Avatar (3D)

So here it is. Allegedly some ten years in the making and with an estimated budget somewhere in the region of the GDP of several small European nations combined, it’s James Cameron’s Avatar. They say it’ll revolutionise cinema. They say it’s a whole new way of doing things, with advanced technology used to both capture and display the action in a way never before seen or contemplated. The tag-line might as well have been “It’ll blow your freakin’ mind,” since that’s been the general thrust of the marketing push behind it.

There’s a lot riding on Avatar‘s box office take. Cameron’s career, the existence of 20th Century Fox (probably; $300 million is a lot of moolah), the very way in which big mainstream blockbuster movies get made in future. So it’s both something of a relief but also vaguely disappointing that Avatar has turned out to be quite good, actually.

First though, the negative: the story’s not exactly what you might call original. Think of Pocahontas with a sci-fi twist told from John Smith’s point of view and you’re not a million miles away. Then again, with so much at stake here, I can see why they’ve played it safe with their script.

Sam Worthington plays Jake Sully (a character who sounds like he might be related to Monsters Inc.’s blue-haired lead). A paraplegic marine — and there are no electric wheelchairs in the future — he’s enlisted into a corporate-military program which involves having his mind transferred into the body of an alien. His job is to convince the natives of the planet Pandora to move away from their sacred lands so they can be strip-mined for natural resources. But as he learns more of their nature-loving ways, Jake finds himself becoming more and more at odds with his orders…and so on.

Make no mistake, the narrative is certainly not going to catch you by surprise. Because it doesn’t have to. Not when a film looks like this. Okay, so it takes a while for your eye to “settle” into the 3D, and for the first third or maybe half of the movie, you’re strangely aware of the computer-generated nature of the characters and settings. But then, something just seems to ‘click’.

It might simply be the beautiful colours, the vibrancy of Pandora as rendered in shimmering neons and florescent shades. The set pieces become a kaleidoscope of light and movement that’s utterly hypnotic, so much so that when the film shifts back to real actors on sets, they suddenly don’t seem as real as the CGI. Meanwhile, the tall, blue-skinned aliens who seemed so fake at first become, by the end of the film, completely believable as ‘real’ characters with genuine emotions.

Sure, there’s a few awkward questions raised by the whole “telling an anti-technology, anti-materialistic story by using vast amounts of technology and money” aspect (but you could say the same about, well, most sci-fi films), as well as some potentially racially sensitive matters if you’re into that sort of thing, but really these things are best put to one side. This is easily one of the most beautiful mainstream movies I have ever seen. It’s rare you find a film that’s worth watching on the largest cinema screen you can find. Avatar is one of them. Go. Look. Now.

Advertisement