Avatar is not that great. It’s not even that good. At best, it’s mediocre in nearly every way.
Except successfulness. I know. That doesn’t even look like a real word.
I like a lot of James Cameron’s films, so I bear him no grudge. Even if I did, I doubt he would care. What bothers me is that the world seems to be drinking the same Kool-Aid I thought was reserved Apple fanatics.
So, let me explain why I think Avatar was only mediocre. The hype surrounding it usually focuses on its visual effects and how next-generation they are, so I’ll start there and continue on to areas where more people are inclined to agree with me such as story.
The visual effects and motion capture.
Leading up to its release, we kept hearing that with its breakthrough computer graphics and use of motion capture, Avatar takes movies to place far beyond where they’ve been before. Really? Avatar was technically very sound, but I didn’t see anything earth-shaking. Did the same people towing that line see The Curious Case of Benjamin Button? Actually, a lot of people did see that film, but maybe they failed to see how revolutionary it was. In the coming years, Button’s impact on filmmaking will go far beyond that of Avatar and nearly any other film in recent history.
(By the way, I’m going to be doing a lot of comparison to Benjamin Button here. Before you go thinking I made that film, worked on it, or have some biased connection to it, let me tell you this. Not only do I have no connection to that movie — other than possibly knowing people that worked on it just like I probably know people that worked on Avatar — I think overall it is a worse film than Avatar. Where Avatar’s story was lame; Button’s was non-existent. The clumsiness of the storytelling — what story there was — was actually painful at times. Where Button’s weaknesses actually caused me to wince many times, Avatar merely induced yawning.)
We have now reached the point that we can cast any actor at any age whether dead or alive. Think about that. Tom Hanks may well continue to “act” in movies for decades, and he can realistically play the love-struck 20-something or world-weary 40-something. Heck. He can be both in the same movie. Sure, he’s sort of already done that in The Polar Express, but the walking zombies that inhabit those Zemeckis films can’t hold a railroad lantern to the technology that was Brad Pitt’s tour d’decades in Benjamin Button. Whoever is the hottest starlet today can continue to be as hot for decades. Had it been around forty years ago, the application of technology in Button would mean Scarlett Johansson would be competing with Marilyn Monroe for parts in movies.
Nothing in Avatar had not already been done. The level of motion capture was on par with Peter Jackson’s King Kong. Detailed facial capture was used there and in Button. The technology may make it easier but there were no major leaps.
The rendering of this captured data into believable, three-dimensional form was also achieved in these prior films. Maybe Avatar added a little more sweat and a few pores, but it hardly shifted the playing field.
Furthermore, we all knew which were the CG critters and real-word people in Avatar. But in Button? The only way we knew it wasn’t a flesh-and-blood Brad Pitt on screen was that we knew he was in forties and the character on screen was in his twenties, or eighties, or an infant. Okay. Maybe the eyes weren’t quite right some places, but that will be fixed through refinement in the coming years. The breakthrough was Button and not Avatar. Besides, any visual effects artist will have to admit, it’s easier to render convincing versions of creatures that don’t exist (such as Na’vi and the animals on their planet), because we have no real-world basis of reference. But, to create a human — a creature with which we have the most intimate familiarity — and to pull it off? That is great visual effects.
The 3-D.
3-D like we’ve never seen before. Or something like that. Even now, industry insiders talk about how Avatar has changed 3-D. It’s true. It has. I just don’t know why.
Three dimensional films have been around for decades and decades. 3-D still images date back to the mid-1800s. Movies to the 1950s. Sure, it was done well in Avatar, but again, it was hardly breakthrough.
I think there is some confusion in non-technical circles about how difficult it was to achieve 3-D in Avatar. Most of the movie is created in a computer. For the past decade or so, nearly all computer generated film visual effects are rendered in 3-D. This means the objects exist in a three-dimensional space and are themselves defined three-dimensionally. (And if we count time, which is a dimension and present in movies but not in stills, objects are actually four-dimensional.)
