Daemons Movies
“AVATAR takes us to a spectacular new world beyond our imagination, where a reluctant hero embarks on a journey of redemption and discovery, as he leads a heroic battle to save a civilization. The film was first conceived by Cameron 14 years ago, when the means to realize his vision did not yet exist. Now, after four years of actual production work, AVATAR delivers a fully immersive cinematic experience of a new kind, where the revolutionary technology invented to make the film, disappears into the emotion of the characters and the sweep of the story.”
Screen Crave:
To begin, yes this is the epic visual masterpiece that you’ve all been waiting for and it succeeds in everything it tries to do (visually).The overall look is stunning beyond belief, the special effects are impeccable, Cameron got me to shed a tear and sit on the edge of my seat… BUT the film isn’t flawless, not by a long shot…
The Plot:
Paraplegic war veteran, Jake Sully is brought to another planet called Pandora in place of his brother with the promise of getting his legs back if he helps the government on a mission. Pandora is inhabited by a primitive race called the Na’vi and Jake is sent in to learn their ways so that he can help relocate them and the humans can take over.
The Good:
* Special Effects: As if you didn’t already expect this. The SFX are impeccable and he uses them well. Instead of just shoving them in your face, he weaves them into the story beautifully, and they come off effortlessly.
* The Details: Normally in a film like this, you can see a few mistakes here and there, but I didn’t catch any. From Sam Worthington’s tiny legs to the computers within the scenes – every detail was thought out and used as a part of the environment. The best thing that Cameron did was allow for all his hard work to be incorporated into the wide shots without saying “hey look at this.” In allowing everything to be part of a greater whole, Cameron truly created a world of his own, which makes you truly feel as if you’ve been transported into a new world while watching the film.
* The Acting: To both the actors and director’s credit, the performances came through extremely well. It’s amazing how much of the actors emotions you could see through their Avatar characters. Zoe Saldana gave an especially emotional and strong performance, and you never even saw her real face.
* Sam Worthington’s Hair: It sounds ridiculous, but this is another detail that really stood out. Normally you’ll notice that an actor is given a hairstyle that they can have throughout the entire film, but Worthington’s hair changed with every time shift in the movie and it always looked completely natural. Yet again, nice touch.
The Mediocre:
* The Story: Cameron came up with a lot of original ideas for this film, but the story was not one of them. Although it was well put together, clean, and everything played out like clock-work, there was no originality to it. As everyone realized as they were walking out of the theater, the film is Dances with Wolves but with blue cat-like aliens. It’s every video game you’ve ever played, ever steamy-action novel you’ve ever read, every plot line you’ve seen before in a big budget film. Is it well told? Absolutely! But with all the time and money Cameron put into it, I would expect him to tell an old story well. I get that he took a number of risks, so maybe asking for an original story was taking things too far…
The Bad:
* Early Footage: Although it was fun to see early footage of the film a few months ago, it screws you over in the long run. The first 45 minutes of the film is all about being in awe of the environment. It’s about reacting to everything around you, for the people who have seen the footage the experience isn’t fresh and therefore it doesn’t carry you as much as it should. For those of you who have abstained from any footage, you’ll soon be rewarded.
* James Horner: I could literally tell you what instruments he was about to use and when (and I did tell the person sitting next to me a few times). The music was signposty, cliched, and sounded exactly like Titanic. Horner and Cameron go together like two peas in a pod and people love their collaborations, just not me. Films that take big risks like to find safety where ever they can, and Horner is their comfort blanket. For me, it was the one big thing in the film that almost took me out of a few amazing moments.
* Natives Vs. Technology: (Spoiler alert) A white man comes in, learns the ways of a more primitive people, then fucks them over, has a change in heart, and comes back and uses their own ignorance and belief system to make himself a hero. It’s like Thanksgiving all over again! Although this is an old story that we’ve seen many times before and I can’t blame Cameron for coming up with it, is this really a message we want to be spreading and more so, promoting? What about taking responsibility for yourself?
Overall:
If nothing else this is a visual masterpiece and is meant to be seen in IMAX 3-D theaters. It will take you on a ride and blow you away. If you want to avoid some of the problems with it, just make sure to turn your brain off upon arrival and let your senses lead you.
Washington Post:
Though set in the year 2154 on Pandora, a moon in the Alpha Centauri-A star system, the film deliberately evokes the way Europeans subjugated and killed native peoples in Africa and the Americas in order to plunder natural resources. The film’s low opinion of humankind borders on misanthropy.
The imaginary Na’vi beings on Pandora are nearly naked humanoids, bluish with orange accents, sparkly skin and tails — which may elicit giggles.
Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) is a former Marine whose legs are paralyzed. He goes to Pandora to work for Grace (Sigourney Weaver), a scientist who studies and loves the Na’vi. She enables Jake to walk again by transferring his consciousness into a manufactured Na’vi body — his avatar — so he, along with Grace and a few others, can mingle with the Na’vi and gain their trust. Meanwhile, a take-no-prisoners colonel (Stephen Lang) works for a mining company intent on extracting a rare mineral from Pandora. To him, the Na’vi are just in the way.
On his first day on Pandora, Jake is rescued from wolflike creatures by a Na’vi warrior, Neytiri (Zoe Saldana, who’s terrific). She mistrusts Jake, suspecting he’s not really Na’vi. Still, she teaches him the Na’vi ways and of course romance blossoms.
There is intense, if relatively bloodless violence, with choppers, missiles, machine guns, killer robots, arrows and spears. There is an implied sexual tryst, remarks akin to racial slurs and profanity.
Star Tribune:
James Cameron returns to the big screen with an epic that mixes popcorn fantasy with poetic soul.
“Avatar” is a story about a trip to a new planet, and the film vibrates with the excitement of discovery and awe. Not just for the sight of six-legged rhinos and butterfly-hued dragons, but for the thousands of hours of work that unite here in a creative epiphany.
James Cameron’s epic vision is finally onscreen, and its impact is stunning. The film is a breakthrough, a new chapter in the history of science fiction, like “Metropolis,” “2001,” “Star Wars” and “Blade Runner.” It is a popcorn blockbuster with poetry in its soul.
“Avatar” draws you into its alien world with unprecedented realism, using vivid graphics and 3-D processes.
The interactions between live actors and CGI creations, the emotional weight of the humanoid creatures’ expressions, the details of delicate capillaries in leaves and the heft of hulking war machines all are brilliantly realized.
But it isn’t visuals alone that make “Avatar” a marvelous, resonant film. Its power comes from its marriage of strong, well defined characters with a story that tests them to the limits of courage and compassion. The film is a sensually and psychologically immersive experience with thrill-ride sequences and romantic interludes that will put your heart in your throat. The visuals are the foundation of everything else.
Tree Hugger:
Dances With Wolves in Space?
Avatar is a science-fiction epic that was made using cutting edge technology (a lot of it is computer generated).
The story takes place in 2154 on an exomoon called Pandora where humans have discovered very valuable natural resources. But before they can extract them, they first have to deal with the native Na’vi humanoid aliens, and this leads to conflict.
So far it sounds like the classic storyline of industrial greed vs. traditional harmonious lifestyle. But there’s an important point to make as we translate this lesson from fiction to reality.
Unlike in Avatar, there isn’t an external enemy that comes in and tries to ruin everything. All of us are deeply entangled in a system that produces a mix of good and bad outcomes, and we are all partly responsible for both. What we must do is maximize the good and minimize the bad.
The short version: “We have met the enemy and he is us.” At least until we decide to be part of the solution…
Rough Cut Reviews:
Jake Sully is a paraplegic ex-marine who is given the chance to go to an alien planet called Pandora where corporate fat cats want to mine the planet for a precious material called ‘Unobtanium’ and is seen as the answer to Earth’s energy crisis, the problem being though, is that the planet is home to an indigenous species called the Na’vi who don’t want to give up their home.
Jake inhabits the form of an Avatar which is his mind inside a Na’vi body and his mission is to accompany scientists as a bodyguard however he is quickly recruited by Colonel Quaritch to infiltrate the Na’vi and learn their ways in order to get them to leave their home.
Jake soon learns there is more to the locals than meets the eye and becomes torn between right and wrong.
AVATAR strong point isn’t its storyline or even its script. Instead it’s a visual masterpiece in modern cinema and will surely now set a precedent – why should we set for something less when we now know what’s now possible? The story is very much like that of the Kevin Costumer movie DANCES WITH WOLVES so it’s not but is still original however in its own right, it’s still passable. Whilst the action is perhaps less frequent as some had expected given Cameron’s previous Sci-Fi / Horror hybrid ALIENS, but when it does arrive it’s wonderful to watch. Instead AVATAR tells the story of Jake relationship with Neytiri and becomes part of their tribe – this in no way detracts for the finish product.
Overall AVATAR is a true movie going experience and really needs to be seems in its intended medium – a big screen.
Blog Critics:
Cameron has never been the greatest storyteller and that’s not what his strength is even if he’s written or co-written all but one of his features. What Cameron brings to the table with each film is a new sense of shock and awe to the senses. Sure, there are elements heavily borrowed from other films, mostly Dances with Wolves and Ferngully: The Last Rainforest, but since when do directors have to be completely original to tell a compelling fantasy?
