Avatar (2009)
Directed by James Cameron
In the 22nd century, a paraplegic Marine is dispatched to the moon Pandora on a unique mission, but becomes torn between following orders and protecting an alien civilization.
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Many parts of the first half actually reminded me of an old animated film called Ferngully: The Last Rainforest (odd reference I know, but it's truly what I was reminded of) in which another species is being forced out of their home by bulldozers for the resources it contains.
(Most) audiences who have seen Avatar in 2009 may accuse James Cameron’s screenplay as nothing more than a rip-off of Ferngully: The Last Rainforest (1992), Pocahontas (1995) and Dances with Wolves (1990).
Among other things, its clunky, unoriginal story elements recall bits from the 1992 animated feature "Ferngully: The Last Rainforest" and the Oscar-winning "Dances With Wolves" (1990).
Heck, long before " Battle for Terra ," there was 1992's "Ferngully: The Last Rainforest," which boiled down to the same elementary lessons.
We’re talking about a movie that mirrors the plot of the 1992 classic “Ferngully: The Last Rainforest.”
This also plays a part in the overall narrative structure of the movie, with the commonplace ideas of both Ferngully: The Last Rainforest and Dance with Wolves being heavily echoed a bit too much as well as the typical “White Savior” archetype.
Which can be put down to the fact that I've seen "Dances with Wolves", I've watched "Pocahontas" and many other movies which run with a similar theme and although it's well constructed it didn't feel special enough to match up to what "Avatar" delivers visually.
(Most) audiences who have seen Avatar in 2009 may accuse James Cameron’s screenplay as nothing more than a rip-off of Ferngully: The Last Rainforest (1992), Pocahontas (1995) and Dances with Wolves (1990).
Essentially, Avatar offers a combination of Disney’s Pocahontas and Dances with Wolves.
Cameron’s script blatently borrows aspects of Dances with Wolves , Disney’s Pocahontas , and Ferngully: The Last Rainforest .
The story here is a variation on the Dances with Wolves template (or Pocahontas template, depending on your cinematic recall): A soldier from an encroaching civilization spends time with the members of the enemy, i.e. the people indigenous to the land, and, through the course of his interaction, gains not only respect and sympathy for them, but falls in love with one of their women ( Avatar digresses from the Wolves example in that the woman in question is an actual, true-blood native).
But now that it has finally arrived, all I can say is 'Is that all there is?' I already saw this story earlier this year in a CGI animation called "Battle for Terra" and I certainly didn't experience the sense of awe that I recall upon seeing "Jurassic Park" way back in 1993, even without 3D.
Sure, this would all look even better if Cameron had used a combination of practical effects and animation instead throwing as much computer processing power at his movie as possible (as proven by the far more convincing effects in Jurassic Park or Lord of the Rings… or for that matter Titanic), but judged solely on an animation level what he’s accomplished is amazing.
Most modern blockbusters attempt to wow us with technical prowess, but few succeed; those that do (the last two I can recall would be The Matrix and Jurassic Park), do because the filmmakers know what they have is special, and they know how to present it to ensure that we know, too.
The exploration unfolds with a sense of wonder, joy, and danger reminiscent of the first half of Jurassic Park.
But it reminded me more of the "Jurassic Park" series.
Then there’s the wildlife on Pandora, which resembles the dinosaurs from “Jurassic Park,” while the action-packed finale recalls the ending from “Return of the Jedi.”
But if you believe special-effects blockbusters have the right to exist at all, if you respect the genre that brought us Star Wars and Raiders of the Lost Ark and yes, Titanic, then Avatar is something that needs to be seen.
Which can be put down to the fact that I've seen "Dances with Wolves", I've watched "Pocahontas" and many other movies which run with a similar theme and although it's well constructed it didn't feel special enough to match up to what "Avatar" delivers visually.
(Most) audiences who have seen Avatar in 2009 may accuse James Cameron’s screenplay as nothing more than a rip-off of Ferngully: The Last Rainforest (1992), Pocahontas (1995) and Dances with Wolves (1990).
Among other things, its clunky, unoriginal story elements recall bits from the 1992 animated feature "Ferngully: The Last Rainforest" and the Oscar-winning "Dances With Wolves" (1990).
Inspired by Edgar Rice Burroughs’ John Carter series from the early twentieth century, this science fiction tale borrows from Dances with Wolves, historical events like My Lai, and even films found in Cameron’s own catalog.
The worst aspect of Avatar is its Frankenstein’s abortion of a storyline borrowed from Dances With Wolves , so every single plot move was telegraphed in 1990.
If you have seen Dances with Wolves , you have seen this theme before, the white man migrating into territory of the American Indian.