At the final step of putting that CG image to film or video, it is reduced to two-dimensions, but it could just as easily be made into three-dimensions if it were intended to be shown that way. Until recently, there were almost no three-dimensional films, so there was no reason to record it to media in 3-D. But the information allowing it to be done was already there.
In 2009, the computer graphics company NVIDIA came out with a hardware/software kit called Geforce 3D Vision that turns almost any computer game into a 3-D experience. This is done without changing the game and it works most of the time. It can do this because just like most movie visual effects, video games are rendered in three dimensions. They are (usually) only displayed in two dimensions. The three-dimensional information exists in the computer just as the 3-D visual effects information exists for most movies. The visual effects talent behind Avatar had to do relatively little to change their workload and flow to create 3-D elements. And since most of the movie is nearly 100% computer graphics, the only change to render these out to 3-D for presentation was two passes instead of one. A lot more work for the computers; not a lot more work for the designers.
I’m not saying Avatar didn’t look good nor that a heck of a lot of talent and hard work was behind it. I’m saying to make a CG film 3-D takes little more creative work than to making it 2-D.
As for the live action sections of the film, which integrated visual effects into the scene, there may have been a little more complexity here, but not as much as some might be lead to believe. Again, to make solid visual effects these days, you must map the 3-D computer graphics elements into the practical space where actual actors and set pieces are shot. So, that work is done pretty much the same for both 2-D and 3-D films. You can get away with more sloppiness in a 2-D film, to be sure, so some extra care and work would have be done in a 3-D movie.
So, did the 3-D look good in Avatar? Yes. But it was also fine in Jaws 3-D (1983), Wing of Courage (1995), Spy Kids 3-D: Game Over (2003), and My Bloody Valentine (2009) among others. (Actually, I thought it wasn’t so hot in Spy Kids, but I saw it with those awful red-green glasses.)
The story.
While I may be lonely in criticizing the films CG and promoting more realistic perspective regarding Avatar’s 3-D, I start getting a bit more company when it comes to the story. So, I won’t spend a lot of time here.
Cameron peaked with Terminator 2: Judgment Day, a complex story in terms of faithfulness to his own original film and where he was able to go with that. Avatar, as many have pointed out, can be seen as derivative of Disney’s Pocahontas, Kevin Costner’s Dances with Wolves, and numerous other films. That doesn’t bother me. Almost any film can be claimed derivative of some other film or story. That’s okay, as long as they do it well. Avatar does not.
There are a lot of ways in which Avatar stumbles story-wise. The most glaring is its lack of subtlety.
Avatar’s subtlety smacks you in the face and then rubs Pandoran dirt in it (which we all know is much better than earth dirt). I get it. Native Americans – oops I mean Na’vi — are good. Nature is good. Man is bad unless he loves nature and hates progress. Government, corporations, and the military are really bad.
To anyone who thinks the writing in Avatar is clever, I have one word: unobtanium. Really? Years writing this script, and that’s the best name you can come up with for the rare stuff the bad guys are after. Never mind not letting us know why they want it so badly.
And Pandora as the name of the planet. Gee, what box of trouble have we opened up by going there?
The local folk on the planet are the Na’vi. Hmm. Na’vi. Apostrophes sometimes denote left out letters. Maybe it’s short for native with a little dyslexia thrown in?
I’m surprised Cameron didn’t go all the way and make them green. I guess even he has limits on how many ways to hit us over the head with something.
And other stuff.
There’s lots of other little things to attack in the film, but I risk making this essay overly long (kinda like Avatar). In the end, can millions of people and billions of dollars (yes, more than one billion) be wrong?
Look, I think moviemaking is first and foremost about entertainment. Not art. Not message. I don’t mind when basic films with simple stories do well. I just think those films need be recognized as such as not elevated above their plain. Avatar is an extremely basic film with an extremely simple story. Its visual effects are on par with any major studio and many independent films. Its 3-D is also no better. It’s not bad; it’s just not all that great.
Except in terms of successfulness.
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