Technology has never looked so human in film.
After all the online buzz (some good, others bad), after all the focus on box office receipts (as ever, Deadline's Nikke Finke has the most comprehensive run-down), after all the attention on whether Hollywood's reigning techno-geek could create a worthy successor to his Oscar-winning, record-shattering "Titanic," "Avatar" snowballed through the pre-winter snowstorm of 2009. James Cameron didn't just make a sci-fi epic. He's created a wholly believable, realistic world, at once marking a new cinematic era and expanding the possibilities of film in our technology-dependent, digital entertainment-driven 21st century. From here on out, movies will be divided into two epochs: B.A. and A.A. Before "Avatar," After "Avatar."
Asked where "Avatar" stands in the history of technology and movies, Roger Ebert, a film historian and arguably the country's pre-eminent movie critic, wrote me in an e-mail: "It inaugurates the next generation and raises the bar. A milestone in the same sense as 'Star Wars.'"
For decades, Ebert has been a skeptic of 3-D technology; while blogging about the animated movie "Up," which premiered in 3-D at the Cannes Film Festival earlier this year, he wrote that 3-D is a "marketing gimmick" aimed "to justify higher ticket prices." But last week, Ebert led the throng of critics who raved about "Avatar," the largest 3-D release in movie history. Cameron's baby, more than 10 years in the making, is "not simply a sensational entertainment, although it is that, " Ebert wrote. "It is an Event, one of those films you feel you must see to keep up with the conversation."
Because people are talking about it, especially in the virtual water cooler that is the social Web. The hashtag #Avatar has been a trending topic on Twitter for days; early Friday morning, on the day of the film's release, @walkercd tweeted: "If the snowstorm takes me this weekend it'll be because I left the house to see AVATAR." In a decade that's been marked by countless innovations in special effects -- from "The Matrix" series to "The Lord of the Rings" trilogy -- there's a sense that, too often, technology is showcased for technology's sake. You can almost hear the director shout from behind the camera, "See, look at what I can do!" The story takes a backseat to the technology. That's not "Avatar." Cameron's use of 3-D is the "best I've seen -- and more importantly, one of the most carefully-employed," Ebert wrote. "The film never uses 3-D simply because it has it."
It's not just critics who've run out of superlatives to describe the experience. Michael Arrington, founder of the industry insider blog TechCrunch, declared "Avatar" as the "the iPhone of movies" -- a real game-changer. Like Arrington, I lined up on Thursday night at the first midnight showing of "Avatar." I was in the San Francisco Bay Area, home to Silicon Valley, attending a conference at the University of California-Berkeley. It was a packed theater -- and, surprisingly, a mixed crowd. There were as many young women as they were young men, many of them sporting their Cal gear. A few minutes into the more than two-and-a-half hour film, when we first see Jake, the former Marine who's a paraplegic, take his first steps on Pandora as his nearly ten feet tall, blue-skinned avatar with a tail, a bespectacled student in front of me yelled: "Oh man, this is much better when you're drunk."
I wasn't drunk. But I did notice, as I looked down my notebook and jotted down some notes, that my jaw had dropped. Literally. It was breathtaking, the sheer beauty of the images on screen -- alive, vivid, seemingly touchable. There's a "thereness" to the action, fleeting and fantastical but somehow also grounded and natural. As others have noted, the story is not new -- it's part "Pocahontas," part "Dances With Wolves" and all the more relevant given the recent climate summit in Copenhagen. At one point in the film, Neytiri, the princess of the Na'vi tribe, tells Jake, her inevitable love interest, as they walk the lush, layered land of Pandora: "All energy is all borrowed. One day you have to give it back." But the new technologies that are used in service of the story -- shot with cutting-edge "Simulcam" camera, with live action seamlessly mixed with CGI imagery, among others -- has revolutionized film-making as a technical art form. And one with a heart. After all, what has distinguished Cameron's movies, from "The Terminator" to "Aliens," are the human stories behind the technology. Take the pulse rifle-carrying, gender stereotype-breaking Ellen Ripley.
"Too much is being said about the technology of this film. Quite frankly, I don't give a rat's ass how a film is made," Cameron told The New Yorker's Dana Goodyear, who wrote a 10,400-word profile of the 55-year-old, Canadian-born director. "It's an emotional story. It's a love story. They're not expecting that. The sci-fi/fantasy fans see the trailer and they think, Cool -- battles, robots. What you really need to get to is, Oh, it's that, too."
