Friday, January 22, 2010

Two Things I Learned From Thusday Night

So last night I got an incredible opportunity to see the movie Avatar in Imax 3D. The first time I saw Avatar, it was pretty unamazing. The second time, I was really able to drink in the gorgeous imagery of the film. This third time was a mixed basket. The first thing I learned from my adventure was how amazing it is to watch a movie in Imax. The first 30 minutes of Avatar were so immersive and epic and despite the cornball dialogue I was able to get into. What happened after that leads me to the second thing I learned from last evening.

Avatar really isn't that good. Is it alright? Sure, but the fact of the matter is that it has so much going against it. As soon as the Thanator chase sequence comes you lose sense of what's going on. This is probably the first and only case so far in which 3D worked against the movie it was used on. On a regular film the action sequence might feel in place, but in 3D it just made me sick, and confused. Then the film started to get a little better for a while, until we reached "The Tree of Souls" which sounds like it's in a death match with "The Matrix of Leadership" from Transformers 2.

Then we got deeper into the conflict, and the action was a little more comprehensible, but I really couldn't feel the emotional force of each death. I felt sorry for the Navi crushed by the tree for a minute, but then was apathetic to their cause. Grace's death was a straight throwaway, with no emotional potency whatsoever. Trudy's death wasn't believable because we see her face as the ship is about to explode, then it cuts away so we don't even see the full violence of her death, and we just see the ship exploding on the outside.

The 2 people to blame for the pitfalls of this film are James Cameron, and James Horner, the director/screenwriter and composer respectively. I doubt that Cameron knows how to make a good story anybody, and I'm sure that James Horner can't make a good score anymore. Too much of the film felt like Titanic, and I wasn't happy about that. Ultimately I reach my final conclusion that while it may be a fun action film, it does not deserve to win Best Picture. For that matter it doesn't deserve to even be nominated. There were so many good movies this year, and of all of them, Avatar kind of sits near the bottom of the stack.
In summary, Imax is amazing, Avatar isn't.

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