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The space/military culture is reminiscent of that in Aliens and the cross-cultural romance recalls Titanic.
The Na’vi, with their bows and arrows, are no match for gunships and soldiers inside exoskeletons (the machines being one of several echoes from Cameron’s Aliens, another is the corporate servant Parker, reprising Paul Reiser’s venal Carter Burke), and American military might is casually excoriated throughout the film.
The other chief villain is the mining company’s on-site manager Parker Selfridge (Giovanni Ribisi) who will remind you of the Paul Reiser character in James Cameron’s “Aliens”, another rousing entertainment.
Certain characters directly recall figures in the director's past movies, such as Giovanni Ribisi's mundanely evil corporate stooge, who is a more two dimensional rendering of Paul Reiser's Carter from Aliens.
The colonel’s pacifist adversary, scientist and fellow Avatar Grace ( Sigourney Weaver , for that “ Aliens ” vibe) wants to create a “bridge of trust” with them instead.
As you’d imagine, the eco-hippie, Gaia mother earth stuff is overdone and is faintly insufferable, Cameron serving up some mature slices of cheddar in the vein of the thumbs up from T2 and slushy romance of Titanic whilst the song that plays out over the final credits needs to have every copy on the planet collected together and hurled into the nearest active volcano.
Cameron’s exceedingly expensive 12-years-in-the-making fictional follow-up to Titanic supposedly represents the dawn of a new era for the art form, one that on the basis of the film at hand will involve ever-more expert CG animation, thrilling 3D effects, and little non-visual substance to prevent one from slowly nodding off amid sensory-overload avalanches of fantastic sights and raucous sounds.
Cameron’s 12-years-in-the-making fictional follow-up to Titanic supposedly represents the dawn of a new era for the art form, one that on the basis of the film at hand will involve ever-more expert CG animation, thrilling 3D effects, and little non-visual substance to prevent one from nodding off amid sensory-overload avalanches of fantastic sights and raucous sounds.
Sure, this would all look even better if Cameron had used a combination of practical effects and animation instead throwing as much computer processing power at his movie as possible (as proven by the far more convincing effects in Jurassic Park or Lord of the Rings… or for that matter Titanic), but judged solely on an animation level what he’s accomplished is amazing.
As you’d imagine, the eco-hippie, Gaia mother earth stuff is overdone and is faintly insufferable, Cameron serving up some mature slices of cheddar in the vein of the thumbs up from T2 and slushy romance of Titanic whilst the song that plays out over the final credits needs to have every copy on the planet collected together and hurled into the nearest active volcano.
The other half is an intense action thriller that recalls Cameron's legendary work on Aliens and Terminator 2: Judgment Day .
The fact that his earlier films don’t seem to succumb to this ( Terminator , Aliens or even Terminator 2 ) may be less a sign of someone losing some degree of control of his material and more the result of someone who is ambitious, striving to find the perfect combination of spectacle, emotion, entertainment, character, cinema and story.
It's worth pointing out that there is a group of "Cameron regulars" including Michael Biehn (The Terminator, a deleted cameo in Terminator 2 , Aliens, and The Abyss) and Bill Paxton (The Terminator, Aliens, True Lies, and Titanic), and Avatar reunites him with his Aliens star Sigourney Weaver, proving there are actors who support his directing style (Biehn was considered for the role of Colonel Quaritch, but Cameron felt reuniting Weaver and Biehn would remind viewers too much of Aliens).
Unlike other James Cameron movies such as Aliens (1986), Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991) and True Lies (1994), Avatar just doesn’t have the same rewatchability factor.
To this day, the groundbreaking work of 1991's "Terminator 2: Judgment Day" and 1993's "Jurassic Park" is more impressive.
Avatar most reminded of The Abyss (1989), with one crucial difference.
The scenes of humans interacting with otherworldly creatures bring to mind similar scenes from “The Abyss.”
Filmmaker extraordinaire, of special effect films, James Cameron (“The Abyss”/”Aliens”/”The Terminator”), after a 12-year hiatus since his 1997 ‘Titanic,’ outdoes himself in CGI effects and creates a goofy SF film packed with stunning vistas, psychedelic wonders and enough toys to please all the kiddies in the audience.
The first two Terminators, Aliens (with Weaver), The Abyss, and, of course, Titanic, all cost plenty, but with the exception of The Abyss, they sold more than enough tickets to make up for the expenditure.
Say what you like about writer-director Cameron -- and take it from me, people have -- he has always been a visionary in terms of film technology, as his pioneering computer-generated effects in “The Abyss” and “Terminator 2: Judgment Day” testify.
