If you’ve ever had the good fortune to catch ITV’s Jeremy Kyle Show, you may recall the host stating with alarming frequency that he is ‘paid to tell the truth’. So, inspired by the dubious assertions of Jez, I’d like to make the same claim. And to prove it, here’s some truth:
Avatar is awful.
Avatar is awful.
Available on Blu-Ray this week, the ‘biggest movie of all time’ is now being re-reviewed across the media, and for some strange reason, there appears to be a great deal of apologising going on. Phrases like ‘visually superb’ and ‘ground-breaking effects’ are flung about to mask most reviewers’ subtext of disappointment. It’s as though no-one wants to break cover and admit how tiresome this movie really is.
I don’t work in digital animation, so I’m prepared to accept that Avatar is technically very impressive. But this is faint praise indeed – Bloggers are rarely admired for their typing speed, however ‘technically impressive’ it might be. Therefore, whatever the programming merits of the movie, they are hardly a sufficient basis for critical acclaim. Indeed, to my untrained eye, the animation looked proficient and the 3D rendering seemed adequate, but it delivered nothing more impressive than stuff I saw at Disneyland about ten years ago.
3D, of course, is the format of the moment for Hollywood (well, it’s easier than producing movies of any quality). Now, it may just be my aging eyes, but this high-tech marvel always appears as flat images placed in layers – like those cardboard theatres kids used to play with. It never really cooks up an immersive, ‘real world’ feel and for $200m, perhaps it should.
This needn’t matter, of course. If a picture is loaded with creative flair, bursts with wild imagination and explodes with surprise and wit, its use of technology is all but irrelevant. But Avatar does none of these things. With the combined might of Hollywood’s finest art directors available, I am honestly astonished that tall, skinny blue people is the most arresting alien life form James Cameron could manage. He did much better with the sub-ocean, neon creatures in ‘The Abyss’. And the planet’s backgrounds may well have been imported from a folder tagged ‘generic jungles’. In fact, many of the movie’s other key design points are lazily lifted from previous films. We’ve seen people riding dragons in everything from ‘Eragon’ to ‘Revenge of the Sith’ – while the robotic exo-skeletons are taken wholesale from Cameron’s (far superior) ‘Aliens’.
‘Dark Star‘ and ‘Silent Running‘ are two much older science fiction flicks with comparatively miniscule budgets. The former uses a beach ball with feet for its alien and the latter has walking microwave ovens as robots, but these are genuinely brilliant movies. Why? Because the storylines,characterisations and scripts are lovingly crafted and truly original – further, obvious weaknesses for Avatar.
The metaphor deployed as a comment on America’s questionable, imperialist adventuring is so clumsy it’s a wonder the audience didn’t trip over it on the way out of the screening. What’s more, the entire plot is derived wholesale from Dances With Wolves. Presumably, Cameron imagined throwing enough pixels at the screen would ensure no-one noticed. One can’t help feeling the years of production that went into the film were largely consumed by young, lonely men hunched over super powered Apple Macs, leaving just a couple hours for some hacks to cobble a screenplay together. Calling a rare mineral ‘Unobtainium’? Why not dispense with the subtleties and go for ‘Trickytogetholdofium’?
Given its over-achievement, there is an ironic and depressing lack of ambition at the heart of Avatar. Where one would hope to find ideas and concepts to take the viewer to new and fascinating places, there’s a gaping void, fringed with cliché and laziness. Take away the paint and glitter and there’s nothing more than a half-baked, badly written script and barely memorable characters, clinging to a hackneyed storyline. And it is far, far too long.
If you saw Avatar in a theatre and you’re tempted to see what BluRay adds to the experience, resist that temptation. Even if the movie was projected into the night sky above the UK’s major cities, it would add little or nothing – because a poor film will always be a poor film.
There are some things you can’t polish – Avatar is one of them.
I don’t work in digital animation, so I’m prepared to accept that Avatar is technically very impressive. But this is faint praise indeed – Bloggers are rarely admired for their typing speed, however ‘technically impressive’ it might be. Therefore, whatever the programming merits of the movie, they are hardly a sufficient basis for critical acclaim. Indeed, to my untrained eye, the animation looked proficient and the 3D rendering seemed adequate, but it delivered nothing more impressive than stuff I saw at Disneyland about ten years ago.
3D, of course, is the format of the moment for Hollywood (well, it’s easier than producing movies of any quality). Now, it may just be my aging eyes, but this high-tech marvel always appears as flat images placed in layers – like those cardboard theatres kids used to play with. It never really cooks up an immersive, ‘real world’ feel and for $200m, perhaps it should.
This needn’t matter, of course. If a picture is loaded with creative flair, bursts with wild imagination and explodes with surprise and wit, its use of technology is all but irrelevant. But Avatar does none of these things. With the combined might of Hollywood’s finest art directors available, I am honestly astonished that tall, skinny blue people is the most arresting alien life form James Cameron could manage. He did much better with the sub-ocean, neon creatures in ‘The Abyss’. And the planet’s backgrounds may well have been imported from a folder tagged ‘generic jungles’. In fact, many of the movie’s other key design points are lazily lifted from previous films. We’ve seen people riding dragons in everything from ‘Eragon’ to ‘Revenge of the Sith’ – while the robotic exo-skeletons are taken wholesale from Cameron’s (far superior) ‘Aliens’.
‘Dark Star‘ and ‘Silent Running‘ are two much older science fiction flicks with comparatively miniscule budgets. The former uses a beach ball with feet for its alien and the latter has walking microwave ovens as robots, but these are genuinely brilliant movies. Why? Because the storylines,characterisations and scripts are lovingly crafted and truly original – further, obvious weaknesses for Avatar.
The metaphor deployed as a comment on America’s questionable, imperialist adventuring is so clumsy it’s a wonder the audience didn’t trip over it on the way out of the screening. What’s more, the entire plot is derived wholesale from Dances With Wolves. Presumably, Cameron imagined throwing enough pixels at the screen would ensure no-one noticed. One can’t help feeling the years of production that went into the film were largely consumed by young, lonely men hunched over super powered Apple Macs, leaving just a couple hours for some hacks to cobble a screenplay together. Calling a rare mineral ‘Unobtainium’? Why not dispense with the subtleties and go for ‘Trickytogetholdofium’?
Given its over-achievement, there is an ironic and depressing lack of ambition at the heart of Avatar. Where one would hope to find ideas and concepts to take the viewer to new and fascinating places, there’s a gaping void, fringed with cliché and laziness. Take away the paint and glitter and there’s nothing more than a half-baked, badly written script and barely memorable characters, clinging to a hackneyed storyline. And it is far, far too long.
If you saw Avatar in a theatre and you’re tempted to see what BluRay adds to the experience, resist that temptation. Even if the movie was projected into the night sky above the UK’s major cities, it would add little or nothing – because a poor film will always be a poor film.
There are some things you can’t polish – Avatar is one of them.
