gwax's rumblings

I saw Avatar last night in RealD 3D and, I have to say, it is a very pretty, rather fun, awe­some to watch movie. The 3D for Avatar was incred­i­bly well done but it gave me such a bad headache and nau­sea that it almost wasn’t worth it. Luckily, I was able to imme­di­ately go home and go to sleep, thus not deal­ing with the dis­com­fort much. Needless to say, I think that I’m going to stick to 2D movies for the fore­see­able future.

Diatribe about 3D aside, Avatar is a pretty great movie. Sure it’s Dances with Wolves in space but Dances with Wolves was a good movie so why not put it in space. Actually, more than that, to me Avatar was Dances with Wolves meets Dinotopia in space. The color palettes of Avatar were vibrant and pretty in much the way that the palettes of Dinotopia were; fur­ther­more, the crea­tures and world were suf­fi­ciently real­ized to make it seem like a place that one might really want to go. In fact, I think Avatar has pro­vided me with the first arti­fi­cial set­ting that I have had a strong desire to visit since Dinotopia.

So, hav­ing dis­cussed the pain (lit­er­ally) of the 3D, the ade­quacy of the story (ade­quate being the right word), and the beauty of the world, let’s talk about the spe­cial effects. For quite a while, I have been adamantly opposed to the use and overuse of CGI in the film indus­try. Certainly, some stu­dios do CGI cor­rectly (Pixar, DreamWorks) but when mixed with live action, I tend to think that the Jurassic Park or Aliens approach of rely­ing pri­mar­ily on live action, pup­pets and robots is a much safer and more visu­ally appeal­ing approach. The clear­est exam­ple of where real is good and CGI is bad is to look at the orig­i­nal Star Wars tril­ogy in com­par­i­son to the new Star Wars tril­ogy. Somehow, thank­fully, James Cameron has not fallen in the same way that George Lucas has; Avatar beau­ti­fully mixes the real with the CGI and I did not once feel as though things had fallen into the uncanny val­ley.

Hopefully Avatar will end up prof­itable in spite of its truly ludi­crous bud­get (offi­cially $237M + $150M mar­ket­ing) and James Cameron will be allowed to keep mak­ing crazy as heck sci­ence fic­tion stuff (it was at >$232M after its open­ing week­end so odds are pretty good). The out­stand­ing ques­tion now is whether he’s going to make a sequel to Avatar or whether he’s going to make Battle Angel Alita like he’s been talk­ing about for a while.

So yeah, over­all, I am inclined to rec­om­mend the Dances with Wolves meets Dinotopia in space movie, oth­er­wise known as Avatar but I do not rec­om­mend it in 3D unless you’ve got some dra­mamine to take before­hand. Actually, that’s an idea; maybe I’ll pop a cou­ple dra­mamine and try see­ing it again, you know, for science.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 22nd, 2009 at 9:56 am and is filed under movies & tv. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.