Visually absorbing 'Avatar' takes technology to new heights

Posted December 16, 2009 10:00 pm

Dann Gire

James Cameron's science-fiction adventure "Avatar" runs for an insanely long two hours and 43 minutes, yet, there's not a single slack moment in it.

This feature has been edited down to the narrative nubs.

That's not all.

"Avatar" is also a visually dense 3-D feast stuffed with lots and lots of stuff, and then more stuff. It throws so many elements into a scene that it's impossible to observe and absorb all the fascinating touches and intricate details in a single viewing.

Ever since Cameron announced his $300 million production of "Avatar" - based on an idea he reportedly developed 15 years ago - the movie world has been waiting with cautious hope that it would be a worthy follow-up to his last critical and commercial smash, 1997's "Titanic."

It certainly is, And then some.

"Avatar" is an action film, an intergalactic Romeo & Juliet romance, a pro-Green Movement movie and a fiercely anti-imperialistic essay all wrapped into a state-of-the-art special effects experience. It contains its own original alien language, too.

Cameron's bold and risky venture represents a historic achievement in movie animation.

It's not exactly on the same level as Walt Disney's groundbreaking "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs," but after 19 years, "Avatar" finally fulfills the primitive promise of "Jumanji" that computer-generated characters interacting with regular human performers would be the way of cinema's future.

Set in the year 2154, "Avatar" tells the apocalyptic tale of a world, ours, in desperate need of a mineral found in abundance on the planet Pandora, home of a tailed, lizardlike species of humanoids called the Na'vi.

An Earth Marine named Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) has been permanently crippled in battle. But, in a clever premise, his genetic code enables him to step into the figurative shoes of his recently deceased twin brother, being prepped as an Avatar, a synthetically created Na'vi warrior body operated by human electromagnetic brain waves.

Now, Jake can live as a fully functional Na'vi, along with another Avatar, Grace (Sigourney Weaver), inhabited by a humanistic, chain-smoking scientist.

Jake almost dies during his first dangerous night alone on Pandora. He is saved by a catlike Na'vi warrior named Neytiri (Zoe Saldana), who realizes he's not one of her tribe, and takes an instant dislike to the foreigner.

When diplomacy fails and the Na'vi refuse to relinquish their most sacred, mineral-rich sites to the desperate humans, Marine Colonel Quaritch (a muscled-up Stephen Lang) calls on Jake, now a trusted member of the Na'vi, to supply intel to destroy them from within.

Of course, the colonel doesn't know that Jake has fallen in love with Neytiri and gone native. He stands with the spiritual, primitive Na'vi.

Cameron is not as good a writer as he is a director and technician, and "Avatar" attests to this with some brittle, functional dialogue, a simplistically mounted evil-vs-good story and a climactic fight sequence that goes just a little environmentally wacky.

Nonetheless, "Avatar" soars as an action film to end all action films, an epic with animated characters so realistically rendered that we forget they are mere pixels, and become swept up in Cameron's tense and moving tale of a future where the past is, sadly, repeated once more.

Article Comments

Article Categories
Entertainment Lifestyle Movies

Article Comments

Guidelines: Keep it civil and on topic; no profanity, vulgarity, slurs or personal attacks. People who harass others or joke about tragedies will be blocked. If a comment violates these standards or our terms of service, click the "flag" link in the lower-right corner of the comment box. To find our more, read our FAQ.