The early press about James Cameron's latest movie, "Avatar" couldn't have been more hyperbolic: this film was going to forever change the way we experience movies. The director -- already famous for wowing audiences with quicksilver robots in "Terminator 2" and sinking an entire ocean liner in "Titanic" -- spent over a decade working on the movie. He reportedly developed a brand new 3-D camera for the flick along with entirely new technologies for motion capture. The movie's budget was reportedly in the ballpark of $300 million. And yet there was almost no word on what the movie was going to be about, and few indications of what it was going to look like. Though the first sneak peak to a Comic-con audience received raves, the positive buzz for "Avatar" diminished when the first trailer came out in September. It outlined a plot that seemed glaringly familiar and it showed a bunch of half-naked blue people running around a digital jungle. To say it failed to overwhelm would be an understatement. The flick was almost immediately dubbed "Dances with Smurfs" by furious fans on the internet. Blogs made unflattering comparisons between "Avatar" and the CG animated fiasco "Delgo," which is also about half-naked blue people in a forest.
This weekend, "Avatar" will be released on 4,000 screens across the country and audiences will finally get to see what all the fuss is about. Is "Avatar" a landmark of moviemaking or it yet another big-budget Hollywood production with a recycled plot? It turns out both are right.
The movie might have cost the GNP of a small nation but all that money is on-screen: it looks gorgeous. As David Denby of the New Yorker writes, "James Cameron's "Avatar" is the most beautiful film I've seen in years. Amid the hoopla over the new power of 3-D as a narrative form, and the excitement about the complicated mix of digital animation and live action that made the movie possible, no one should ignore how lovely "Avatar" looks, how luscious yet freewheeling, bounteous yet strange."
Cameron's famed obsession with detail -- this is a director who insisted that real Beluga caviar be served during the first class dinner scene in "Titanic" -- is fully on display here. The film takes place on Pandora, a planet filled with lush forests, floating mountains, and a huge moon that fills the night's sky. Each frame bustles with life. And each creature in the movie, from massive hammer-headed pachyderms to six-armed neon lemurs, feels like it has its own evolutionary back story.
Cameron even went so far as to hire a linguist to invent an entirely new language for the Na'vi, the aforementioned half-naked blue people who look like panthers crossed with runway models. And it is with the Na'vi that Cameron's technical wizardry really shines: they are entirely computer generated yet their movements and facial expressions feel almost completely natural. Unlike other live-action/CG hybrids like this year's "A Christmas Carol," the digital artifice quickly falls away and you start thinking of them as real. Neytiri (played by Zoe Saldana), the lithe Na'vi princess who falls for Jake the main character, might very well become the first non-human movie character ever to become a full-blown sex symbol.
Where some critics found fault with the movie was with its well-worn storyline. As Scott Tobias of the A.V. Club wrote, "Look past the New Age beauty of Cameron's Pandora -- and whenever the camera swoops through its verdant, psychedelic wonders, that isn't easy to do -- and Avatar is a weak patchwork of his other films." The evil corporation out to pillage Pandora is straight out of "Aliens," the evil general is like the Terminator channeling Dick Cheney, and the forbidden love story between Jake and Neytiri has shades of Jack and Rose from "Titanic."
In short, "Avatar" neatly sums up all of Cameron's strengths and weaknesses as a filmmaker. His stories might be trite and his dialogue might be tin-eared, but his visual brilliance is astounding. And it was the film's beauty, not it's storyline, that no doubt nabbed "Avatar" a a pair of Golden Globe nominations. If you see it (and see it properly in 3D), "Avatar" will be unlike anything you've seen.
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