the maverick delivers....

Rating: 8/10 (10 August 2010)

I was lucky enough to see this in IMAX 3D, and for what amounted to about 8 USD. I had felt that much of the hoopla about "game-changer" and "enter the world" was just that - marketing. How wrong I was. This is really an amazing, immersive visual experience. Much of that has to do with how the visual effects are used (in technology terms), quite apart from their actual quality and magnitude.
From the trailers you just cant tell what this is actually going to be like. It looks pretty, but not so very novel, and maybe even a little disappointing. While what we get in the theatre is of another visual order. The third dimension allows for a presentation of objects that the flat screen simply cannot. Thats what seems to have worked in its favor - people going in with reduced expectations and then coming away stunned by the actual experience. Because the WAY in which photo-real CGI and stereoscopy (i.e. 3D) are combined is the key to this new threshold for visual verisimilitude.
Think about the worlds that we saw in the Pirates and Spiderman movies, the Rings movies, the Harry Potter films, even the Matrix trilogy. Compare that to what we see in Avatar. Credit must be given where it is due, and the fact is that very little of what we've seen earlier compares with this film. This is essentially a different approach - they've actually created a new world out of whole cloth, and they found new ways to deliver this world visually, in spatial terms. The director's intentions - that the viewer should feel no distinction between real and artificial, that photo-real CGI should necessarily surmount the Uncanny Valley - these are achieved, at least to a far greater degree than anything we've seen before.
Unfortunately the story and characters are as banal as everyone reported. I was shocked at how unmoving this was non-visually. This completely fails to engage on an emotional or thematic level. I actually felt that 300 was far more emotionally rousing, and thats pretty damning. Both the story and the storytelling were needlessly trite. Why ?? Was it a deliberate strategy to aim for the "broadest common denominator" ?
For now I believe we should see this as an experiment that largely succeeds visually. That it does not do so in other ways, that it does not enter our minds and souls, is hardly the point. This is a new way of doing things, and it is only the beginning. What James Cameron and others are doing is freeing the filmmaker from the bounds of hardware and physicality. A film can now truly be ANYTHING the filmmaker wants it to be - that seems to be the promise realized by Lightstorm and Weta. Think about when someone like David Fincher or Tarsem Singh or Zack Snyder get their hands on this technology. Someday someone will integrate narrative, imagery and music in the "new way", and we as viewers will greatly evolve in our conceptual reasoning abilities. Audiences did not necessarily appreciate the water tentacle in The Abyss for what it was. But recall what came after that : the T-1000.
Dear Lord. Fox gives this guy half a billion to make a film with untested methods, and it becomes the highest grossing film ever. Unbelievable