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Avatar
2009, PG-13)
This is a wakeup call to all humanity & its leaders & authorities to arouse from its present delusional dreamstate trajectory of unsustainable ecocide & environmental racism in time to avert the sucidal extinction of the very source of our mother Gaia's whole presence of all the life whithin us.
"What have you been smoking? They're just trees for godsakes!"
Whatever you do, do not fall for idea that this is just a borrowed story from elsewhere even if some of the essential story elements bare an abstract recognisability as the genera shared by history itself as well as many of its stories & legends from time immemorial. Instinctual metaphorical archetypal parable patterning etched deep into the collective unconscious of our racial memory through which we commonly percieve all reality is unavoidably echoed forth in this exceptionally unique & thoroughly original retelling of it. AND - it tells it better than its ever been told before. PERIOD. I switched immediately to Dances With Wolves after this & the contrast couldn't be more starkly dramatic. In no way could they be interchangably recognizable as each other. They're so different from each other, its like landing in a completely different unverse. And; if Dances coincidently shares some abstractly common narrative elements with Avatar & is also an uncommonly good movie as compared to the average retelling of that ancient archetypal universal recounting of the initial contact made by civilization's expansive encroachment then Avatar is just that much better than Dances & then some. The same goes for Pocahontus, Ferngully, Last of the Mohicans, Tarzan, Princess Mononoke, The Mission, At Play in the Fields of the Lord, Emerald Forest, Mutiny on the Bounty, Silent Running etc etc. et al! And beyound that, the avatar element is utilized unlike any other movie, from Matrix to Tron to Surrogates, to just as much of a unique & thoroughly superior effect as the shared narrative themes of 'going native & turning on civilization'. But, the two thoroughly integrating into a seamlessly whole story? Never yet in any convincing way that I can recall with the sole possible exception of Matrix Revolutions. And this avatar dynamic was much more clearly & simply shown than Revolution's/Neo's convoluting peace agreement with the matrix machine's opsys/sysop.
What superlative could be applied to this movie that hasn't been overused already? It is quite simply the most important event in the history of cinema & beyound that one of the most important cultural events in human technical evolution into a fully immersive 3D media environment of augmented reality toward that Matrix Rubicon that we shall have to control before it controls us. After selling 90% of its advance tickets to 3D showings, an analyst for Exibitor Relations wrote: "The Holy Grail of 3D has finally arrived. This is The One: the behemoth." 3D was $1.3b of N Am box in 2009. 3X's 2008. 10% of 9's take. That geometry has accelerated wayway beyound that this year into looking like what sound did to silents & color did to B&W this whole half-centry + since its novelty introduction with Creature From the Black Lagoon.
As a matter of scale, the making of this film was a whole industry unto itself. More than 2,000 people including the most advanced minds in animation, cinematography, computation, art, design, biology, anthropology, linguistics & on & on collaborated in the most monumental achievement of entertainment history. Nothing before has ever come close to this. Especially all the never-before-seen innovations applied to totally original effect & novelty of purpose. Breakthroughs that are already being offered to meet many existing global concerns including usefull offers of unique value in confronting the BP oil spill that was btw turned down by the Selfridge like character running that mindless profit enterprise.The 3D Fusion Camera System has at last been perfected by James Cameron & Vince Pace & will be incorporated into many industrial, medical & educational purposes farfar beyound its transformation of all media & entertainment. The nearly absolute perfection of CGI augmented reality & motion capture leaves the barrier of the uncanny valley problem to that past history of being too real & not real enough at the same time. This time, it was truly indistinguisable. It's all real! This changes gaming & virtual reality profoundly & immediately into one big powerful game engine of transformer/mutation on demand of living miniatures to any size. This production was 3/5 CGI & 2/5 live with miniatures. And I defy anybody to clearly tell which was which. 31 days in the Hughes Hanger at 6X the volume ever used for motion capture, for the newly perfected PERFORMANCE capture that ADDED meaning, expression & nuance to the live actor's avatar driving of a first time ever virtual camera system. Zoe Saldana's Ney'tiri was a riveting amplification of a lightly flowing into intensely gripping naturalism that could never be achieved by any other existing techniques. Over 31 days of live action shooting in Wellington at Stone Street Studios with a 1000 cast & crew. 900 Weta Digital animators working day & night, week in & week out. 4,000 servers with 35,000 processor cores running ubuntu linux + grid engine cluster manager with over a petabyte of 17 gigabytes per minute of memory constituting one of the very biggest supercomputers in the world going around the clock for months on end makes this the supergaint megalith monster of all CGI & animation. The Leviation of its generation. Total cost: officially $237m ; unofficially 280 to 310m ; rumors range as high as 390m. "Whoo! that's alot a' cheddar!" Box: $2 3/4b. That's with a b, son. Its first day on Bluray it tripled the previous 600k record of Dark Knight. An unbelievable 20m in 3 wks. Its not abating. Its not a flash. Its got long legs into the forseeable future of its probable dominance and as the standard for all big budget comparisons. Its bigness a decisive factor in the quality of it's & many successor's experience for the audience. Like it or not. So get used to it.
