In time though that beauty will fade. Technology and cinematography always moves on, and its on the merits of story that we really determine a classic. This is why Toy Story is still loved despite using very basic CGI. If something is great because it looks great, why haven't more people called Fantasia 2000 a classic?
"Steamboat Willie" is a black and white cell animated short by Walt Disney involving his newest creation Mickey Mouse in a parody of a Buster Keaton film. As he commandeers a boat, Mickey performs some animal cruelty involving squeezing a sow's piglets, force feeding a cow, playing a goose like a bagpipe, and laughing at a drowning parrot. There is even some toilet humor in it. It's classic, is it not? And yet there is hardly a "story" to speak of. In fact this short was made before pacing and editing techniques were invented. Yet we all know it's a classic.
A good story is NOT the indicator of a classic, and I am not grading Avatar on whether it is a classic or not.
Did Steamboat Willie insult the audience's intelligence?
As a writer, I can tell you that as visually stunning as this movie was it was about as run-of-the-mill as you can get. Much like how Twilight insults my writer's sensibilities, Avatar does the same by having the one dimensional characters, the cliche plot, and the heavy-handed green aesop.
I don't think it was visually stunning artistically. The Banshee/Ikran is basically a pterosaur, the Thanator is an altered wolf, the direhorses are altered horses. Pandora's vegetation is also pretty boring. I could come up with some better alien wildlife off the top of my head: giant burrowing six-legged furry worms, snake-like land-dwelling cephalopods with elastic tongues, bipedal roach-like creatures that have radial mouths and swing from trees using whiplash tails, bulbous purple fungi that grows and writhes on trees in irregular globs, huge plants that blanket the jungle floor in sprawling spirals, forests of land-dwelling sponge, enormous flowers that have tentacle like appendages, plants that look like echinoderms, etc etc.
And there's no point in comparing Avatar to Steamboat Willie. Steam Boat Willie is intended as a purely artistic pioneer. Avatar on the other hand is released to be a competent whole, with actors and writers and dialog and morals, released as a Hollywood film, not an artistic showcase.
Avatar will go down as a classic though, not on it's merits but as the movie that finally beat the Titanic, ushered in a new 3D phase/era and another megablockbuster for Cameron. So despite not being as good, it will probably manage to remain a bit of a Steamboat Willy because of it's important place in history
"Steamboat" was a milestone. That's not the same as being a classic.
Rhymes with "Protracted."
Looks like some people here should be writing their own reviews. I'm flattered that you all took the time to shuffle through all these reviews to put your commentary under my review, though I have no idea what any of you are trying to say.
"Avatar will go down as a classic though, not on it's merits but as the movie that finally beat the Titanic"
That is a trivial achievement, as most everyone knows inflation-adjusted gross is the more telling metric. Not that it tells us everything we want to know. It's impossible to rightly weigh popularity across distinct eras for various technological, commercial, and cultural reasons. But it is more reliable to measure in real as opposed to nominal money.
"Looks like some people here should be writing their own reviews. I'm flattered that you all took the time to shuffle through all these reviews to put your commentary under my review, though I have no idea what any of you are trying to say"
Wow, you are pretentious and self-satisfied.
^Um, what? 'I'm flattered that you took the time...' sounds like the opposite of pretentiousness and self-satisfaction to me. If it was irony, I didn't get the point.
Oh, and I completely agree with Rajesh Motie. It's pretty obvious that I do though, as I wrote a review with that point.
This implies, quite correctly, that my mind is dark and damp and full of tiny translucent fish.Leave a Comment:
It's not great because it's great. It's great because it looks great.
I follow Roger Ebert's philosophy that all movies should be critiqued on their own terms. Giving a movie a certain amount of stars doesn't mean it is absolutely better or worse than similarly rated movies; it represents how well a movie got to executing it's vision. Many people pan this movie because it is pretty one dimensional character and story wise, but everybody agrees on one thing—that this is one heck of a good looking movie. Even the Oscars agreed with that sentiment. Director James Cameron has always been known as a perfectionist who will go to the ends of the Earth to create an immersive environment that you cannot possibly believe to exist, and yet it is there on the big screen, and off the screen in 3D.
The story as many of you probably know by now is pretty standard— a disillusioned soldier finds a way to escape his bleak existence by running away to join a free race of people in an exotic land. He falls in love. War erupts, and he must choose a side. Trope links will guide you to the nearest exit. The messages were heavy handed, and the characters all fell into predictable tropes. But once again I suspend my disbelief of this story to focus on the most complex character, the planet itself. Much like the eponymous ship from "Titanic" The planet Pandora is the star of the show, flaunting a wondrous array of photorealistic CGI fauna and flora. The plants give off an ethereal glow by night while animals act like actual animals. It's Jurassic Park believable. The new, real-time motion capture technology employed in the movie suitably surmounted the uncanny valley and captured the actors' every move, allowing a nuanced performance that usually suffers from railroading special effects into a dolly shot. The 3D was tastefully employed to enhance composition of a scene rather than as a marketing gimmick to raise profits.
Much like a Renaissance painter, Cameron is a man of the arts and sciences, his artistic vision demanding the cutting edge to satisfy while gaining inspiration from new discoveries in science. The resultant artwork contains standard themes and subjects, but the way it is rendered gives you the impression that you could just fly right into that screen while an entire world encompasses your mind as if you were transported into a different body altogether.