Movie Review: Avatar

Avatar

Written and Directed By: James Cameron

Starring: Sam Worthington, Zoe Saldana, Sigourney Weaver, Stephen Lang, Michelle Rodriguez, Giovanni Ribsi, and Joel Moore

Director of Photography: Mauro Fiore, Editors: James Cameron, John Refoua, and Stephen Rivkin, Production Designers: Rick Carter and Robert Stromberg, Original Music: James Horner

Rated: PG-13 for intense epic battle sequences and warfare, sensuality, language and some smoking.

    There is a shot about three minutes into James Cameron’s Avatar that announces its own achievement. As Jake Sully wakes up from a cryogenic sleep on a spaceship, he moves out of his bed and into the zero gravity chamber around him. It is not so much the beautiful production design, but Cameron’s technology that gives it an immersive experience―we don’t as much see how big it is, but feel how big it is. Which is why Avatar, in all its ecstatic hype and grandiosity, is a cinematic experience like no other―it thrives on the idea that cinema is a spectacle experience.

    Mr. Cameron, who has not directed a narrative film since 1997’s Titanic, knows something about being big. Avatar, which was four years in the making and with a budget that has reached a monstrous size, justifies every minute and dime spent. Combining 3D technology that Mr. Cameron and his team at Weta, along with many other technologies invented for the making of this film, Avatar is not so much a film that changes how movies will be made, but reminds us that movies can make us scream, jump, and simply say, “wow.” It’s a film that thrives on the same principle that made George Melies’s A Trip to the Moon a cinematic classic in 1902. Is it the lyrical art of Tarkovsky, or the structural awe of Coppola? Hardly. Yet what it is a deep passion for cinema on the visceral level; Mr. Cameron ignores the brain and digs right into your soul.

    No doubt, Mr. Cameron has also written a story that is essentially about the love of spectacle. Mr. Cameron sets in film in the future on a planet called Pandora, in which our protagonist Jake (Sam Worthington) has no use of his legs but has a chance to live the thrill of adventure once again on Pandora. A private company, with a fully equipped military presence commanded by the hilarious and appropriately evil Stephen Lang, has landed on the hell hole of the universe for a special mineral worth billions. However, Pandora is home to not only the most deadly and blood thirsty creatures alive, but also a native race called the Na'vi, 11 foot blue cat like humanoids who want nothing but the humans to leave. Jake regains his legs, and truly his life, but entering into the mind of an “avatar,” a Na’vi body programmed to function with his mind.

    As Jake takes control, and Mr. Cameron launches us into the world of Pandora, Jake does what we all have wanted: to live the thrills of the spectacle. He becomes part of the Na’vi, and his love of the universe around him is also ours. His desire to touch, grab, and feel part of this cinematic heaven is reflective of our own, and certainly how Mr. Cameron would imagine himself. We feed off his energy, and while the dialogue and characterization is one note, it brings us into a nostalgia of our first discovering of spectacle. What Mr. Cameron does so well is not just show us Pandora, but immerse us into it. Every detail, from flies to plants to giant creatures, has been meticulously created to make us believe. The Na’vi themselves, brought to life in motion capture performance similar to that used for Gollum in Lord of the Rings, are full of emotion and wonderment, and simply watching how the expressions of the faces move is often more fascinating than the giant parts around them.

    Avatar’s story, if simplistic, is one that reminds us that it is not the story being told, but how it’s told. Mr. Cameron, by bringing his imagination to not only the cinematic space but into our minds, has proven cinema’s worth. The 3D, while notable at first, fades into the background quickly as we become absorbed by the world around us. It’s still there, affecting our every sense, but one is so caught up in the thrills and the beauty that Avatar’s accomplishment is not the 3D but its ability to throw us down the rabbit hole and never let go. The two and a half hour running time feels short for a film that makes us truly believe in the power of spectacle. And it is spectacle in every sense of the word; Mr. Cameron reminds us why movies have captivated us for over 100 years: from train robberies, to chariot races, to dinosaurs, and now on a world called Pandora.