In the far future, 2154 to be exact, Jake Sully is being recruited by the military to take the place of his departed twin brother, Tom – a scientist – and travel to the planet Pandora. It is explained that the reason for his selection is that as a twin he is genetically identical to his brother and therefore able to control Tom’s avatar.
Avatars are genetically bred human-Na’vi hybrids used by the government to interact with the local inhabitants of Pandora who happen to be sitting on the planet’s largest deposit of Unobtanium, which can be used to save Earth from an energy crisis.
Parker Selfridge has other plans for Jake and uses Colonel Miles Quatrich to convince Jake to play double agent against the scientific side of things. They want Jake to either convince the Na’vi to leave their home and relocate or bring back information about the tree they live within in case the military needs to force the Na’vi out.
While he’s in deep cover, the Na’vi wind up making Jake one of their own after he is saved and trained by Neytiri. Also, after being the newest Na’vi inductee, Jake mates with Neytiri but none too soon before the military begins to lose its patience and destroys an ancient territory, almost killing Jake and Neytiri. After Jake attacks one of the bulldozers, Colonel Quatrich decides that Jake has chosen sides and that the military must now be forced to drive the Na’vi out whether he has to take out Jake along with them or not.
Many complaints have been made about the lack of story and film’s long (two hour and 40 minutes) runtime. Anyone going into the film looking for mind-blowing social commentary is sure to be disappointed. What James Cameron has provided is a huge leap into the future of filmmaking.
Through the use of motion-capture, CGI, and a boatload of money, Cameron has given a huge middle finger to George Lucas and his ill-conceived trilogy of prequels and Michael Bay, who can’t hold his camera still long enough to see or comprehend anything happening on screen. Jar Jar Binks the Na’vi are definitely not.
Robert Zemekis should also pay attention to what’s happening here as the biggest trumpeter of motion-capture. Leave it to Cameron and Peter Jackson to give us the best uses of this style to date. The horrendous backfire of Zemekis’s A Christmas Carol and his even worse Polar Express adaptations cannot be overlooked when Cameron gives us such a fully realized world that you never once don’t believe that what you’re looking at is real, at least as far as the world of Pandora is concerned.
This is a movie that demands to be seen on the big screen, exactly where James Cameron intended it to be seen.
Who knows if it will wind up being the biggest blockbuster of the year but so far it’s definitely on track to being at least one of them. While some over-sized, testicled, racist robots will probably come out on top, it’s nice to see a far better film come along to give it a run for its money.
Welcome back, Cameron, your throne awaits its king’s return.
Creative Loafing:
Director James Cameron’s long-awaited Avatar depicts an alien race with a fondness for bows and arrows, but keeps the 3-D jutting clichés under control. Even when bloody arrowheads stick out at your face, Cameron ensures the stunts don’t distract from his otherworldly story. Avatar’s innovative imagery affirms that some kinds of cinematic special effects can indeed touch audiences, if not on the emotional or intellectual level. If rendered properly, make-believe places, characters and events can have a seductive, escapist appeal, from King Kong’s Skull Island to Star Wars’ alien landscapes.
Avatar strives to not only reach the levels of those films, but to raise the bar for genre fantasies to come.
It’s the year 2154 and we’re orbiting Pandora, a place of poison atmosphere, savage wildlife and the most valuable substance in the universe, puckishly called Unobtanium. Tensions simmer between Earth’s military-industrial representatives and a research team led by Grace Augustine over how to handle the indigenous population, the Na’vi — a race of lithe, 10-foot-tall, stripy-blue cat people with tails, fangs and practically no clothes. The scientists can download their consciousnesses into cloned Na’vi bodies, called avatars, to study them up close. Sully just happens to be compatible with the avatar of his recently deceased twin brother.
Thus the audience learns the ropes of the 22nd century and Pandora’s ecosystem through the eyes of Sully, a wheelchair-bound outsider seeking a chance to walk again. When Sully first tries out his looming alien body, the visual effects hit an awkward patch: The humans and aliens never seem natural in the same frame together, and the Na’vi take some getting used to. At times, their skulls look wider than their hips, which seems anatomically problematic. The Na’vi’s enormously expressive faces and eyes help a great deal.
Sully agrees to spy on the Na’vi for ruthless Col. Quaritch and soon finds himself stranded in the jungle surrounded by vicious predators, including some particularly sleek and creepy hyena-like aliens. Na’vi princess Neytiri reluctantly rescues Sully and agrees to teach him the ways of her tribe, so the audience gets to know Pandora’s flora and fauna through lively training exercises.
