Blue People

Okay, that's better.

Down to bidness: Excellent movie. Visually amazing. I, for one, am generally not a fan of green screen usage for special effects, instead preferring the old Star Wars model ships and the like - to me, the lighting and depth is never right with the CGI (computer-generated imagery) stuff. Phantom Menace is a perfect example of this, as well as the issue of actors not perceiving their CGI counterparts at the right distance and angle. Even Transformers, which came out just a year and a half ago (July 2007), was fraught with all sorts of CGI issues, with voices not matching their onscreen sources and, quite frankly, too much damn shiny stuff. All told, I am generally skeptical verging on pessimistic with these types of movies.

[I will say that Sin City was a big milestone for me, in that it was the first time I have been lost in a CGI-driven movie and forgotten about the effects. I think striving to make everything, not just the CGI characters and landscape, look cartoonish/animated made all the difference. Although perhaps the technology is finally getting there...]

Blah Blah. Anyway, my point is that Avatar was amazing to watch. The lighting and shading and depth on the CGI characters was, to my eye, as good as it gets. Their interactions with their environment and their human counterparts was amazingly real. And the landscapes were believable. Beautiful and believable. Part of the secret to the success of the landscapes, I suspect, again lies in the effort to reach an unknown standard (i.e. a foreign planet) and not a known one (i.e. a talking yellow Mustang).

That said, apart from its visual appeal, there is actually an enjoyable movie underneath. The plot, albeit not a new concept, was not overtly trite either. All of the actors provided creditable performances apart from Sigourney Weaver, who was a little too cookie-cutter. I really enjoyed Sam Worthington in the lead role as well - not because he was amazing, but because he was a solid and understated and, most importantly, NOT Nick Cage... By that I mean, I am sick of the same faces and same crappy actors. Even great actors carry some of the baggage of their other roles with them: witness anything Al Pacino has done in the last ten years, try not yelling 'Whoo-Hah!' during his monologues, and you'll see what I mean. Every time you recognize an actor in a role, he/she loses a little bit of the believability that makes them great in a performance. This is what drives the great ones to immerse themselves physically in a role, not only to look the part, but to distance themselves from their previous roles (see Raging Bull, Monster, Courage Under Fire, The Talented Mr. Ripley, Last King of Scotland to name a few).

Tangent over. Bottom line: It was a solid, "workmanlike" film made better by an amazing visual display. And for someone like myself, who is as loathe to credit this CGI-explosion culture of Michael Bay and George Lucas as can be, this may be the greatest compliment I can give.