Avatar: Kwon & Juan Review

Kwon: <Sigh>  Okay.  I understand why people were excited about this movie, although I was less excited than most.  And I get why people are impressed by it.  Though again…  I mean, fine.  Yay you, James Cameron, you built your own camera.  And your computer graphics team did some fantastic work.  Who doesn’t want to fly on a dragon?  Or frolic in a giant awesome tree?  Or you know, live on another planet?  Yes, Pandora is beautiful.  And it’s all appropriately dreamlike and fantastical and yes, your crackpot visual team did its job.  But Avatar still smells like Pocahontas: Attack of the Blue Aliens/Dances With Ferngully/The Last of the Immoral Slaughtering of An Indigenous People. Despite moments of real ingenuity, the 3D extravagance merely serves as a gimmicky distraction.

Juan: This was supposed to be “the re-definition of moviemaking for the next century”, and I had expectations… big expectations. Afterward, I kept wondering if I had been watching a 3d movie at all. Once a discussion began on the immersive nature of what had been done I started to change my mind, but my expectation of a complete sensory overload was left wanting. Avatar decided to be subtle about its usage of the groundbreaking medium, and arguably became the standard by which 3d films should be made. I watched the movie anticipating revelation, and was served blue guys that smacked of fakery. It took me a good 30 minutes to ‘believe’, and even then it was mostly because I was tired of squirming.

Kwon: There are a handful of affecting moments, courtesy of a well-cast ensemble (Zoe Saldana successfully demystifies the puzzle of green/blue screen acting).  But why resort to such a blatant morality-by-numbers tale?  The villains/antagonists/vessel for evil are so evil, it’s totally boring.  Do they really need to be so monomaniacal?  I mean, the guy that’s after all the martian rocks may as well have been wearing a three-piece suit fashioned out of printed currency.  And his military henchman’s hatefulness is alarmingly excessive.  Why does he want to kill everyone so much?

Juan: Disagreed! I love how Cameron creates archetypal bile ridden characters. Something in him just loves the concept of yin and yang too much. They’re not believable, but they are fun to watch.

Kwon: That single-minded menace works when your villain is a robot… and called The Terminator.  But it’s pretty ridiculous on a human face.  Even in a ‘Popcorn Flick’ like this one.  I mean, they didn’t even try that in Ferngully.  The bad guy in that was a ginormous cloud of greasy smoke, for crying out loud.

Juan: The first half of the film tried my patience multiple times. I kept on wondering when the movie was going to begin. James, it took you decades to write this film, what were you doing the whole time? Rather than a story I received a pastiche of scenes that are more focused on the mystery of Pandora. In the end, the movie was more about the world than the people. In a society where films have a shelf life that gets exhausted somewhat quickly compared to video games, an IP on all platforms must be created. So from a marketing perspective I get this film now, and there have been successful franchises (Star Wars, TMNT, Ghostbusters, et al), and failed abominations (The Matrix), but rest assured that universe creation will be revolutionized here. The innovations in disturbingly blurred realities will become the topic of journalism for years to come, and my guess is Avatar will set the bar like it just did for 3D.

Kwon:  Visual advancements in film are no small accomplishment.  The techy geniuses who pull those strings are all incredibly gifted people and the job requires an immense amount of patience (word is one of the guys who did the SFX for Food, Inc. was in need of a well deserved vaycay, due to the demands placed on his mortal frame).  It’s exciting to be swept away by innovation.  But Cameron falls victim to the all too predictable trap of, perhaps not abusing the technology, but certainly exhausting its impressiveness.  I enjoyed the visual tour of Pandora.  But the more I got away from it, the more I started to forget, and eventually not care, about the visual awesomeness.  And therein lies the problem.  If the dudes at Pixar can animate the entirety of a film (and make computer fur move like fur!) and still write the shit out of the story, then Cameron could have at least attempted to muster the same ambition for his screenplay that he did for his photography.

Juan: And I’m actually going to disagree on the photography because I wasn’t that impressed.  Maybe I’m disagreeing less specifcially with Cameron’s film and more with the CG super-epic genre as a whole. Does it ever strike you odd that directors worry less about physical connection? The wide acceptance of ‘suspend your disbelief’ in filmmaking is one of the more frightening trends today. Watching a feature like Avatar is a harsh reminder of how difficult embracing 3d elements as reality is. Many times the film plays out like a scoreboard in my head where I’m ticking off ‘good’ or ‘bad’. In many ways the game becomes more important than watching the film itself, and later on at the bar the obligatory conversation ensues.  That aside, there is something about a nice little shaky cam in 3d that really helps me engage. Cameron, see District 9 for a real cinematographic tour de force, and take some notes for next time! While you’re at it check out BSG or Firefly for shooting spaceships. I get it, 3d realized in this way is important, but man was I underwhelmed.

Kwon:  Not so much in disagreement, actually.  I concur on the quality of the actual avatars in Avatar.  And this usually tends to be one of Cameron’s biggest shortfalls, and one that cannot be remedied by necessitating astronomical video-rendering times.  There is a notable deficit of emotive connectivity that has little to do with graphic detail or how ‘real’ his avatars look.  I felt infinitely more bonded to the stop-motion figures of Wes Anderson’s Fantastic Mr. Fox, a film in which the characters have little more facial movement beyond the bearing of teeth and the raising of an eyebrow.  And while I was certainly taken by the visual landscape in Cameron’s film, I never felt I was watching anything that was vastly and/or wholly superior.

Juan: I’m with you ~ there is something so natural about puppets like the ones in Fantastic Mr. Fox. I think to myself, “Those are puppets and that’s okay because they can still make me cry”. Anyways, sometimes I feel like the zeitgeist behind Cameron films is what makes it huge not the movie itself. Would we all really be having a conversation about how this movie “changed film forever” if we hadn’t been told to? I can’t shake the feeling of being abused by an overactive media culture that forces conversation on me. It’s useful to have something to say at the water cooler, but I still like the concept of ‘me’. It’s frustrating to think that my likes aren’t things I would choose independently.  But I digress and it doesn’t change the fact that J-Cam is a douche.

Kwon:  Yeah.  And here’s where I break from diplomacy and bear my claws.  WTF, Golden Globes, you should be embarrassed.  I thought you were all critics.  I’m truly baffled.  Perhaps many of you are still enduring the shame of shafting last year’s blockbuster-that-was-actually-a-real-movie-and-deserved-to-be-acknowledged (The Dark Knight).  And you should be.  But this blatant overcompensation does not bode well for your already compromised reputation.  And James.  Seriously.  The speech.  “Give it up for yourselves!”  Translation: Yes, give it up for the fact that we (I) have such good fortune that we (I) can spend this night congratulating ourselves (myself) for being so successful (rich). I know you can’t really help it.  I’ve seen enough of your interviews to know that pretty much everything you say is laced with megalomaniacal ego… so I wasn’t that surprised.  But I actually LOOKED AWAY FROM MY TV, I was so overcome with third-party embarrassment.

Juan: I literally started laughing during his speech. Cameron is like an alien trying to understand what a human might say, and I wonder if there is a serious social problem kept under wraps by his publicists. I mean, who accepts an award, and immediately slaps everyone whoever tried to get an award in the face. Cameron that’s who. Man, I can’t think of a more dick line than what he said, and that’s taking into consideration his Titanic speech. Did you see Leo DiCaprio’s face during it? I felt like we were kindred spirits thinking “man, what a cock”. Exactly Leo, exactly.

Kwon: Okay, I’m gonna go vomit now.  My apologies to the graphics team behind Avatar.  You’re all aces.