It's no secret at any point in the movie that the story for Avatar is, to use just a small fraction of the negative words applied to it, preachy, dull, cliched, done-to-death, and plagiaristic. But it's also not much of a secret that the story is, was, and always has been second pickle to the special effects James Cameron set out to revolutionize from the get-go. Here's why he succeeded.
The thing that makes special effects so derided in modern cinema is not usually their quality, but their integration into the real-world scenes. A commonly-used example of this sort of thing is Star Wars; the hand-made spaceships and sets of the original trilogy are much more interesting to look at than the computer-generated spaceships and sets in the prequel trilogy because they exist in reality, were made by people, and have a tangible history to them. Reality is reality, and watching reality being mixed with what you know was made inside of a computer is jarring at best, and deal-breaking at worst.
But with Avatar, the knowledge that the breathtaking landscapes you're witnessing are all being made inside computers actually enhances the experience rather than detracts from it. It's computer-generated, but the world generated in that computer is so large, active, and alive that it actually manifests itself as a separate reality in your mind. It's almost like the worlds of the more big-budget computer games in that regard; you could see yourself walking into it much like one walks around Azeroth in World Of Warcraft.
So if you haven't seen Avatar already, watch it as soon as you can. To say that you'd be watching the most unbelievable computer-generated imagery ever created would be doing it a disservice.
The only reason to see it is for the effects...
...and I mean that in the best possible way.
It's no secret at any point in the movie that the story for Avatar is, to use just a small fraction of the negative words applied to it, preachy, dull, cliched, done-to-death, and plagiaristic. But it's also not much of a secret that the story is, was, and always has been second pickle to the special effects James Cameron set out to revolutionize from the get-go. Here's why he succeeded.
The thing that makes special effects so derided in modern cinema is not usually their quality, but their integration into the real-world scenes. A commonly-used example of this sort of thing is Star Wars; the hand-made spaceships and sets of the original trilogy are much more interesting to look at than the computer-generated spaceships and sets in the prequel trilogy because they exist in reality, were made by people, and have a tangible history to them. Reality is reality, and watching reality being mixed with what you know was made inside of a computer is jarring at best, and deal-breaking at worst.
But with Avatar, the knowledge that the breathtaking landscapes you're witnessing are all being made inside computers actually enhances the experience rather than detracts from it. It's computer-generated, but the world generated in that computer is so large, active, and alive that it actually manifests itself as a separate reality in your mind. It's almost like the worlds of the more big-budget computer games in that regard; you could see yourself walking into it much like one walks around Azeroth in World Of Warcraft.
So if you haven't seen Avatar already, watch it as soon as you can. To say that you'd be watching the most unbelievable computer-generated imagery ever created would be doing it a disservice.