Despite Pandora’s lighter gravity, Avatar’s themes can be crushingly heavy. The Na’vi commune with the planet’s ecosystem by plugging their ponytails into plants or animals, so there’s lots of spiritual mumbo-jumbo. You can imagine being forced to watch the sappiest scenes every Earth Day for the rest of your life. Cameron’s script tries to soften the blow with Sully’s tree-hugger quips, but lines like “The Sky People are coming to destroy the Hometree!” are pretty unspeakable.
Cameron’s script acknowledges some of its other obvious points. The plot resembles a certain Kevin Costner Oscar-winner about a military man who gradually takes the side of native tribespeople against a technologically superior expansionist force. At one point, Sully encounters a rampaging animal and when Grace tells him neither to run nor shoot it, he asks, “What do you want me to do, dance with it?” How about Dances with Titanotheres?
The film plays very much like a follow-up to Cameron’s Aliens (and could conceivably take place in the same fictional universe). Giovanni Ribisi plays a white-collar worm virtually identical to Paul Reiser’s role in the earlier film. The Avatar military also uses mechanical “walkers” like the ones Ripley used to fight the alien queen — only larger and more weaponized. Studio accountants concerned audiences won’t turn out for a “new” film property not based on some kind of hit franchise needn’t worry — Avatar’s as derivative as any big blockbuster.
Avatar comes to a crescendo with an omigod-spectacular battle sequence featuring floating mountains and flying reptiles vs. gunships. In general, Avatar resembles a pulpy sci-fi book cover made flesh and blood, and the computerized landscapes have more solidity and detail than any other film. Ironically, you get so caught up in the action that you start to ignore the 3-D.
It’s a great piece of film escapism that improves on George Lucas’ Star Wars prequels.
Examiner:
I saw it this past weekend and it was awesome!
The movie draws you in and makes you bond with the characters.
There is so much beauty and excitement in the movie from beginning to end.
A classic love story entangled with justice, adventure and science fiction.
A must-see!
The Globe and Mail:
Visually, this gives him the chance to tap into his state-of-the-art toolbox and put the money right up on the screen – one moment we’re watching a zippier Star Wars , the next an enhanced JurassicPark . Narratively, it lets him hopscotch around different genres like sci-fi, adventure, war flicks, even vintage westerns – look and it’s a stranger-in-a-strange land tale, look again and it’s cowboys-and-Indians shtick. And, thematically, he gets to be similarly eclectic, commenting (yes, liberally) on everything from environmental havoc and health-care reform to American imperialism and corporate greed.
The setting is the year 2154, and we open on a space shuttle travelling to Pandora, a solid moon circling the gaseous planet of a distant star.
Inside the shuttle, zero gravity is really cool in 3-D, but Cameron just tosses off the effect – he’s got much more eye-popping stuff in store.
Indeed, Pandora proves to be quite the box of mixed delights. Within their high-tech, oxygenated barracks, the human invaders have occupied the territory for the usual reason: There’s raw material to be filched, a precious mineral sorely needed to replenish the Earth’s failing energy supply.
The mining project is overseen by a corporate bigwig and a napalm-loving Colonel right out of Apocalypse Now. However, balancing the avarice is a token nod to knowledge. Led by Grace (Sigourney Weaver), a few scientists are on hand to analyze the moon’s rain-forest vegetation and its stone-age inhabitants – the “Na’vi” are tall, blue-skinned folks with wide-spread orbs, Spockean ears and long slender tails, the better to navigate the 1,000-foot treetop where they make their home. To win over the “hearts and minds” of the locals, the scientists have devised a way of implanting their own DNA into a Na’vi body and, thus reproduced as avatars, hobnobbing with the natives, teaching them a smattering of English and studying their tribal habits.
Jake (Sam Worthington) is such an avatar. In his human guise, he’s a paraplegic ex-Marine, maimed in combat elsewhere in the galaxy. (“They can fix a spinal, but not on vets’ benefits, not in this economy.”) Of course, Jake is our guide into the strange land of the Na’vi, and Cameron’s cue to amp up the visual spectacle. Blending the mythic and the prehistoric, what a compelling world it is, an eerie yet often lovely realm of floating mountains, tumbling waterfalls, six-legged steeds, rampaging dinosaurs, of pink flora that blossom by day and feral dogs that snarl by night.
There, we meet Neytiri (Zoe Saldana), another strong-willed babe in Cameron’s canon, and under her tutelage Jake goes native with a passion. Together, they tame a pterodactyl, broken like a wild bronco, and the two fly up through the surreal skies. She instructs him in the spiritual ways of her people, whose tails are literally plugged into their environment in symbiotic fusion. If this sounds a bit too classic, perilously close to trite, it is and it isn’t. Certainly, all this noble-savage palaver can wear thin. Then again, since the imagery is so potent and unique and palpably exotic, the familiar narrative tropes are almost reassuring, helping to ground us in this otherworldly Eden and giving the predictable message a surprisingly fresh vigour.
