In Avatar, director James Cameron takes the war against the modern viewer’s attention span nuclear. Can Internet and cable television compete with 3-D exploding dragons and a nauseatingly detailed alien jungle? The answer is no (or not yet). Avatar is the most visually overwhelming film of all time. Unfortunately, it succeeds in being a movie event without overly worrying about being a movie.
In the first 90 minutes of the film, Cameron unveils a sci-fi landscape unlike any in film history. The planet of Pandora and the space stations around it are vibrant and detailed to the point of being manic. Rather than create mis-en-scene that suggests a place and reality, the special effects artists of Avatar have created a world that has seemingly more detail than the real world.
My main concern coming into the 6:00pm showing was that I would be expected to follow long periods of plot containing only the CGI blue people. See, the cold artificiality of computer graphics usually distract me from the story, which is not good. The graphics in Avatar are step up, allowing for close-ups that track realistic human emotion on fake blue faces. Instead of being distracting by the fakeness, however, the über-reality upstages any “acting” (I was particularly drawn to Sigourney Weaver’s avatar’s teeth, which are radiant and individually distinct).
The story works well enough in the first part of the film (though why the wise blue people would allow a self-admitted spy into their community is never addressed). Sam Worthington plays a crippled marine who gets run again courtesy of an advanced science project paid for by an obviously evil corporation. The storytelling breaks down after two hours, however. Cameron can not resist a narrative third trip to the buffet that dilutes the pure thrills of the first act.
So the last major world cultural event of this decade is full of visual pyrotechnics but proves bloated and somewhat hollow? Sounds about right.
