Henry and I saw Avatar 3D yesterday, and I can't stop thinking about it.
The story is not really the point: it's your usual sci-fi evil earth corporation plundering beautiful virgin planet mixed with boy-meets-alien in a Lord of the Rings New Zealand forest. We inherently know the story arc and resolution, having seen this play out a hundred times in a hundred different time periods. James Cameron is not a great writer: that's not where his genius lies.
It's the cumulative impact of the filmmaker's vision, imagination and visual effects: breathtaking, mind-blowing, spellbinding. Think of when you saw 2001: Space Odyssey, or Star Wars (the very first one): suddenly there's a whole new way of telling a story with film.
Yes, the blue aliens are a little goofy, the evil US military is still evil, the acting is non-nuanced and the dialogue is corny. Amazingly, it's easy to forgive all that, because the glowing forest, the floating mountains, the lithe creatures, the movement, the luminescence, the 3-dimensionality is frankly astounding. It's a 2 1/2 hour movie and I never wanted it to end.
(The marketing is state-of-the-corporate-art, of course: twitter feeds, app downloads, interactive websites for the McDonald's toys, etc. What do you expect for a $300-$500 million budget [depending on who's counting]? And don't get me started on the morality (um, immorality) of spending half a billion on a piece of celluloid when so many souls could be saved with that amount. The reality is that no one is about to say "Hey, instead of making this movie, let's send the money to Unicef!" That's a topic for another more socially-responsible blog.)
James Cameron,Steven Spielberg, Jeffrey Katzenberg: all are committing to Digital 3D for their upcoming movies. It is the way image-making is moving, whether through the movie screen, home TV or computers. Story-telling is still about the story, at its heart, regardless of the tricks. But this movie paints a world unlike one you've ever imagined, and that is its story.
Go see Avatar in 3D and tell me what you think.
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