The Cinematic Revolution

Today, I finally got around to seeing James Cameron's new film, Avatar. In a nutshell, I can understand why he spent 12 years since Titanic preparing to make this movie, pushing for the development of technology to create a film "unlike anything ever seen before."

Because it's actually a movie that's almost exactly like several things we have seen before.

If you strip away all the technological window dressing of Avatar, the movie itself is an incredibly familiar tale of an advanced people threatening a more primitive culture for its own gain. Our Hero is a character who bridges the gap between the two worlds, learning to identify with the natives and being forever changed by the experience.

James Cameron's take on this story is told capably enough, but not exceptionally. Only a few of the characters in this film pop with the crystal clarity of the people of Aliens, The Abyss, or other Cameron films. The dialogue is at times a bit stilted and false. The allegories are heavy-handed and thrust in the audience's collective face.

Fortunately, then, the film does have its technological achievements to steal the focus away from all this. And make no mistake, the movie is an absolute triumph on that front. What's going on in Avatar cannot rightly be called "motion capture"; it truly is performance capture. The aliens of Avatar look absolutely real; there's never even one moment where they don't seem like completely credible.

And the nuances of each actor come through perfectly. The technique is most apparent when watching Sigourney Weaver's performance. We have 30 years of history watching her in films to have a good sense of how she acts; we also see scenes of the actual Weaver performing in this movie. And when the CG-rendered version of her takes over, it's seamless. When you see her CG character perform, it's her, as real as life, and far better than any six-hour makeup application could have achieved.

In fact, so authentic are the performances captured and rendered by this new technology, that you can easily separate the good actors from the not so good. Along with Sigourney Weaver, you get great turns by Zoe Saldana, CCH Pounder, and others; the rather stiff Sam Worthington often seems outclassed.

But I come back to the same place in the end. The movie looks like a million bucks -- well, hundreds of millions -- because it has to. It truly is a revolution for filmmaking techniques; it offers absolutely nothing new as a piece of storytelling.

My senses are overwhelmed enough that ultimately, I still rate this movie a B+, and give it my recommendation. Really, you must go see this in the theater if you plan to see it at all; to see it at home later will only minimize the impact of the major reason to see it.

But I do get the feeling that the movie will not hold up well in the future. I often feel when I watch a classic movie from decades past that the film doesn't hold up to its esteemed reputation. It was inspiring in its time, but others came along to do better later. I think that in a few decades from now, when other movies have followed in Avatar's footsteps -- its glowing, iridescent footsteps -- Avatar will seem to future generations as over-praised.

Though I do look forward to seeing what might be done with this new advancement next.