AVATAR - Film review - Originally written 9th March 2010

Yes I have finally got my butt in gear and been to see Avatar. Only 3 months after it was originally released.

This was a very interesting experience, my first 3D movie.

Most of you will have seen it (this may contain some spoilers) so I won’t bother to go into the plot, it’s basically a remake of Dances with Wolves (seriously, I am sooooo not kidding here), except it’s almost totally devoid of any characters. The film is hugely bloated and goes on for far, far too long and it is actually a bit of a clock watcher. If there were decent characters in the film then this wouldn’t have been as much of a problem but as the characters in this film are CGI smurfs it’s a very emotionally vacuous film. Once the humans start attacking and killing the Na’vi I just don’t care. They are cannon fodder and it all looks very pretty with them getting blown up (albeit bloodlessly) but I don’t know who they are nor have I been told who they are. Even with J.C. (James Cameron) seaguing into slow-mo does nothing to help his cause. Slow-mo in death scenes only works when you are watching a character you have grown to like or love being killed, the slow-mo drawing out their death agonies (see The Wild Bunch to how it should be done). In this it just looks wishy washy and rubbish.

The ecological/anit-war message about how humans are so evil is rammed down your throat so blatantly I’m amazed more people weren’t gagging and is actually quite embarrassing. And they never once try and expand on the fact that the hero is basically turning his back on his own race to side with the aliens. That’s never dealt with on screen and I was quite disappointed by this.

Oh and please tell me I wasn’t the only one thinking that as Giovanni Ribisi is being led away to get on a ship to take him offworld he wasn’t thinking “Let’s take off and nuke the entire site from orbit”.

It’s pretty much a 2 star movie and I think I’m being generous here.

Oh wait, the 3D.

The 3D is just f**king amazing. As anyone who has seen it will agree, words just can’t describe what a purely big screen experience this is. The scenes in the forest are stunning with trees and leaves and flys all buzzing around you, in 3D they look so unbelievable. The scenes at night when the forest lights up is magical. When you’re running with the na’vi in the giant trees hundreds, even thousands of feet up in the air and you look down there is a real sense of depth that just can’t be conveyed in a normal 2D movie. The whole alien-ness of Pandora is just so fantastically realised that the fact that the story and characters are cr*p are rendered fairly meaningless. I could sit and watch the scenes of flying and running in the forest forever. The end big action scene, the battle of the na’vi fighting with bows and arrows versus the humans with all their hardware, giant robot things and flying copters with the na’vi on their flying creatures really shows that 3D can handle the action as well as anything else. Visually the film is 10 stars. Out of 5. Yes, visually the film is THAT good.

However just imagine if the script and characters had been as good as the visuals. We would probably be looking at contender for ‘Greatest SF movie ever made’.

Also because the 3D is so good, I don’t think I ever want to see this on DVD, when it will be released in 2D. I just don’t wanna see it like that. I want it in 3D. I only want to see it in 3D, anything else is just less than what it should be and until we can replicate the 3D from the big screen perfectly on my home tv screen then I will never buy this film. I just hope they keep it on the big screen for a long time yet.