Avatar

I didn't really know what to expect of Avatar going in. I was never super excited about this movie - being a movie nerd, I had followed its development online and heard James Cameron's promises that it was going to revolutionize the way 3D is used in movies, create a new kind of moviegoing experience, change cinema forever, etc. And while I was never convinced that these hyperbolic claims would come to fruition, I did believe that, coming from a writer/director like James Cameron, this film might have the potential to be groundbreaking in some way, or at least be really really good. But when the first trailer was released, I was not very impressed. I wasn't disappointed or anything, there just wasn't anything in the trailer that made me particularly excited about seeing the movie. I guess I had always planned on seeing it, mainly because it's been such a talked-about project since the very beginning of its production, but after seeing the trailer, I was somewhat skeptical about how good it would actually be.

But enough about my expectations for Avatar going in, here's what I thought coming out: I was pleasantly surprised by it, but not blown away. My main response was that this movie is absolutely gorgeous. If there's ever been a movie that needs to be seen on the big screen, this is it (that's why I almost didn't include any image of it at the top of this post, and why I ended up using a poster instead of a screen shot - these images were created for a big screen, and seeing them reduced to computer screen size is almost pointless. Still, I like to have something to put up there). That's the main thing that James Cameron and his visual effects teams delivered with this movie - a new world that is jaw-droppingly beautiful. I don't know if I would call the visuals in Avatar groundbreaking, because they really don't do anything truly new, but the thing is, they do things that have been done before BETTER than they've been done before. We've seen photo-real CGI landscapes before, but not ones this lovely, and we've seen motion-capture CGI characters before, but not ones this convincing. I would say that these effects, rather than changing the game (as Cameron claimed they would), simply raise the bar - which is not an unimpressive feat. If Avatar does not win the Oscar for visual effects come March, the Academy Awards will be stripped of any shred of credibility they have left.

There has been a significant amount of criticism directed at Avatar's writing, comparing the plot to "Dances With Wolves in space", complaining about the not-so-brilliant dialogue, etc. And while these accusations are not wholly unfounded, and the fact is that the script is the film's weakest point, I don't think they really hurt the film or get in the way of what Cameron is trying to accomplish with it. The script is nothing new and nothing brilliant, but it's not a bad script, and it does what it needs to do, which is provide the film with a reasonably compelling story to tell with its amazing visuals. The characters are good enough to give the actors something to work with and make the audience care about them, even if this movie won't be winning any acting awards, and the plot is interesting enough to propel the action.

I would not call Avatar a masterpiece or a game-changer or anything like that. But I would call it a good movie, because it succeeds at what it sets out to do. What people who complain about a plot we've seen before or the simplistic dialogue don't realize is that James Cameron did not set out to give us the next Citizen Kane, and you know what? That's okay. He set out to give us a good action movie with wondrous visuals, and that's what he did. A movie doesn't have to be good at everything in order to be a good movie. It should avoid being bad at any one thing, but if a movie does one or two things spectacularly, and everything else decently, that movie is by no means a failure.

I do feel that Cameron ultimately hurt his own movie by talking it up so much and building such high expectations for it. Not financially of course - Avatar has broken the record for reaching the $1 billion worldwide gross mark faster than any other film and is currently the second-highest grossing film of all time behind Cameron's own Titanic. But artistically, Avatar simply doesn't live up to all the things that Cameron promised about it, and honestly, I don't know if any film he'd given us could have. But regardless of its failure to live up to the hype, Avatar IS a solid science fiction/action movie that is absolutely stunning to look at, and that's good enough to make it one of the better films of 2009.