Of all the marketing gimmicks out there, “The Disney Vault” has to be one of the more ridiculous.
Ordered a new computer. Anyone want a stalwart if occasionally crashy G5 with a rich history in show business?
I was going through some draft posts that I never published, and I had one that was bagging on District 9 before I saw it. I never put it up, and once I did see it, nothing I had to say seemed relevant. It’s a superb film.
On the other hand, I have been bagging on Avatar before I saw it and I can tell you I was absolutely right to. Let’s talk about what works:
The visual effects are excellent. The action has very well choreographed, the camera angles are smart. The vehicle design and computer readouts are thoughtful and clever.
Zoe Saldana’s character is completely realized. For her (but really for her character alone, I’m sorry to say) the illusion much of the time was complete, and it felt like I was watching her in makeup, as opposed to a CGI character based on her.
The sound is awesome, great mix with the music, and very dynamic.
The 3D is artfully done, the best I think I’ve ever seen.
Alas…
All of this million dollar hardware is in the service of a story that makes no sense. The third act is a complete accident. (SPOILER ALERT) The turn at the end of act 2 when Michelle Rodriguez springs our heroes from the brig is almost insulting in its implausibility. Also, the eventuality that the Na’vi would have a means to permanently transplant our protagonist to his new body is shocking in its convenience. The existence of the “Mutara Nebula”/magic-place-where-radar-doesn’t-work is similarly convenient, but more excusable. (END SPOLIER)
I don’t think at any point I believed Pandora actually existed. The sets were very fake, the luminous quality of everything seemed very overrought. I’m still waiting for the film where they create a forest planet out of thin air and it feels as real as forest moon of Endor. This film, like Beowulf and the new Star Wars films, utterly lacks texture, grit. You can’t smell it.
The Na’vi have to be one of the most revolting bundles of aboriginal clichés captured on film, this side of Fess Parker’s Davy Crockett. They make Iron Eyes Cody’s Chief St. Cloud in Ernest Goes To Camp look solemn and respectful.
The so-called Important Message of the film is ham-handed and self-satisfied, and as with much else here, seems to be designed to insult the audience’s intelligence, and actively alienate people. The movie made me want to cut down a tree out of spite.
The fucking Maguffin is called “unobtainium.”
All of this seems to indicate that, while James Cameron is a great filmmaker, he seems, like so many of our über-directors lately, to have internalized his contempt for movie audiences. He just thinks we’re dumb. And you know what, I paid $10 to see it, so I guess I’m the greater fool.
I guess I’m going to hell for writing this.
I think this movie gets an unfair rap on account of the fact that it just doesn’t compare to the first film, but it’s not a very logical comparison. The first film is a head trip and basically a very, very expensive art house film, and 2010 is a Hard SF film, which is actually just as rare, but a very different quantity.
But it ain’t a Kubrick film. It’s natural that Hyams would direct it this way, after his equally very accomplished Hard SF film Outland, and to be honest, the feel of 2010 seems much closer to the spirit of Arthur C. Clarke’s writing. If Morgan Freeman ever gets around to doing Rendezvous with Rama or someone ever does Imperial Earth, they’re going to look much more like this film than 2001.
The David Shire has not weathered the years very well. It’s also remarkable that all of the computer screens in the original 2001 were depicted as flat panels, and in this film they were systematically replaced all of the flat panel rear-projection screens with CRTs, which must have seemed au courant at the time, or at least much easier to photograph. I also suspect Kubrick would not have approved of any of the detail work on these new sets — on the Leonov, Cyrillic letters are just sorta randomly splattered all over every surface, and on the Discovery, you can see the brush strokes on HAL’s control panel.
I wish there was a Lightroom/Aperture type program for sound files. Something that did approximately what Audacity or Peak does, but with integrated library, workflows and good metadata management.
