Avatar (2009)
I must have seen this three or four times at the cinema in 3D and on the biggest screens I could find. Then watched it a few more times on blu-ray, to the point where I maybe wore it out because I don't think I've re-watched
'Avatar' in the last 10-years. Since then it seems to have had a few critical maulings and had the
"Dances with Smurfs" p*ss takes, so I wasn't sure what to expect on seeing it again. I opted to revisit the nearly 3-hour "Collector's Extended Cut" because if I'm going back to Pandora, I want to see it all!
Well, I loved it all over again. The motion-capture performances still hold up, mostly to the point where your brain just excepts them as flesh and blood 10-ft blue aliens. The wondrous phosphorescent Pandora landscapes and creatures are still magical. All the human battle tech is so cool, including the robot suits, those awesome double-rotor gunships and that colossal helicopter-war-cruiser thing looks truly formidable. The shots of the Na'vi swooping around on the Ikran dragon/butterfly creatures are exhilarating. The imagined world is so vast and rich. One shot really stood out for it's scale, where the Na'vi Ikran riders are looking down from floating mountains, on to the humans in their aircraft miles below, as they in turn look down on the jungle floor miles below them. The mechanics of how the Avatar system works is fascinating, it's advantages, it's drawbacks. I love the scene where the giant Neytiri is cradling the tiny dying human body of Jake, it's a powerful image. When he comes back round they look into each others real eyes for the first time and instead of Neytiri being distracted by seeing his true form, she instantly recognises the same person she loves inside.
Some of the dialogue can be a bit clunky at times, of the
"I got this" variety.
James Horner's score has some nice moments, the sad brass theme, the dramatic music during the ending battle but it lacks a really memorable main theme to tie everything together. I was imagining how much stronger some of the scenes revealing the wonder of Pandora would work with something on the level of
John Williams' 'Jurassic Park', or Horner's own
'Titanic' playing instead.
Stephen Lang's merciless Colonel Quaritch has been criticised for being one-dimensional but I think it's because we are setup to expect him and Grace to be the devil and angel on Jake's shoulders. He's initially friendly with Jake, while Jake has an antagonistic relationship with Grace, which is reversed early on. As soon as Jake has his first experience among the Na'vi, there is never any question where his sympathies lie. Almost all the characters except Quaritch change and grow, from a point of distrust and open dislike (the evolving relationship between Jake and Grace is particularly well handled) but he is an unmoveable rock. He's almost a fearless anti-hero, like in the scene where Trudy steals a helicopter and he instantly acts, sucks in a big lung full of air and strides out into the poisonous Pandora atmosphere and tries to shoot her down, before anybody else's brains have even switched on. Or when he's calmly suiting up in the robot armour, while his arm is on fire and the ship he is on is going down, then jumps out and nonchalantly walks out of the fireball. He's one-dimensional but God is he a compelling antagonist.
Now I'm super excited to see
James Cameron's forthcoming sequels (pencilled in for December 2022), I want to see more of this amazing world he created.
I'm not sure if this has been upscaled to 4K, or if 'Avatar' has a 4K release somewhere but this scene look stunning. The lighting on Neytiri's face looks so real:
Capturing Avatar (2010)
This feature-length documentary from the
'Avatar' blu-ray is a nice companion piece. It's clear from their enthusiastic faces how passionate Director
James Cameron and Producer
Jon Landau were about the project. Most of the focus is on the years of preparation and experimentation which was done to take performance capture to the level Cameron needed to translate the full range of his actor's emotions but I'd have liked more about other aspects of the production. For example, it shows very cool behind the scenes footage of them "landing" the full size helicopter props via cranes, with huge wind machines simulating the downwash, in a way that feels very real, even when you can see it's on a green-screen stage but there is nothing on how the team at Weta crafted all these props.