Avatar is an Experience, not a Film!

Rating: 8/10 (5 January 2010)

Too often people let themselves get caught up in the hype of a thing.
An event is announced that signifies a landmark or return of something momentous and suddenly all hell breaks loose. Some side with blatant aggression, raising pitchforks and lanterns and storming forward with disregard of reason or logic or any kind of care. They only see what they want to see, and nothing's going to satisfy their lust but spilled blood.
Then we have the trolls, who are just as bad.
It's a shame, because many of the opinions you read on Avatar will be skewed by this factor, and while that won't matter on a personal level for most, it could in turn skew the opinion of others into locked down emotion in a similar fashion.
People are easily lead by the opinions of others, and this hype of extremes will play a large part in the way Avatar is heralded.
However, long after the hype has died, once new and better advances have been made, will Avatar stand with the genre classics as a timeless piece of film-making?
I'm not entirely sure.
There's no denying Avatar is a fantastic achievement in terms of visual design and implementation. Every penny of the budget is on screen for us to devour. This isn't something to be watched, it's something to be /experienced/. Fully. Throughout the movie I was /there/, on Pandora, sucking in the air and gasping in time with the characters at the beauty of this wondrous new world that Cameron's created.
The CGI is almost seamless. The motion capture technology developed for the film has breathed life into the CGI characters like nothing I've ever seen. Usually with CGI events I scrutinise for flaws and joins and actively hunt for the strings, scissors at the ready, but this time I wasn't even given the chance to catch my breath long enough to focus, let alone handle a pair of scissors with that much precision!
The 3D is great. It's not heavy handed, nor is it used in a gimmicky way to excite the audience. It merely heightens the reality of Pandora, especially in the aerial scenes where my sense of vertigo was triggered on more than one occasion. At times it almost felt like there was too much to take in, and repeated viewings might be essential to grasp the full visual value.
I honestly think anyone denying this film is a remarkable technical achievement is in denial about something else entirely. I just wouldn't buy it. It's /that/ good.
Just as the Na'vi 'jack-in' to Pandora, I felt jacked-in to Avatar. It flowed into me in euphoric waves of excitement and awe and for the first time in a long time, I felt the ice of my cynical adult expectations thaw and the child-like wonder I thought I'd lost took my hand and led me through the jungles of this beautifully realised world.
The action is masterfully handled. A wondrous return to the old-school of long panned shots and well considered space, and the editing is smooth and consistent. There's no ROTF huddles of incomprehension, or shaky cam for the sake of cool nonsense, this is Cameron showing the kids how it's done.
The story itself is a very clear-cut case of 'Good' Vs 'Evil'. This simplicity will no doubt turn off some who hunger for something meatier to chow on, but for me the simplicity was a strength. It was Jake's journey that hooked me, and a convoluted and 'smart' plot would have bogged that down and over complicated the pure emotion of it all.
The acting is very fine for the most part. Lines are delivered with conviction and real emotion and this helped a great deal in overcoming some of the issues I've mentioned so far as, regardless of them all, I was still given a very solid impression of each character's personality and their metaphorical weight within the universe. I found both Weaver and Saldana especially intense and alive, Worthington very watchable and warm, and Lang suitably bad-ass and believably threatening.
However, the lack of depth of exposition and in the relationships between the characters left some of the potentially most affecting moments of the story unsatisfying and gave the film a slightly hollow feel in places. And while the spectacle of the visuals and the emotional impact of the individual performance themselves certainly carried me along with the emotions of each scene, I didn't connect with everything in a way that would have made me hail this as the instant classic I've been hoping it would be since it was announced.
Also, the historical allegory the film makes to our imperialistic nature as a species could be misconstrued by some as a political commentary on contemporary events, which might cause some confusion and alienate potential viewers. I never felt like I was being preached to, and for the most I felt like I was discovering these truths along side Jake, and even though I was never as surprised as he was, it still felt like the revelations were part of a fiction rather than a lecture.
Perhaps my expectations were too high given the quality of Cameron's previous efforts, but there is one thing that I absolutely cannot deny: the overall sense of awe this film generated transported me on a magical journey that felt exactly like I was experiencing an alien world, like I was breathing the air, running with Jake through the training grounds as we both marvelled at his new avatar body, and cheering with the natives as they gathered their strength and courage to defend their homeland. It felt like I was a child again experiencing wonder for the first time.
And that's something very rare indeed.