Let's leave aside the money haul; judging by the strong word of mouth online, "Avatar" should break the $1 billion mark. Let's forget the awards and accolades; this won't be the last time you'll read the words "Oscar" and "James Cameron" between now and March 10. (And if Cameron and "Avatar" are not top contenders for "Best Picture" and "Best Director," respectively, then the Oscars deserve the consistently low ratings it gets.) What Cameron has achieved, quite simply, will outlast any award and box office report.
James Cameron, Hollywood's reigning techno-geek, has humanized technology.
***Here's the latest extended HD trailer***
Sharon Waxman: Avatar Delivers - and That May Change Everything
A political story about American selfishness, a love story between a man and woman kept apart by their cultures, and a bang-'em-up wartime narrative with the most spectacular images this side of Star Wars. Works for me.
Wajahat Ali: Avatar: A Cinematic Playground
Avatar's aesthetics tower considerably over its predictable storyline and mediocre dialogue, but James Cameron deserves props for seamlessly blending live action, 3D and digital effects.
Avatar - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Or was it Pocahontas? whatever.
We saw it in 3-D IMAX, but I think it would be good with just two dimensions.
James Cameron could do a service to humanity if he would have himself cloned so that he could work on more projects simultaneously. The man is a genius.
The movie *is* groundbreaking in a number of ways, the thing that it showcases is how seamlessly so much of the CG is. Some people might be stuck on the idea that 'that monster is fake' but forget that everything else in scene is too. Watch the trailer, notice how completely the envionment wraps all the scenes? Virtually all of the CG in the movie is of such a quality that it's irrelevant to the image. It's just another prop used in telling of the story. While I found the scale of the environment to be a bit on the ludicrous side, I was more impressed at the effectiveness of the human environment, which was equally CG, but done well enough to be ignored so you could focus on the acting and story.
Will this be a movie that holds up to repeated viewing.. I'm not so sure about that. I'm sure it'll be a good one for showing off hid def systems and wraparound sound though.
As the end-credits rolled for James Cameron's new movie, Avatar, the audience burst into rowdy applause. It seemed to me that they were applauding the sheer computerized dazzlement of the show -- but in the story itself they had just watched the US suffer a humiliating defeat on a distant planet. In the final frames, American soldiers and the corporate executives they had failed to protect were shown lined up as prisoners-of-war about to embark on a death march.
More to the point, the depiction of our national character through the whole course of the film was of a thuggish, cruel, cynical, stupid, detestable, and totally corrupt people bent on the complete destruction of nature. Nice. And the final irony was that Cameron had used theatrical technology of the latest and greatest kind to depict America's broader techno-grandiosity -- as the army's brute robotic warriors fell to the spears and arrows of the simple blue space aliens. Altogether, it was a weird moment in entertainment history, and perhaps in the American experience per se. No doubt audiences overseas will go wild with delight, too, but perhaps with a clearer notion of what they are clapping for than the enthralled masses of zombie Americans.
Michael Moore (who may otherwise be right or wrong) is having great fun bashing capitalism by going around the world to countries with high suicide rates and saying how he admires them, and other forms of patronizing so he can get them to watch his movie: http://www.japanprobe.com/2009/12/03/michael-moore-in-japan/#comment-388988 The irony is too obvious NOT to mention.
Also, not to mention they are "multinational corporations" and not "American corporations", so it is NOT the "American way". But what he does is for money, not education. Documentaries, as a rule, don't spin information to induce a calculated emotional response. If he did care, he would be on our streets leading a revolution instead of whining that if people didn't start a revolution that he'd quit making movies. http://current.com/items/91072412_moore-if-theres-no-revolution-i-quit.htm (gee Mike, maybe that's why you're losing influence? Anybody else acting like, let's face it, a conniving toddler would be spanked and told to stay in their room and without the Nintendo.)
But all of this is entertainment, a concept defined as "Something to relieve the stress of real life". Equally ironic; entertainment now has people shoveling real life back at its audiences.
I ought to see the movie. Maybe it is genuinely good.
I am not sure that this movie is appropriate for an 8 year old, though I am sure many would disagree. It is rather violent.
How do moviegoers have anything to do with the pathetic shenanigans that are going on on Capitol Hill?
Creating an international blockbuster, I would argue, is a place for the expression of themes and an experience that can touch the human spirit....
What Cameron has achieved here is monumental and IMO that is to say to all filmmakers that they literally are only limited by their own imaginations going forward (if you can get the enormous funds necessary to access the special effects needed). But I do not believe that the film is worthy of inclusion on a best picture list.