For example, check out the machine-in-the-garden sequence. Sure, it’s inevitable. We know that, once again, humans and their steely brutality will despoil yet another pristine landscape, slaughter ever more innocents. The idea is old, but since the environment is new, so is our emotion at its destruction. The film draws us visually into the beguiling mysteries of the place, then defies us not to grieve when the bulldozers do their worst. And grieve we do – this scene feels truly tragic.
The action afterwards does not. Pitting armour and explosives against arrows and guile, the climactic battle drags wearisomely on, one of the few times when the picture suffers from its 2 3/4-hour length. Still, the occasional lapse is forgivable when that reward is delivered.
Avatar is a king’s ransom fairly well spent, not least because Cameron’s invitation into his superbly crafted universe comes with an unexpected price: He makes it easy to gaze fondly on all this movie magic, but only in exchange for a hard look at ourselves.
New York:
“Avatar,” his 3D virtual-reality alien-jungle adventure epic, is less a movie for the ages than a quintessential movie of its time.
It’s dazzling and engulfing, a techno-dream for the senses. But it’s likely to leave audiences at once amazed, and unmoved.
“Avatar” is set on Pandora, a mining colony light-years from Earth. Jake Sully, a Marine who has lost the use of his legs, and who is recruited to enter the Avatar Program, where, fusing with a genetically engineered body, he infiltrates the Na’vi, a tribe of tall, proud, blue-skinned warriors as lithe as gazelles.
Cameron makes Pandora a hypnotic suspended forest, lit by a purple primeval, nearly underwater glow. His marvelous use of 3D renders that landscape heightened, popping, and bolder than life.
It’s the story and characters of “Avatar” that could have used another dimension or two. Jake and a sexy tribal princess impress us with their fluid, prancing movements, but there’s no subtext to their smoothly virtual faces.
What it’s in the service of is a relentless acid-trip videogame thrill ride. The climactic battle in “Avatar” is a rousing clash of color and movement, of machine-gun droids and Na’vi warriors flying their psychedelic griffin steeds down canyon walls.
As spectacle, Avatar is “indelible” – a true rush. But as a movie, it all but evaporates as you watch it.
Wired:
Avatar is a damn good movie. Building on a solid foundation of strong performances, Cameron and his team have cut from whole digital cloth an exquisitely detailed world at once familiar and gorgeously exotic.
The adventure takes place entirely on the distant orb known as Pandora, an exotic alien world sitting squarely in the cross-hairs of earthlings’ military-industrial complex. This is where humans clash with the Na’vi: 10-foot-tall blue creatures that enjoy a special bond with their world.
Every few minutes, Cameron unveils another vista, another beast, some new flower or dinosaur-bird or airborne jellyfish designed to stun the senses and celebrate nature’s sheer fecundity. Like the Discovery Channel on acid, Avatar’s wildlife produces sensations of wonder, awe and delight.
The narrative sinks deeps roots into an archetypal Pocahontas myth, while the movie’s eco-friendly theme remains profoundly pertinent.
The Avatar premise essentially retools Dances With Wolves‘ “exploitive white man goes native” scenario. Encased inside a tomblike pod, nail-tough ex-Marine Jake Sully, operates a remote-controlled avatar genetically engineered from human and Na’vi DNA. Stationed at the human colonists’ Hell’s Gate compound, Sully is dispatched by his superiors to infiltrate a native tribe that refuses to relocate from the 1,000-foot Hometree that just happens to be perched atop a lode of precious minerals.
Instead, Sully comes under the sway of beautiful Neytiri.
No wonder. Lithe and limber, Saldana tears into her elongated, computer-enhanced character with abandon. Neytiri hisses, snarls, swings from vines and shoots some wicked arrows, all the while demonstrating a bond with the beasts of her world that inspire pathos and envy in equal measure.
By coupling credible actors and unprecedented depth of photorealistic detail in the service of a familiar but still-resonant message, Avatar sets 3-D cinema on a profound path that might just change the movie-going experience for decades to come.
Great: Powerful vistas of mind-blowing flora and fauna; technology serves profoundly pertinent nature theme.
Bad: Future humanity evidently has no blacks or Asians; spectacle fatigue sets in around the two-hour mark in this 161-minute film.
Avatar is a mind-expanding adventure on a beautiful world filled with plants and creatures both ferocious and whimsical. Giant, dinosaur-type beasts; jellyfishlike creatures that float through the air; and all manner of other imaginatively bizarre beings that fight and fly through the bioluminescent, black-light forest Cameron and his talented artists have brought to life. It’s filmed using special stereoscopic 3-D cameras invented by Cameron and his cinematic wizards, and the immersive onscreen imagery looks astonishingly crisp.
