Monday

Avatar is going to take more than one post. As the cliché goes, it's not so much a film as an experience. For today, I'll try to review the film for those of you who haven't seen it. Roger Ebert has famously compared it to when he first saw Star Wars, and for me Avatar has certainly been what I imagined being alive in 1977 was like. I'll still prefer Star Wars, but I wouldn't be surprised if there was a whole generation for whom Avatar was their favourite film. I'd never seen a 3-D film before, which might explain some of my awe, but I believe Avatar goes further than any other such project has. There's no way to describe it other than to say 'it feels like you're there'. I was gasping in astonishment for about the first five minutes. After a while, you actually get used to it to such an extent that you're deeply disappointed when you see a normal film later. Criticisms that point to the similarity of plot to other films (Dances with Wolves, Pocahontus, FernGully) miss the point. You won't have seen anything like Avatar. Moreover you don't go to Avatar to see great character development, intense personal drama, and scintillating dialogue. You go for the experience, to be overwhelmed, which undoubtedly you will be. Is the dialogue in Star Wars great? Is the storyline all that original? You have to go to the film with the correct expectations. This is an incredibly beautiful movie (which is part of the point of the narrative), which takes itself seriously (I say this as a good thing). I was a little disappointed by the score. James Horner seems to have stolen melodies from his previous scores to Titanic, Aliens and Star Trek. Plus the Leona Lewis song is awful. Nevertheless, if you are at all interested in the cinema you have to see this movie, definitely in 3-D, and preferably in IMAX. To compound the comparisons to Star Wars, there's already talk of sequels.