Well, I finally caught up with the rest of the English speaking world and watched James Cameron’s Avatar this week.
While a lot of people have criticised the movie for being predictable and riddled with clichéd corny dialogue, I think they’re missing the point.
It’s a Jim Cameron movie. Terminators 1 and 2 were hardly the height of cutting edge dialogue. Aliens, while arguably one of the most awesome sci-fi movies of all time, was never going to win Best Original Screenplay at the Academy Awards. Let’s not even get started on Titanic…
Actually, thinking about it, Titanic might be the best place to start. Both Avatar and Titanic were self-confessed labours of love for the director. Both were in production one way or another for years and both required new technology to be developed to bring the director’s vision to life. Both are visually stunning and genuinely sumptuous to watch.
Unfortunately, both suffer from being too damn long. It took Hollywood a long time to get over their self-imposed 90-110 minutes limit and now it’s starting to feel like every director is taking the opportunity to make their next film into a mammoth opus. Cameron is very guilty of this with Avatar. it’s just shy of 3 hours long and boy does it feel like it. a good edit could cut that down to about 2 hours and make a much faster paced movie without compromising the overall plot.
I felt Cameron hadn’t padded the film, but he had taken such relish in creating this new world and all of it’s flora and fauna, that he wanted to show it all off as much as possible. He clearly put a massive amount of creativity and effort into this film and I get the impression that he wanted everyone watching it fall in love with the planet Pandora the same way he had.
Sorry, I’m rambling… Avatar is a very well-made movie and a great spectacle, but could do with losing about an hour of it’s running time and backing off the heavy-handed environmental message.
Sam Worthington is functional as the lead character, but seriously could they not have told him to pick one accent and stick with it? He swung between Aussie and American all through the film.
One last thing that stuck with me after the movie ended; lots of War on Terror symbolism. The human assault on the Na’vi Hometree had definite 9/11 imagery undertones as the tree fell, ditto with a lot of the dialogue. “Shock and Awe”, “Fight Terror with Terror”, “Winning the Hearts and Minds of the indigenous people” all sounded rather too much like Fox News circa 2002.