Perhaps the most amazing creatures are the avatars themselves: 10-foot-tall, slender blue beings, genetically engineered to look like the planet’s indigenous people, the Na’vi.
Cameron started by hiring, in 2005, USC linguistic expert Paul Frommer to invent an entirely new language for the Na’vi, the blue-skinned natives of Pandora. The director liked ejective consonants, a popping utterance that vaguely resembles choking. Frommer locked down a “sound palette” and started developing the language’s basic grammatical structure. It took months to create the grammar alone. Thirteen months after he began work on Avatar, Frommer wrote a pamphlet titled Speak Na’vi and started teaching the actors how to pronounce the language. He held Na’vi boot camps and then went over lines one by one with each actor. “Cameron wanted them to be emotional, but they had to do it in a language that never existed,” Frommer says.
With the language established, Cameron set about naming everything on his alien planet. Every animal and plant received Na’vi, Latin, and common names. As if that weren’t enough, Cameron hired Jodie Holt, chair of UC Riverside’s botany and plant sciences department, to write detailed scientific descriptions of dozens of plants he had created. She spent five weeks explaining how the flora of Pandora could glow with bioluminescence and have magnetic properties. When she was done, Cameron helped arrange the entries into a formal taxonomy.
This was work that would never appear onscreen, but Cameron loved it. He brought in more people, hiring an expert in astrophysics, a music professor, and an archaeologist. They calculated Pandora’s atmospheric density and established a tripartite scale structure for the alien music.
Eventually, a team of writers and editors compiled all this information into a 350-page manual dubbed Pandorapedia. It documents the science and culture of the imaginary planet, and, as much as anything, it represents the fully realized world Cameron has created.
Thirty-two years after realizing that he desperately wanted to make a space epic to rival Star Wars, Cameron has put the finishing touches on his picture.
BBC:
“People ask things like ‘will Avatar change cinema?’ In many ways it already has and that has happened in production behind the camera,” said James Dyer, editor in chief of Empire Digital.
Push boundaries
An abundance of cutting edge tech has been used to bring Avatar’s alien world to life on the screen.
But the story itself sticks to a fairly traditional formula – alien creatures who live on the distant world of Pandora are threatened by humans. The blue-skinned and 10 feet tall Na’vi have to battle an exploitative human firm which is after a precious mineral. Paraplegic ex-marine Jake Sully is hired to remotely control an avatar to get to know the locals but it ends up falling in love with a local tribal princess.
Film reviews have been mostly positive, but Mr Dyer believes the film was written to push technological boundaries rather than for the storyline.
“The story in itself is not a bad one. It’s an archetype Dances With Wolves, it’s Pocahontas, it’s that kind of thing,” he added.
CNN:
“Avatar” stretches the bounds of the cinematic imagination. It shows us something we’ve never seen before: an entire alien world, a new and complex ecosystem rendered in three dimensions with dazzling fluidity and detail.
Pandora’s rainforest resembles a spectacular coral reef. At night, the plants have a phosphorescent glow. When the Na’vi tread through it, the ground lights up beneath their feet (I kept waiting for someone to break into a chorus of “Billie Jean”).
It’s this vivid blurring of the real and the imaginary, the material world and the spiritual, that’s at the heart of Cameron’s movie.
In his peculiar vision of utopia, technology and ecology fuse. On Pandora, electrical currents flow through the root systems of the trees.
When the Na’vi ride a winged dragon, the first thing they do is plug into its circuitry. It’s a techno-geek’s pantheism, a new gloss on the counterculture slogan “Turn on, tune in and drop out.”
Jake Sully’s out of body experience is simply another extension of this interconnectivity, as if role-playing games might one day lead to a profound philosophical empathy, a higher human consciousness.
The film wears its anti-imperialist, anti-corporate sentiments on its sleeve (Stephen Lang’s trigger-happy military commander spouts “war on terror” slogans to hammer home the point).
It’s basically “Dances with Wolves” in outer space; the tale of a U.S. soldier “going native” (Cameron even casts Native American actor Wes Studi as a Na’vi chief).
Dramatically, it’s simplistic. But if you look around the world at the devastating impact of oil companies on indigenous populations, you have to concede that Cameron has a point. A double bill with Joe Berlinger’s documentary “Crude” might be in order.
99.8% believable creatures. With a story close to Alan Dean Foster’s, MIDWORLD.
CNN geek:
It was fantastic.
