Caught Avatar on IMAX 3D in a packed auditorium. Sitting next to me was an 8 year old wriggling in his seat with excitement - waiting for the film to begin. Down the row three teenagers were taking pictures of themselves in the 3D glasses, and people had lined up 2 hours before the show started to grab the best seats in the huge theater. By standing in line for an hour I managed to score reasonable seats that were not in the front row side! So what did Cameron and IMAX serve up?
From the word go the moon Pandora sucked me in! There was lush tree life and we soon saw hexapods of every shape and size that vaguely resembled animals we see on earth. There were flying dinosaurs, lumbering terra-bound dinosaurs, six limbed fierce canines, and the Na'vi. These BLUE "people" were pure of heart and connected in a giant Gaia-like web to all other living creatures - animal and vegetal - on the planet. Did Cameron deliberately make them take on the BLUE hue of our avatars of Rama and Krishna? But of course the real Avatars were the hybrid bodies created with evil earth technology by fusing the Na'vi and human DNA. These AVATARS are controlled by the human mind that shares DNA with them. Strangely enough, in an environment with this technology of ESP or non-physical connections, people still scoff at Na'vi minds being connected through a large network of "nerves" that run through trees!!
Since many have poked holes in the story of Avatar, I want to talk about that first. Yes, it is all we expect from a big budget Hollywood studio film. The corporates have fucked up the home planet and Earth is not even green anymore. Now they are at Pandora and want UNOBTAINIUM, the mineral that will change semiconductor business, and are aided by the evil military types who are now guns for hire. (Unobtainium makes it sound more like a radioactive element!) Into this mess is co-opted Jake Sully, a paralyzed war veteran whose twin brother shared DNA with an Avatar but died in an accident. The scientists are the usual Hollywood geeks but Cameron does them a favor but not casting them as evil doers who have destroyed the planet. The love story is subdued but works as the reason why Jake Sully decides to let go of his military loyalties and protect the Na'vi way of life.
Cameron also gets a surprising amount of the science right, except for the floating mountains, and the fact that most of the imagined life on Pandora was very Earth-like, particularly the Na'vi. Even more scientifically troubling is the idea of melding genetic material from the Na'vi and the humans. This suggests that all life has chemically similar genetic material, a panspermia or Chariots of the Gods type of scenario! But giving the animals 6 limbs does make them unique and a different evolutionary trajectory from that we see in large earth life. The glowing life that responded to tactile stimuli was a great touch and here Cameron seemed heavily inspired by ocean life - the floating seeds of the "mother" tree were like jellyfish, and the glowing extensions of vegetation like see anemone tentacles! The animal-vegetal neural networks on Pandora are a flight of the imagination that is a little breathtaking! And dragons and horses that need to bond with their riders goes with the theme and seems a little less outrageous in comparison.
All in all Avatar soars into flight and is a breathtaking ride that keeps one engaged for the almost 3 hour run time. The cliched story is still several notches above what Titanic served up, and the no star cast does a good job of keeping us engaged in the characters they play. The exception (to the no name bit) is Sigourney Weaver, and she can never be less than engaging! Even the bad guys are not cardboard cutouts. The wrench I felt in my heart as the giant tree went down, was more than what I felt as DiCaprio drowned among the debris of the sinking ship. And the exhilaration one shared with Jake Sully as he soared on the orange red dragon was worth the price of admission.
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Thanks Angelica - even before Dinotopia we had Ursula K LeGuin tales of dinosaurs bonding to humans and flights on dinosaurs. To read was one thing, to see it realized on screen was exhilarating. Will watch Dinotopia!
ReplyDeleteUtah man fired from job for calling ‘Avatar’ fan an “Avatard”
ReplyDeletehttp://community.livejournal.com/ohnotheydidnt/42441421.html
hile director James Cameron’s latest big-budget film, Avatar, astonishes audiences with a torrid of stunning visual effects, the movie has also grown a surprisingly large and rabid fan-base. Just ask Anthony Hansen, a Salt Lake City-based customer service representative who works for Stencil Tech, or at least he used to until he was fired from the company for expressing his “anti-Avatar” views of the movie.
