Avatar is possibly the most beautiful CGI movie ever!

[Reasonable]

tarheel91 said:

Reasonable said:
Avatar manages to be the most impressive, beautiful use of CGI to create another world, coupled nicely with the lowest level of narrative ambition.

It's not bad, but in a way that almost seems worse it's simply bland. All that effort, all that expense, for something so familiar and obvious. Couldn't Cameron have actually married the ability to deliver a new world with something new to say or show?

What struck me was how much Avatar resembled the latest version of a AAA videogame. The plot's the same, the weaknesses are the same, but the graphics have been improved.

7/10 and the likely candidate for testing your new 3D TV and BR player, but not a great film nonetheless.

What particularly struck me, was how little it did with so much expense, while a film like Moon did so much with so little expense.

*facepalm* If you think ANY story is original, you simply haven't read/watched enough.  Every story has been done before.  What makes individual stories remarkable is the way they're told.  I thought this one was told wonderfully.

*facepalm* if you don't have the cinematic depth to understand the difference between broad brush, easy strokes as Cameron uses in Avatar vs the excellence of narrative and depth in films like The Hurt Locker and Moon, to name a few this year.  Opinions are fine, we can all have them, but cinema has defined standards and levels as well, and these can be used to measure true excellence, and Avatar falls sure of the high end of excellence.

Also, there are clearly plenty of ways to be original, I see many movies do this every year, not to mention novels and theatre productions.

Avatar was well presented and solid, and in case you didn't notive I wasn't saying it was terrible, but every beat was telegraphed and obvious.  We need someone to get them out of lockup?  Fine, we'll have one sympathetic pilot, we won't explain why she alone has doubts while everyone else is a warmongering jarhead, we'll just have her do what we need with the barest reason to do so when in fact her actions have little basis in her character at that point.

The problem with Avatar is that it was hugely unoriginal in narrative and very basic in motivation - for the most part its characters are caricatures, and if it wasn't for the fact the cast delivers very good performances the weakness of their dialogue would be all the more apparent.

I do appreciate that basic motivations and characters were there at all, look at the awful horror of Transformers 2 to see the real bottom of the barrel, but Cameron has shown before he can juggle broad strokes with detailed characters better than he did with Avatar, and that's why it's dissapointing he didn't push things a little further.  He's got aliens, except they never really act alien, more like a mix of Native American Indians with a few other elements added from other tribal examples.  He's got an interesting character in Jake, but he doesn't really explore him much.

Now if you thought this was told wonderfully fine, but I can tell you that it wasn't as original as it could have been, nor as well written.  Cameron seems to genuinely have a talent for broad narrative and basic characterisation, but he falls short of true excellence in the details.  I just wish he'd give in and hire a great scriptwriter to take his final draft and give it a little character polish.  With Cameron's excellent direction I think we'd then get something trully worthy of this otherwise excellent creation of another world.