Avatar - Or how to much computer animated stuff can put worse movies even further down

Rating: 2/10 (18 January 2010)

First of all I'd like to say that I saw the Avatar trailer some weeks before I went to the cinema to see the movie. My thoughts were something like: "Holy crap what is this? Worse computer artists trying to make photo realistic graphics mixing up with real actors in one picture?”. Surprisingly the story with the avatars didn’t look that bad from the trailer. After the trailer I already had enough of this movie and thought I would never watch it because it didn't look like a must see.
That was before the big Avatar hype and all those positive 8 to 10 point reviews I read all over the Internet and here at IMDb. So after I read those I thought perhaps the story could be really worth it. After the first 45 minutes I finally recognized that my first impression given by the trailer has been going in the right direction only that the story wasn't interesting at all. The Story is absolutely what we have seen in so many other movies before i.e. "Dances with Wolves". Many other reviews already give a good impression about how lame the story really is so that I can concentrate on another aspect here.
Most of the 8 to 10 point reviews I read say that the movie does look so great and that the effects are awesome. I say this movie doesn't look that much better than actual video games as for example 'Crysis' do. There is absolutely nothing realistic about the computer animated pictures shown in this movie. Whenever you can see an real actor side on side with an computer rendered person or in an computer rendered environment (you will see this only once or twice in short, fast scenes because the artists know how worse it looks…) the content created with the computer looks nothing but ridiculous. What's going on here folks? Why has this ugly plastic look so much effect on some people? I have seen 10 to 30 years old science fiction movies lately and each alien there does at least look 10 times better than those boring blue Avatar aliens. The difference is that the old aliens were hand made. They aren't tons of creatures crawling out of some 3D application which in our days still isn’t able to create photo realistic characters on the big screen.
Perhaps for some people all of this 3D thingy and computer animated stuff is so impressing that they finally forget to compare it to the real world to see that it is nothing else than plastic. So please, take some time to compare. Do you rally want movies which look like plastic which have this typical "out of the computer" look? Please don't misunderstand me, the computer as tool has a great potential when used the right way as you can see in Lord of the Rings for example. But until we can create whole movies with the computer, mixing them up with only a hand full of real actors, and seeing them as a really harmonious movie will still take some years of development. Perhaps movies like Avatar which will be forgotten after some years because they are visually out-of-date and don't really offer something else are necessary to come to a state where computer animated and rendered graphics will be mature enough to serve as a stylistic device for telling really great new stories. Until then I prefer the good old decent Star Trek or Star Wars alien.