My Take on AVATAR

I've been thinking about AVATAR, what makes it so special, the best film of its kind since 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY. Is it the 3D? The 3D enhances the feeling of involvement, to be sure. But it is never used as a gimmick the way it was back in the '50s when all you were meant to notice were the spears coming out of the screen towards you in BWANA DEVIL to distract from the ridiculousness of the plot. Digital 3D is an extraordinary technological advance. But the 3D here isn't anything technically more wonderful than the 3D in CORALINE, for instance. So the sense of wonder doesn't come from the 3D. I'd say the advances in motion capture and combining computer imagery with live action are the real technological advances that Cameron has made. More than ever before...even more than has ever been conceivable before, he's brought an alien world alive, populated it with convincing aliens and made the audience care.

In my lifetime, the signpost film, the one film which has always been the standard of the limitless possibilities of film, was Kubrick's 2001. Individual scenes remain in my sensory memory like engraved engrams: being in the PanAm shuttle watching the pen float; walking among the people on the moon approaching the sentinal; or hanging in space floating with only the labored sounds of breathing on the soundtrack. Never before (or for that matter just about never since) has there been a film with such a truthful experience of something that nobody had ever done or seen before; but maybe, like me, had somehow visualized while reading science fiction and never expected to see portrayed realistically in a movie. That's basically why it survived my 17 awed viewings in that '68-'69 year.

Well AVATAR does something similar: to allow the audience to be totally immersed in the film in a way that is technologically an order of magnitude advanced from Kubrick's capabilities at the time (which were amazing, when you think about it, since nobody has ever topped it to this day until this film).

I've heard people complain that the script is predictable. In fact it really is a mashup of DANCING WITH WOLVES (which won a best film Oscar, by the way) and the novel STARSHIP TROOPERS (the way it might have been shot had the film been more true to the novel) with everything reversed to make it Cameron's own. That's a good enough story for me. And the acting is more than adequate...that isn't the point. The characters are archetypes, mostly; but what is amazing is that their emotional reality truly does survive the digitization.

Cameron's forté as a director is putting together a total experience seamlessly. You aren't aware that this is a movie, it's an alternate reality. When you stop and analyze it, all the elements are just about perfect: design, cinematography, music etc.; but nothing is more than perfect enough to stand out, so at least I wasn't analyzing for once, rather I was experiencing entirely. I think that's Cameron's strongest suit. He is the complete filmmaker par excellence...the combination of Kubrick's brain and DeMille's showmanship.

Go all ye filmgoers to the temple. See Pandora. Be amazed.