Major Step Forward

Rating: 8/10 (29 May 2010)

I didn't exactly know what all the hype was about before I actually saw Avatar at home on BluRay. Now I wished I had seen it in 3-D in a theatre. It is a technical tour de force. In a year that didn't really produce that many exciting films, I am somewhat at a loss to figure why it didn't win Best Picture. Politics I suppose or maybe something more Let's examine that.
What avatar isn't is a philosophically deep movie. A lot of people draw the obvious parallel to Dances With Wolves although Little Big Man also comes to mind. The characters herein are cardboard however, the plot utterly predictable from the opening scene. We are the ugly Americans, laying waste to everything we touch. One of our midst is sent out to destroy the enemy. He instead falls in love with them and ends up becoming one of them. Zzzzzzzzzzzzz. Been there seen that. It never hurts to be reminded that Mother Earth is herself alive nor that all creatures great and small deserve their rightful place as her children. Never hurts at all. So it's fine with me that in this worldview the buffalo finally get their revenge. 'Bout time. So what was accomplished? A lota whole lot.
Technically.
Notwithstanding that a new cogent universe was created, Cameron and crew advanced the art of film making an entire order of magnitude. The graphics are simply amazing. Fantasy takes on the cloak of reality here. The actors are empowered, not trivialized. Againthe term empowered is used in the technical sense; they are actually weakened by a hackneyed utterly predictable script. But can you imagine what these same actors, armed with a gifted writer behind them might achieve? That will be the true legacy of this film. That's why it deserved the Best Picture Oscar. No other film in the competition really had the juice of 'legacy'. What Cameron & Crew achieved will live on for years.