James Cameron is now indisputably the King of the World greatest director/producer of all time. Only Peter Jackson comes anywhere close IMO with LOTR & King Kong etc. Add in Abyss director's cut (Which you didn't really see unless you've seen that version with the downright prophetic tsuname warning that we have to learn to share the earth with each other as well as all life on it & with those beyound also here in ways & by means completely beyound our comprehensibility), Terminators & Aliens to name a few. And; Titanic, which I could never figure out why everybody liked, unlike this, which is definitely in my top 10 favorites of all time. Altogether, one who knows more than any other how to tell the biggest audience the best stories with a strong message & moral. Jon Landau is almost as legendary as the perfect sidekick of this dynamic duo of production excellence. It is more than understatement that Mauro Fiore's cinematography was beyound Oscar winning. It sucked you right in and made you feel a belonging to the midst of it all in all its naturally seeming awe & wonder. The battle sequences were sheer poetry of graceful elegence in exacting clarity of confluence. I don't know who else won for art direction & visual effects which could not possibly be denied for how totally they blew away any & all competition in that reguard. That it didn't get best picture & director is an outrage & an embarrassment. " I See You " sung by Leona Lewis is transportingly haunting & touching. Vividly endearing itself as the tag that firmly pins this movie to the back of the mind. James Horner's background score goes from pulsingly primal with lots of tipanies to majestically graceful to rapturously soring when the voice chior kicks in at just the right emotional pitch & timing. Elegantly moving us seamlessly through every mood. Nothing in the sound seemed studio or dubbed although background might have on occasions been a lttle too foreground & there was sometimes a slight hollowness in the extreme crispness of its clarity & definition. Beyound Weta, there seemed to be some involvement by practically every studio in the history of CGI. Lightstorm, Dune, Cameron's own Ingenious Film Partners, Industrial Light & Magic (battles/explosions/vehicles) were just the main production studios. Weighing in at a very brief concise wallopingly packed 162 minute flow of motion that only slows down for just few minutes in the middle to show the transformation in the protagonist's character & attitude as he reflects in his log on the meaning of what Ney'tiri is trying to teach him. All in all, a very intimate textual detailing with deep dawning emotion for a pageant of such vast spectacle of epic proportion.
WARNING >>> SPOILER ALERT >>> WARNING >>> SPOILER ALERT >>> DO NOT READ BEYOUND THIS POINT UNLESS YOU LIKE SPOILERS AS MUCH AS I DO (IN THE UNLIKELY CHANCE THAT YOU DON'T KNOW THIS MOVIE BY HEART ALREADY) (spoiler police not allowed)
Sam Worthington, called from the retiring ignimony of his car's sumptuous quarters, gives a powerfully unasuming performance as Jake Sully, the "jarhead dropout", whose life had "big hole shot through it" leaving him parapalegically paralized from the waist down with an economy & 'government' too cheap & callous in its gratitude to his service to cover the stem cell nuero-regeneration surgery that would fully restore his legs. Discovered just in time in the alley sprawled out from his latest bar brawl, beating up with his arms alone a girlfriend-brutalizing-bully, by RDA agents to tell him his twin brother's dead & that he's a perfect match to replace him in the next few days on an important mission with extremely generous pay to Pandora, a mere 6 years in cryosuspension away, "which feels more like a fifth of Tequila & an ass-kicking" & no more than that by the end of it. There, he becomes an avatar driver remotely controlling through psionic mind meld a human/Na'vi hybrid body that being half 12-foot-native humanoid makes an especially adaptive explorer of the toxic hostile environment. As Avatar Program security escort, he would be perfectly situated to spy on the Na'vi & scarf all usefull Program data, then with it report back to Col. Quaritch, security chief, & Parker Selfridge his boss, the Administrator for Resources Development Agency's unobtainium mining operations for the whole planet, which sells for $20m a kilo because of its high temperature superconducting properties making it vital to solving earth's energy & resource crises. According to Avatar Program Director, Dr. Grace Agustine, they're there to discover the wonderous secrets of this planet's whole amazing biosphere & how it forms its own worldmind neuronet & the Na'vi's total physical connectedness to all that & through that to the other animals & plants as well. To Selfridge & Quaritch their only Avatar Program purpose is to "... gain these savages trust. Learn their vulnerabilities... learn how to force their cooperation or hit them hard if we can't..." Well, he wonders off on his first field assignment & is chased by some fierce fauna into the unwilling arms of the Na'vi Omaticaya Clan living unwittingly, in their ancient village-containing giant (460 meters) Hometree, sitting on top the richest cache of unobtainium for many hundreds