With "Avatar," James Cameron--a filmmaker who hardly ever makes a movie without employing state-of-the-art technology to create something we've never seen before (see "The Abyss")--futurizes Terence Malick's "The New World" in his rather titanic way.
Leave it to James Cameron to re-invent the format to such an extent that there's no way Ghosts of the Abyss will ever be compared to one of those cheesy '50s 3-D flicks.
It seems that way because the man hasn’t made a fictional feature film since his 1997 Academy Award-winning mega-hit Titanic (and, no, the IMAX documentary Ghosts of the Abyss doesn’t count).
Among his activities in the dozen years since Titanic, the director made two underwater documentaries (Ghosts of the Abyss and Aliens of the Deep) that marked him as both an explorer and a conservationist.
Yet after releasing what was (then) the highest grossing film in the world, Cameron seemed content to retire to the sea and potter about with nautical filming techniques on documentaries such as Expedition: Bismarck , Ghosts of the Abyss and Aliens of the Deep .
Il aura fallu attendre douze ans après que James Cameron ait pulvérisé tous les records au box-office avec l’excessivement oscarisé Titanic pour voir le Canadien revenir enfin à la fiction - après une incursion somme toute assez peu concluante dans le monde du documentaire marin avec Aliens of the Deep et Ghosts of the Abyss.
Filmmaker extraordinaire, of special effect films, James Cameron (“The Abyss”/”Aliens”/”The Terminator”), after a 12-year hiatus since his 1997 ‘Titanic,’ outdoes himself in CGI effects and creates a goofy SF film packed with stunning vistas, psychedelic wonders and enough toys to please all the kiddies in the audience.
Cameron has long been at the forefront of setting new standards for high quality spectacle cinema with films such as The Terminator (1984), Aliens (1986) and Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991) rightly regarded as classics of the science-fiction/action genre.
This antipathy goes back to his first hit, and best film, The Terminator (1984), in which technological progress is equated with death and soulless automatons threaten the extinction of the human race.
This is all well and good in a movie like Aliens , or The Terminator , where we just zip along for the ride, but Avatar thinks itself rather clever, and demands you to think.
It's worth pointing out that there is a group of "Cameron regulars" including Michael Biehn (The Terminator, a deleted cameo in Terminator 2 , Aliens, and The Abyss) and Bill Paxton (The Terminator, Aliens, True Lies, and Titanic), and Avatar reunites him with his Aliens star Sigourney Weaver, proving there are actors who support his directing style (Biehn was considered for the role of Colonel Quaritch, but Cameron felt reuniting Weaver and Biehn would remind viewers too much of Aliens).
Unlike other James Cameron movies such as Aliens (1986), Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991) and True Lies (1994), Avatar just doesn’t have the same rewatchability factor.
They're huge in scale but lack the heft and conviction Cameron gave us in Terminator 1 and 2, Aliens and True Lies.
Cameron is an old-fashioned story-teller, a dealer in myth and archetype, a creator of worlds and none too happy grappling with the complex realities of modern life as he demonstrated in True Lies and Titanic .
Through the last 12 years, I've often deplored how, post-"Titanic", Cameron had gone off making undersea documentaries and developing new filmmaking technologies instead of making other kickass movie-movies like "Aliens" or his Schwarzenegger trilogy ("The Terminator", "Terminator 2: Judgment Day", "True Lies").
Clearly inspired (or perhaps water-logged) from his time spent exploring the ocean depths in "Aliens of the Deep", the many flying, walking and crawling animals on Pandora are beautifully-imagined and not to be trifled with.
Among his activities in the dozen years since Titanic, the director made two underwater documentaries (Ghosts of the Abyss and Aliens of the Deep) that marked him as both an explorer and a conservationist.
Yet after releasing what was (then) the highest grossing film in the world, Cameron seemed content to retire to the sea and potter about with nautical filming techniques on documentaries such as Expedition: Bismarck , Ghosts of the Abyss and Aliens of the Deep .
Without a doubt, this is Cameron’s worst film since Piranha Part Two: The Spawning, and that film may’ve actually had better character development than can be found in the bloated Avatar.
“Avatar” is in the same vein of “Lawrence of Arabia” and “2001: A Space Odyssey.”
This story’s been told before; many have noted the obvious parallels to Dances with Wolves , or not-as-obvious movies like Lawrence of Arabia and Metropolis ; A.O. Scott draws enlightening comparisons to District 9 and Daybreakers , among others.
