It was the film we’ve all been waiting for, apparently. If Empire was to be believed anyway. I’d not heard much about Avatar outside the pages of my favourite magazine, other than a few bits of a trailer that made the film look very much like a computer game. I figured there must be something special about it since it’s doing MASSIVE businesses worldwide (but then considering that most Harry Potter films and the poor Pirates of the Caribbean sequels appear in the top 20 highest-grossing movies doesn’t say a lot for the quality of the rest of the list!). So this Orange Wednesday we popped along to Vue to see Avatar in 3D. 
For the first hour or so of Avatar’s 2.5 I was shifting in my seat and thinking that this film was going to be loooong. But by the last hour I was emotionally involved with the characters, loving Pandora, and wanting to spend more time with the blue Na’vi race that populate this far off planet. That is not to say that I found the opening of Avatar boring. I think my main problem with it was the switching between the world of the Na’vi and the humans a bit jarring – I understand that James Cameron wanted to explain much of the Na’vi’s behaviour and lore, but cutting it together with the plot developing with the Americans kept interrupting my education. Of course it would be poor film-making to just have an of American plot, then an hour of Na’vi ‘exposition’ – though exposition rendered through some beautiful, sumptuous, 3-dimensional CGI vistas, creatures and nature. The 3D made the switching between ‘worlds’ more difficult for me. The CGI-packed Na’vi scenes were easier to watch in 3D than the non-CG scenes featuring human characters. I found that in these latter scenes I had to refocus on what was at the ‘front’ of the screen each time the angle changed, leaving anything happening in the background a little blurred and indistinct. 3D doesn’t seem to allow for any peripheral viewing, except in CGI constructed scenes that have been specifically generated to cope with the 3D effects. My other problem with the 3D is that I don’t wear glasses, and after 2.5 hours, they were irritating my nose! But that’s my own problem, not Avatar’s. Avatar’s story has been knocked for being derivative and nothing new, and I can see that too, although I admit to being so caught up in it all by the end that certain events took my pleasantly by surprise. I also suspecting that certain characters would die at the climax, and happily they didn’t. The dialogue was a bit ‘shit’ heavy, by which I mean that you could tell this was a 12A rated film by the preponderance of the milder expletive. It jarred a bit sometimes, with a script that didn’t really through up any memorable lines.
The cast were all uniformly great – although I have to feel a bit sorry for the actors who portrayed the Na’vi only – we never even get to see their faces properly. And it was only as the credits rolled that I realised that the fantastic CCH Pounder was in it! (I’m currently enjoying her in The Shield TV series on DVD). Sam Worthington, the relatively unknown actor playing Jake Sully, our guide through the world of Pandora, is a man to watch, and not just because he’s oh-so-hunky (even as a 7 foot blue Smurf/Delvian/Dr Manhattan!). Sometimes I was a bit confused as to where exactly Sully was from – he sounded Australian on the narration, yet I didn’t really notice his accent when he was on screen. Sigourney Weaver was great, and had the film’s too-few comic moments – when the humour did surface the laughter it provoked was almost a relief, and made you realise how straight and serious the rest of the movie was. 
No comments:
Post a Comment