Avatar

If James Cameron were to take his new film Avatar back in time about 30 years and show it to a late 70s audience, it would probably be easier to convince them that in the future we had actually colonized alien planets and had sent a film crew there than it would be to explain how CGI works. When the height of computer graphics is an Atari 2600, Avatar must truly seem like it comes from another planet. I really can't say a thing to fault the technical aspects of Avatar. Every second that one of Cameron's Na'vi are on the screen you sit there mesmerized at a creature that really shouldn't exist in such rich detail and natural movement. I can't even begin to imagine how many man hours of motion capture, modeling, texturing, lighting and compositing went into this film.

Let's consider how far we've come in the last decade. 2001's "Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within" purported itself to be the pinnacle of CGI at the time. They even went so far as to create the first "virtual actress" in Dr. Aki Ross, a character model that they thought was so fully realized that they expected to re-use her in future films. As it turns out, she wasn't much of a commodity. Appearing in a bikini in Maxim was the height of her post-film career. It wasn't too long before high school kids with a souped up computer and a pirated copy of Poser were creating their own virtual women, once again proving that any new technology will be co-opted to satisfy our basest needs. As far as Final Fantasy revolutionizing filmmaking - well, the trend didn't really catch on with movie-goers but it did influence storytelling within the video game industry. Even today's mediocre games have fully rendered cut scenes that surpass what Final Fantasy delivered in 2001.

The Star Wars prequels attempted to carry the virtual torch into a new millennium, but despite the technical wizardry ILM had pioneered in the previous decades they weren't able to create believable virtual worlds. The effects in the Star Wars prequels often felt clunky and distracting and made me yearn for the days of puppets and matte paintings.

Robert Zemeckis' people have made some pretty significant advances in virtual characters but I still find the idea to be very unsettling. The fake children and psuedo Tom Hanks of The Polar Express really creep me out. Beowulf further upped the visual ante but I find that the women characters in that film, largely due to being idealized versions created by men, seem to have all the expressiveness of sex dolls.

James Cameron takes one big leap over the Uncanny Valley by simply choosing not to recreate human characters with CGI. If something feels a little alien to you, well, its because they are aliens. Overall, Avatar is technically flawless.

The art direction here is splendid. This film must be a creative person's dream to work on. The world of Pandora is incredibly beautiful and for a couple hours we don't mind taking a tour of it. It really does feel new and fresh and always a joy to look at.

So why am I spending so much time talking about the visuals? Because that's pretty much the only significant aspect of this movie. The plot is very simple. The film is about 2 hours and 40 minutes long but you could easily summarize the whole story in a few sentences. It doesn't challenge the way you think about anything and there is really no subtext to analyze. Spoiler alert! Pocahontas and Dances with Wolves lead the Ewoks to victory over the evil Empire, the Iraqis get to keep their oil and everyone lives happily ever after in Smurfland. Everything plays out exactly as you would expect it to and every plot point is telegraphed way in advance. There is really no tension or drama here and by the end of the film you'll start to get bored by the extended action scene that Cameron probably designed to top every other action sequence in any movie ever. And the action is pretty thrilling and refreshingly comprehensible (I'm looking at you Michael Bay) but ultimately never quite pulled me in to the point that I cared what happened next or gave me any sense that the unexpected could actually happen. It's all by the numbers and we've seen it all before.

There was a brief moment where our hero Jake, in an awkward voice-over, mentions life in his Avatar body seems to be reality while his real life has started to feel like a dream. When I initially heard about the concept of Avatar I was hoping the film would explore this theme more in depth. Given our society's penchant for disappearing into MMORPGs like World of Warcraft or Second Life, it would seem like a theme worth exploring and certainly more of an interesting focus than the hundredth anti-occupation film since the Iraq war started. Avatar really glosses over that MMO gamer aspect (although it is very glossy).

I seem to remember a time when action films were built around human beings and occasionally punctuated with special effects. These days the films are built on special effects and occasionally punctuated with people. As amazing as the CGI effects are there is still a need to connect with the characters and Avatar sometimes makes it hard to do that. There were times when I knew I was supposed to be feeling emotion but I just couldn't muster a tear because deep down I knew I was missing that human connection. So as far as we have come on a technical level, we're not quite there yet.

Avatar has been the source of a lot of talk and speculation in the months leading up to its release. People would ask me what I thought about it and I didn't have much to say. Given that James Cameron is responsible for one of my favorite films, Terminator 2, and one of the biggest cinematic turds in recent memory, Titanic, it was hard for me to form any kind of opinion. And now that I have seen the film I find that my view of it is pretty much as it was before. I'm still kind of indifferent.