I could not get enough of the world we were thrust into. The world that I knew was 100 percent computer-generated, but after the first 15 minutes, I forgot or just did not care. It was so real – so incredible – that I felt like I was there.
I will say: Do not judge this by the trailers. It is so much more and so much better than what we saw. This is a movie that needs to be seen on a large screen – and by seen, I mean experienced in the way only a movie of this size can be.
Wall Street Journal:
The vein of awe mined by the movie is nothing short of unbelievium. This is a new way of coming to your senses—put those 3-D glasses on your face and you come to a sense of delight that quickly gives way to a sense of astonishment.
The planetary high doesn’t last. The closer the story comes to a lumbering parable of colonialist aggression in the jungles of an extragalactic Vietnam, the more the enchantment fizzles.
Much of the time, though, you’re transfixed by the beauty of a spectacle that seems all of a piece. Special effects have been abolished, in effect, since the whole thing is so special.
The word “avatar” wasn’t invented by Mr. Cameron, though everything else in the production seems to have been. In Hindu myth, an avatar is a deity descended to earth in human form. In computer parlance it’s an icon that represents a person in virtual reality or cyberspace. In the movie it’s a manufactured body that’s remotely controlled—not by some hand-held clicker but through brain waves generated by a human being who functions as the body’s driver.
No description of that scenery will spoil the experience of the 3-D process (which dispenses with the usual eye-catching tricks) or the seamless integration of live action, motion-capture, animation, computer-generated images and whatever other techniques went into the mix—maybe witchcraft or black magic. Some of the flora suggest an anhydrous Great Barrier Reef (airborne jellyfish, coral-colored conical plants that spiral down to almost-nothingness when touched) or, in the case of Pandora’s floating mountains, represent an homage to the Japanese animation master Hayao Miyazaki. As for the fauna, they’re not only prodigiously varied—flamboyant dragons, six-legged steeds, elephantine chargers with heads like battering rams, nature-blue in tooth and claw—but creatures with convincing lives of their own, unlike the cheerfully bizarre creations that filled the Mos Eisley cantina in “Star Wars.”
Then there are the indigènes, the French term for natives being appropriate because Pandora evokes the Indochina that existed before France’s doomed war against an indigenous insurgency, as well as the Vietnam that became a battleground for American troops. They’re called the Na’vi, and to describe them as humanoid may be to defame them, inasmuch as they, unlike most of the film’s Americans, revere their planet and live in harmony with their surroundings. The most beautiful of the Na’vis—at least the one with the most obvious star quality—is a female warrior named Neytiri. As most of our planet already knows from the publicity, Jake falls for her in a big but complicated way.
Big because Neytiri, as played by Zoë Saldana, is so alluring—cerulean-skinned, lemon-eyed, wasp-waisted, long-tailed, anvil-nosed, wiggly-eared (trust me, it’s all seductive) and given to feral snarls in the heat of battle. But complicated because Jake is secretly working both sides of the jungle. He’s in love with Neytiri, and soon embraces her people’s values. (Yes, there’s circumstantial evidence that Mr. Cameron knows about “Dances With Wolves,” along with “Tarzan,” “Green Mansions,” “Frankenstein,” “Princess Mononoke,” “South Pacific,” “Spartacus” and “Top Gun.”) At the same time, Jake is spying for a gimlet-eyed military commander, Col. Miles Quaritch. (Stephen Lang proves that broad, cartoony acting can also be good acting.) The evil colonel has promised the ex-Marine a procedure that will restore the use of his paralyzed legs in exchange for information that will help chase the Na’vi from their sacred land, which happens to be the only place where unobtainium can be obtained.
“Avatar” revises the relationship between everyone in the audience and the characters on screen. Actors have always been avatars; they’ve always represented our hopes and fears in the virtual reality of motion pictures. In much of this film, however, they’ve been transformed by technology into a new and ambiguous breed of entertainment icon—not the quasihuman denizens of “The Wizard of Oz,” or the overgrown glove puppets of “The Polar Express,” but nearly palpable fantasy figures that inhabit a world just beyond our reach.
The fantasy quotient of “Avatar” takes its first major hit when the Na’vi take their first hit from the American military. Mr. Cameron has devoted a significant chunk of his movie to a dark, didactic and altogether horrific evocation of Vietnam, complete with napalm, Agent Orange and helicopter gunships (one of which is named Valkyrie in a tip of the helmet to “Apocalypse Now.”) Whatever one may think of the politics of this antiwar section, two things can be said with certainty: it provokes an adrenalin rush (what that says of our species is another matter), and it feels a lot better when it’s over.