The movie centers on Jake Sully (Sam Worthington), a paraplegic Marine who takes a job on the alien world of Pandora in order to operate his dead brother’s avatar, a lab-grown “native” fused with his brother’s DNA to that of a Na’vi, the indigenous humanoid population on Pandora. Hired by a non-governmental mining operation on the planet, the humans wish to remove the Na’vi from their home in order to dig up the precious mineral underneath. As the humans draw closer to war with the Na’vi, Jake realizes that he has more in common with his new blue family than with the “evil humans.”
“I liked Dances with Wolves too,” says Hansen when discussing the plot of Avatar. “In fact, that was a great movie and probably one of two movies that Costner didn’t fall on his face with. Avatar is exactly like it. Just like that new piece of [expletive] G.I. Joe movie was just like Team America: World Police. Am I the only one seeing this?”
When taking a routine call the Monday following Avatar’s global release in theaters, customers, who were trying to make simple small talk with the long-time customer service rep, raved about the new film. “People were calling up and saying that the movie was the best thing they have ever seen in their entire lives. One person actually said, ‘I wish I lived on Pandora. They are so nice there. The movie was so real.’ Really? The blue people seemed nice? You want to live on that planet with the weird rhinoceroses? I told them I’d book a ticket with Nucking Futs Airlines.”
The customer on the other end of the phone, Andrea Thompson, 38, didn’t see the humor of Hansen’s comment and asked to speak with his supervisor. “I needed help with a stencil,” says Thompson. “I couldn’t get it to work. Seriously, how do you get them to work? Does the pencil go on your ear or under the paper?” When asked about Hansen’s comments about the movie, she choked up. “Avatar was incredible. It is in 3D and looked good. I’m not talking “good,” I mean awesome. It was awesome. That man was off his bean. He said that the story was too simple and that if movies were used as a vessel for storytelling, then Avatar was a ‘turd in an Armani’ or something. He also called me an ‘Avatard.’”
Getting into arguments with customers isn’t new for Hansen. He got into hot water during the summer of 2009 when Michael Bay’s Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen arrived in theaters. “At least with Avatar, it’s actually a pretty decent movie and the effects are incredible. With Transformers 2, that was easily the worst movie of 2009. Worse than Transmorphers. Seriously. I can’t tell you how many people called in about that one. The lines were flooded with 12-year-old boys needing stencil help. [expletive] retards.”
For Hansen’s manager, William O’Duff, the complaints from customers was too much and “decisive action” had to be taken. After receiving four complaints from customers, O’Duff called Hansen into his office and asked for his headset. “I’d like to tell you it was a tough decision, but it wasn’t. Avatar was amazing. It was beautiful and I cried the entire time. I loved the story because I can’t remember any movie for more than 10 days so, to me, Avatar was the best thing since G.I. Joe. Awesome”.
Good review ! You need to fix the LINK that leads to PakhiPakhi.
ReplyDeleteThanks Som! Link is now fixed :-)
ReplyDeleteThis is what I wrote on FaceBook after watching
ReplyDelete"Avatar - 3D masala, a Visual delight...Slow in middle portions..definitely worth the price of admission...People should not go expecting some titanic like emotional bonding..
ps: First time I saw people clapping at end of an English movie.."
I know we have diametrically opposite views on Titanic. I think Titanic screenplay was tight (T2 and True Lies even better). Avatar is decent in story telling. Cameron in middle portions got lost showing beauty of jungle and creatures (of course that was visual delight). I thought it slowed the overall narrative. And everything was black and white in terms of representation of characters (nothing wrong in that).
Khanabadosh - the narrative of True Lies and T 2 was superb. And with T 2 again Cameron changed the game - there was no other villain like that droid and no better superhero than Arnold for a long time. But Titanic had an extremely Black and White set of characters, and even worse, the poor were good and the rich were bad and this made the story extremely silly for me.
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