Mientras que otros realizadores adoran decir que sus películas responden a una tradición monolítica y ultra conservadora símil el promedio de las franquicias de nuestros días o por el contrario, afirman que las mismas salieron de un repollo autocontenido y narcisista sin influencias externas, James Cameron jamás tuvo ningún problema en reconocer que Avatar (2009) funciona como un refrito de influencias, recursos, procesos históricos y latiguillos formales y temáticos de lo más diversos, basta con pensar que así como el film incluye alusiones a la Conquista de América, la Guerra de Vietnam, la Fiebre del Caucho en el Amazonas, las dos Guerras del Golfo y todo el operativo bélico/ represor/ genocida del desquiciado de George W. Bush en Medio Oriente después de los atentados terroristas del 11 de septiembre del 2001, también recupera el motivo del doble agente de las faenas de espionaje, aquel “salvador blanco/ occidental” de Danza con Lobos ( Dances with Wolves , 1990), de Kevin Costner, y L…
There are echoes in this of Cameron’s “Aliens” (Giovanni Ribisi impresses as the corporate lackey who places profit above life), and of such infiltrator-becomes-an-initiate narratives as “A Man Called Horse,” “Dances with Wolves,” and “The Last Samurai.”
Like his professional debut, it's another transposition to outer space of the western, specifically countercultural films like A Man Called Horse , Little Big Man and Dances With Wolves , in which the white heroes cross over into the American Indian world and take the side of the supposedly primitive people against the supposedly civilised invaders.
If you’ve seen “A Man Called Horse” or “Dances With Wolves” there’s no reason for me to tell you where it goes from here...
I don’t know who I am.? Who he is, of course, is a born-again Injun in the mode of the hero of A Man Called Horse.
Still, the Chieftain Eytucan (Wes Studi) and the Shaman Mo'at (C.C.H. Pounder) are willing to give him a shot, so we get the chance to see Jam-Cam's version of A Man Called Horse, Dances With Wolves and Pocahontas as the Jakenator becomes more and more "one of them"!
The plot to "A Man Called Horse" (or, if you like, "Dances With Wolves") thusly prepped, Jake is able to strike out on his own - narrowly avoiding death in the jungles of Pandora thanks to Na'vi tribe member Neytiri (Zoë Saldana), with whom he quite naturally falls in love.
When that flotilla of ships hoves into view, it reminds me of the helicopters in “Apocalypse Now”.
The nonstop action in the movie’s last half-hour or so borrows not only from “Apocalypse Now,” but also from “Aliens.”
Alas, even during an Apocalypse Now -reminiscent vista of environmental destruction, or an airborne attack in which figures leapfrog between the wings of attack helicopters, Avatar , from a purely aesthetic standpoint, too often feels like a more highly polished version of George Lucas’s Star Wars prequels, in that the synthetic nature of the imagery unmoors one from a sense of engaging reality.
Like Robert Duvall in Apocalypse Now , he loves the smell of napalm in the morningâ?¦…
The mining project is overseen by a corporate bigwig and a napalm-loving Colonel right out of Apocalypse Now.
Alas, even during an Apocalypse Now -reminiscent vista of environmental destruction, or an airborne attack in which figures leapfrog between the wings of helicopters, Avatar , from a purely aesthetic standpoint, too often feels like a more polished version of George Lucas’s Star Wars prequels, in that the synthetic nature of the imagery unmoors one from a sense of engaging reality.
As the film’s technical marvels grow commonplace, it will look like a clunky old theme-park attraction, a Captain EO for our time.
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But then again, a shot of one of the Na’vi’s six-legged riding beasts running away from battle engulfed in flames evokes the stumbling horse in the battle scene of Andrei Rublev , and like that film, it raises the question of whether the divisions of pagan nature-worship and more polite creeds might be wrong-headed, with an overall concept of humanity and nature fatally out of balance.
But now that it has finally arrived, all I can say is 'Is that all there is?' I already saw this story earlier this year in a CGI animation called "Battle for Terra" and I certainly didn't experience the sense of awe that I recall upon seeing "Jurassic Park" way back in 1993, even without 3D.
It’s not an uncommon theme in science fiction these days, as the very similarly premised animated feature, Battle for Terra, came out just two years prior.
In terms of story, Avatar is a steroidal hodgepodge of been-there, done-that melodrama and paper-thin present-day allusions that distractingly, unintentionally hew tightly to the plot of Aristomenis Tsirbas’s Battle for Terra from earlier this year.
In terms of story, Avatar is a steroidal hodgepodge of been-there, done-that melodrama and paper-thin present-day allusions that hew tightly to the plot of this past April’s Battle for Terra .
But it’s more than that: Not only is it Star Wars and The Matrix, it’s also John Smith and Pocahontas, Dances With Wolves and Fahrenheit 9/11, Edgar Rice Burroughs and Rider Haggard, Hayao Miyazaki and Jack Kirby, Ferngully: The Last Rainforest and Battle for Terra, Jurassic Park and Aliens.