waiting for proper technology and the employment of two special effects giants. The result definitely marks a significant shift for cinema as a whole. Yet that's where the positives end for me... because then we get almost three hours of a shallow story (which could still be tolerated - okay, it’s a fairy tale), dull emotions, the most stupid military lines in history, and blue-green agitation so vigorous that even Greenpeace pales compared to it. The three-dimensional effect is great (Cameron knows how to work with space perfectly), but underneath the fancy tinsel I couldn't find anything more and about halfway through I wasn't even entertained. Sorry, but I was bored shitless with this film. Three stars from me.
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The story is very pedestrian, but who cares. Thanks to James Cameron, I was again that little boy who during the deep totalitarian era, with my mouth wide open, devoured a Polish channel on a grainy black-and-white television, including the first Star Wars, or Zeman's A Journey into the Primeval Times. I devoured Avatar similarly, experiencing partly the joy of exploring the fictional world of Pandora and partly the fascination with 3D technology, which I was a virgin to this day. I really couldn't get enough of that three-dimensional image!! I have some reservations, of course. Cameron put a lot of effort io clothing his film in a 3D garb, but much less on the originality of the emotions of the characters or giving them a compelling ambiguity. All the characters are so naively one-dimensional, just like in fairy tales, but I found it endearing in a way. I hereby forbid the use of the world “cliché”, because the great James doesn’t deserve it. He doesn't deserve it because he invited me to his house for two and a half hours and shared all his hi-tech toys with me. Thanks Jim.
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Incredibly flawless and the most amazing cinema experience of my life. A film that erases the boundaries between the screen and the viewer and that lets you look into another world, to the point that it makes you want to believe Pandora is real. I expected a lot from Avatar and I had come to terms with the fact that such massive expectations could never be met, but the result actually surpassed them. This is something that I could have never imagined, even in my wildest fantasies, because up until now nobody had set a standard for the cinema screen according to which we could set our expectations. The story perhaps isn’t great, but it’s beautiful, classic in the best sense of the word, and certainly not worse than other blockbusters. And to be honest, I don’t think I would be able to watch something intricate, like Strange Days for instance, in this package. Once there are more comparable films, Avatar probably won’t be my favourite (due to personal genre preferences), but it will always be the first. Another viewing is mandatory, the cinema is mandatory, 3D is mandatory! Cameron was the king of the world, now he’s the emperor of the galaxy, next time he’ll reach at least god level, and after this experience, I’m almost certain he’ll pull it off. PS: The posers with prejudices like “I can’t be arsed with a fairytale about blue monkeys” will surely find plenty of things to criticise and I wish them the best wholeheartedly, they are only depriving themselves of the experience. PS2: The experience from the second viewing is at least the same. During the last 60 minutes those goosebumps hardly disappeared.
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In terms of film-craft this is the most precise work that can be achieved under current conditions, but above-average film-craft defining new standards alone doesn’t necessarily make a good movie. Luckily, Avatar is good, but unfortunately no more than just good. It’s like despite all the attention that Cameron devotes to polishing everything down to the last, tiny detail, he forgot about the movie as a whole. Who cares that it suffers from all imaginable maladies of “blockbusters", if only Cameron had managed to enthrall us, draw us in, simply forget that this is still just a movie (it only happened to me in one scene). And the saddest thing about this is that, despite the message, in the end it will be Cameron who causes mass deforestation on out planet due to the mountains of wood needed to produce the paper on which the millions of movie theater tickets sold around the whole world will be printed, and this thought chills me more than any of the best scenes in Avatar. And all of the above applies to the extended version which didn’t concentrate primarily on emotions and characters, but again on technical brilliance. P.S.: This review was written after seeing the regular version; my subsequent visit to see the IMAX version neither improved or impaired my impression of the movie (and why should it, it’s the same movie, isn’t it?), but it did enhance the brilliant effects. ♫ OST score: 3/5
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Avatar is an ultra-mainstream adventure movie for the whole family. In a filmmaking package so perfect it could give you an orgasm, James Cameron self-confidently delivers a super-hackneyed story that won’t surprise you with anything. Apart from his comedies (True Lies), Cameron’s films always contain a hint of existential food for thought alongside all that technical brilliance. But only a hint. They have ideas on which other filmmakers built their movie worlds. Avatar, however, does not contain anything of the sort, and its message begins and ends with a bit of simple ecological agit-prop. It is Cameron’s first film composed solely of things we have seen elsewhere (whether in his films or somewhere else), which he merely delivers in an even more elaborate and beautiful wrapper. Every shot, every cut, every tone of James Horner’s soundtrack contributes to the absolute perfection of the final product. But what good does it do when we always know what happens ten minutes in advance?
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