Avatar is a mix of many movies we’ve seen before, with the strong influence of moments from The Emerald Forest, Dances with Wolves, Tarzan, The New World and even the dreamy and twinkling soft focus scenes from Legend. Beginning with the approach to Pandora, a moon of a huge Jupiter-like gas planet, we get a sense of how visuals have improved since Star Wars.
Avatar refines these scenes and stories with a new generation of visual magic that so trumps everything we’ve seen to date, that even fantasy and sci-fi movies such as Jurassic Park now seem crude. The term special effects is not relevant here, as this entire movie is one seamless visual feast . . . luminescent jungles, VTOL gunships that are surely the maneuverable envy of all Osprey pilots, floating mountains and fabulous reptilian creatures that have actual emotions.
So prevalent is this perfection of a visual environment that you will never again see the words special effects in any future reviews of mine. With the advent of Avatar, that term, as far as I am concerned, is now archaic.
Cryogenic hiberation, though, remains about the same that we saw in 2010 (the 1984 sequel to 2001: Space Odyssey) . . . being sealed in a coffin-like chest until a fellow crew member revives the dormant persons and brings them up to speed on what’s happened during the long journey through space.
Parts of the storyline are very similar to Aliens, the equally scary sequel to Alien. Once again, Sigourney Weaver has a tense relationship with the gung-ho military ops commander, Colonel Miles Quaritch (played by the pumped-up Stephen Lang, recent of Gods and Generals, in which he played the totally different Stonewall Jackson), and her other foil, the civilian “company” hack, who mirrors the devious Burke from Aliens. Weaver seems destined to play characters who are heavily involved with different life forms (Alien(s) and Gorillas in the Mist), and though she is caught acting at the beginning of this film, toward the end, Weaver loses the stiff warp and finds her better weft.
One friend who urged me to see this film noted that “it will change everything.” While I don’t think it will change my underwear, I know exactly what he means. What I hope is that it will change people’s perception of invading other cultures and raining terror down upon them. That’s what I got from this movie — a very clear allegory for what is happening right here in our own world, and a good long look at the kind of people running the shock and awe show.
I only go to movies I think I will enjoy, and I have only gotten to see only a handful of movies in 2009, but even with that limited exposure, I cannot imagine any other motion picture being named Best Picture of the Year.
See also my review of The Young Victoria
-- Thomas Ormsby
twitter.com/ormsby_thomas
