‘Avatar’ Review + no new graphics, sadly.
I am one week into my second semester, and all my teachers are crazy (eccentric, to the max) and decided it’d be awesome to assign us projects in each class due at the end of January. Oh, and they’re all GROUP projects, and I don’t know anyone in my classes. So I bonded with a bunch of random people and hoped for the best. Basically, what I’m getting at is that I’m not going to be updating as frequently, although I’d love to. I haven’t even been on my photoshop much. I am hoping that I can post some of my writing from class this year, because it’s not FF and it’s all short stories.
As well, I have a movie review for ‘Avatar‘, I saw it…two nights ago. And I posted it on a forum, so I just copy and pasted it so it’s not in my normal ’shotgun’ style. And I might add it to my list eventually, but for now it’s just chillin’. I also have a ‘G.I. Joe‘ one that’s sort-of short that I’ll save for next one.
…Warning: Contains spoilers.
Avatar has made over 1.14 billion dollars worldwide in the box office, which has brought that movie into the number two slot for all-time box office champs. Pushing past Lord of the Rings 2003 Return of the King only (roughly) twenty days old. And it’s safe to say that there’s enough steam left in our worldly population to push this movie to the number one spot.
I’m not much into jumping on bandwagons, and when I heard all of the reviews of Avatar, I was quick to make assumptions that they were all just saying what the rest of the world was telling them. I sought out people who didn’t like the movie, but the only people who had anything negative to say was my sister and my best friend. Now, both of them said it was visually stunning, but the plot was a bit washed up and reminded them of such kids movies like Pochahontas and Ferngully. But then the rest of the viewers I spoke too, a majority of them were male. So naturally, I thought that men were too stupid to see that the movie really isn’t all that great (ie. 300 [the movie]).
Thursday night, I grabbed my 3D glasses and dragged my boyfriend to the cinema to formulate my own opinion, and this is what I can tell you: the reviews don’t lie.
Visually, Avatar was probably worth that 20 billion dollars they spent, and the fifteen years they took to make it. I’m not a big fan of science fiction movies, especially futuristic ‘alien’ ones. But I think the main part about the movie was that it touched base with ideas like District 9 – as in that we see them as another race, and no matter how we try to convince ourselves that we want peace and all that junk, we really don’t. And we are kind of assholes when it comes down to it. All we want is what they have.
Sam Worthington, who you will notice is also from Terminator 3: Salvation, puts on an excellent performance, although most of the time its just his voice in an electronically controlled body. Sigourney Weaver, a veteran on the set, puts on a good show as well. Her part is more so the tree-hugging scientist, but I’ll give her a few sentence-credit for her part. As well, you’ll notice Michelle Rodriguez making an appearance as a gold-hearted pilot who joins the rebellion, but a lot of her lines seem to end up ‘catch-phrase’-like.
The action in this movie is actually really good for a science fiction one. A lot of the weapons are futuristic, and of course you have the aliens riding alien beats, but they act a lot like the natives from Pocahontas – as in they’re deadly with their arrows, but against machines – I think not. And they have a special ‘tree’ as well, to join it to the cartoon aspect.
With mention of Ferngully and Pocahontas, I’m not going to say they ripped off the corny storyline from both of those movies, but its pretty close. There’s the ‘forbidden love’ and then the ultimate destruction of their ‘tree home’ which is also similar in Ferngully. And rather than trees, they are trying to dig up some kind of rock (unobtainium – original, huh?). Really, when you’re watching it, you’ll see the various parallels.
But I am willing to look past that little fact, because honestly, once you sit down in that chair and tune yourself into the movie, you forget about everything else. The movie just pulled you into it, and even when you sit back and think about how corny and how overused some of the characters are, some of the story lines, you never realized it during the movie because it was so intense.
Like District 9 of 2009, Avatar is the must-see of 2010. I give it a 9/10, only because of the ‘borrowed’ script, but otherwise, the execution was perfect. They took a children’s tale and made it grow up with some 3D and quality action scenes.
I don’t care if you don’t like action, science fiction and aliens, Sam Worthington, Ferngully, or even 3D – you have to see it anyway. You may be helping them reach that number one spot, but who really cares anyway?
I’d even go see it again.
9/10.
-taylorr