Other narrative problems intrude. For all its political correctness about the goodness of the Na’vis, “Avatar” lapses into lurid savage rituals, complete with jungle drums, that would not have seemed out of place in the first “King Kong.” While Ms. Weaver’s performance is a strong one, it isn’t clear what her character is doing as an avatar, or how the Na’vi perceive her. What couldn’t be clearer, though, is that Mr. Cameron’s singular vision has upped the ante for filmed entertainment, and given us a travelogue unlike any other.
I wouldn’t want to live on Pandora, mainly because of the bad air, but I’m glad to have paid it a visit.
Austin Chronicle:
At 162 minutes and a cost of somewhere between $250 million and $300 million dollars, Cameron’s ne plus ultra of futuristic mechanized mayhem and seamless CGI trickery is both a cinematically spectacular slab of virtually nonstop action and an unmistakable diatribe against corporatized American imperialism.
There are the usual muscled-up boys (and equally powerful girls) with big-bang toys, crying havoc and letting slip the dogs of war, to be sure, but at its heart this mammoth film is … a chick flick, with all the dramatic keynotes that the phrase implies.
Forbidden, interspecies love? Reverence for a planetary feminist godhead? Clandestine dalliances far from the madding crowd? Avatar has all of those romantic tropes and more, and, despite a script that at times leaves its most interesting characters delivering some of the most banal lines in a Cameron film thus far, somehow it all holds together.
Avatar is unmistakably the work of a director who passionately believes that untrammeled, Western-style imperialism and its attendant reliance on the rape and looting of foreign cultures and their natural resources is a pivotal societal sin.
That said, there’s enough white-hot testosterone and Amazonian estrogen to satisfy Cameron’s sci-fi fanboy base and then some.
Occurring in the year 2154 after the total depletion of all of the Earth’s natural resouces, Avatar is set on the planet Pandora, where mining operations have run up against the planet’s indigenous people, the Na’Vi. Eleven feet tall, blue-skinned, vaguely feline bipeds who recall both real-world Australian aborigines and American Indians in their spiritual reverence of nature, the Na’Vi are infiltrated by Jake Sully, a former Marine grunt who has suffered an unspecified spinal injury. Sully is tasked by the bellicose Col. Miles Quaritch with finding a way to remove the Na’Vi, whose social system is complex and matriarchal, from their homeland. This is done by placing Sully’s consciousness within a bio-engineered Na’Vi body – an “avatar” – under the guidance of sympathetic ethnobiologist Dr. Grace Augustine, who is kept in the dark about Sully’s covert mission, the better to lure the Na’Vi to their presumptive doom. But Sully, who regains the use of his paralyzed legs whenever he inhabits his Na’Vi self, slowly comes to appreciate the indigenous world even as he begins to be repulsed by the callow, predatory nature of his true species.
Avatar is not without its faults – the dialogue is somewhat less than crackling – but as a purely visual experience, it’s like nothing you’ve ever seen before: a lush, sexy, primal world created entirely by Cameron’s legions of CGI masters.
For a film with such a lengthy running time, Avatar moves like a rocket. It’s thrilling and lovely and sad and explosive in all the right ways, and it needs to be seen – on the big screen, in 3-D – to be believed.
New York Times:
A New Eden, both Cosmic and Cinematic.
The movie is a song to the natural world that was largely produced with software, an Emersonian exploration of the invisible world of the spirit filled with Cameronian rock ’em, sock ’em pulpy action.
Created to conquer hearts, minds, history books and box-office records, the movie — one of the most expensive in history, the jungle drums thump — is glorious and goofy and blissfully deranged.
Mr. Cameron, who directed the megamelodrama “Titanic” and, more notably, several of the most influential science-fiction films of the past few decades (“The Terminator,” “Aliens” and “The Abyss”), is a filmmaker whose ambitions transcend a single movie or mere stories to embrace cinema as an art, as a social experience and a shamanistic ritual, one still capable of producing the big WOW.
The scale of his new movie, which brings you into a meticulous and brilliantly colored alien world for a fast 2 hours 46 minutes, factors into that wow. Its scope is evident in an early scene on a spaceship (the year is 2154), where the passengers, including a paraplegic ex-Marine, Jake, are being roused from a yearslong sleep before landing on a distant inhabited moon, Pandora. Jake is woken by an attendant floating in zero gravity, one of many such aides. As Jake himself glides through the bright cavernous space, you know you’re not in Kansas anymore, as someone soon quips (a nod to “The Wizard of Oz,” Mr. Cameron’s favorite film).
If the story of a paradise found and potentially lost feels resonant, it’s because “Avatar” is as much about our Earth as the universe that Mr. Cameron has invented. But the movie’s truer meaning is in the audacity of its filmmaking.
He hasn’t changed cinema, but with blue people and pink blooms he has confirmed its wonder.
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