of miles around. They'd have just killed him as a dreamwalker demon in false body trespassing hostile intruder if not for the divine intervention of a sign from Eyewa (the whole binding bioenergy system of Pandora & its collective experience through the signal transduction of chemical transmitters between all the roots of all the trees on into the plants & through queues on most animals & bioluminesent streaming down willow like branches from the Trees of Voices (of their ancesters) & its most sacred central node, The Sacred Tree of Souls/Mother Tree & some other trees as well, all accessible through the tendril jubilee queue thickly braided around with a sturdy length of hair from out the back of the Na'vi's head & falling down past their waist). Woodsprites atokirina from The Sacred Tree of Souls, who are very pure spirits, clustered all over Jakesully like a molting cottonwood on a felt dress. Very unusual. He must be shown to Mo'at (CCH Pounder), Tsahik of the Omaticaya who interprets the will of Eyewa. It's decided, in light of this sign, & Jake's ready admission as warrior of the Jarhead Clan, in consultation with Eytukan (Wes Studi) Oto'eyctan chief of Clan, that this first warrior dreamwalker they've encoutered must be studied & taught to become one of them to also see "if his sicknessss can be cured". And that's not being judgemental or distainful either. Its being downright psychic actually. So he learns their ways while ratting back to Col.Quaritch on through most of the 90 day deadline till the dozers arrive becoming an official clan hunter/warrior taronyu by tsahaylu neurobonding to a wild mountain banshee ikran into his tamed iknimaya private pet for life to fly around on. Ney'tiri as the daughter of & thus next Tsahik is assigned the onerous task of teaching this skxawng moron a rigorous do-or-die intensive course in Omaticaya warriorism which she really starts to warm to after watching him tame his own dragon. Then the night before the dozers he joins the full pledge with the deadly dangerous gloworm/arachnoid vision quest Dream Hunt uniltaron ceremony that brings back a special message from Eyewa & the ancesters of what fates & destinies await the clan, what totem animal he now identifies with & the taking of his full formal place as a born again into the clan member. Then, he drifts off to join for life in permanent tsahaylu bond with Ney'tiri under the Tree of Voices before Eyewa. Then the rood awakening in the morning which begins the war of the three trees & Jake's conversion from avatar fink into mighty Na'vi warrior, The Sixth Toruk Makto Jakesully to unite the clans of all the Na'vi in this time of great sorrow to drive the Skypeople from their land forever. His awakening complete.
Worthington is well-named for this role as both Sully & his avatar. He almost always maintained an intuitively exquisite balance between the bewildered dumbass jarhead gullibility of loyalty to anyone with the snappiest flourish of flag-waving ardor & his feckless naked honesty of vulnerably shaken to the core by the sight of cruel callous injustice when applied with force by the strong preying on the weak. When he flipped out, defected & braved against the ruin of his treachery, owning up in full disclosure, then making his amends with a vengence of steely resolve; it seems like the most natural of transitions without a moment of "who are you kidding" sneaking in to ruin the full impact of hero majestically emerging, stripped from his grunt mercenary cocoon in which his well trained conditioning had numbed his conscience into atrophied slumber along with his listlessly resigned limbs. I could feel his rebirth from the redeeming atonement of the dawning of his newly recognized self. Free & whole, without the need to pump in any additional impetus. Performance: B+ (extremely good). He was given an apt burst of career anchoring follow-ons as Marcus Wright in Terminator Salvation & Perseus in Clash of Titans. Good show. Lots of luck. I hope to see more.
Zoe Saldana's Ney'tiri was a masterpiece of timing & emphasis in a perpetual flow of easy rhythm of naturally ranging sponteneity that could coil into any tense moment with elegant ease & be just as tight to spring as any more rigidly contorting actor. Her fully unrestrained expressiveness was guilessly contained enough to always sharpen without ever blurring the provoking situation. She could easily jump through several sharp emotional changes without ever fatiguing the credibility of her versatility. She had the smoothly verving elan to make outsized look perfectly rightsized. Performance: A (great). Looking forward to seeing her Uhuru in Star Trek.
Stephen Lang's Col. Miles Quaritch rode his driving edge of Captain Ahab elegantly controlled obsessive mania, like a mad barber eager to always demonstrate how he never nicks even the most quivering customer. His White Whale? The whole damn planet. What else?! He delivered his turse obliqueness of never letting an elaboration of his nuance cross his tightly purposed lips in a whir of mesmeric punch & drill down intensity. I finally figured out what "ju ju bees" was. The fine delicacy of severed jubilee queues. His greatest fame is Stonewall Jackson in the play God's & Generals making him the obvious best choice to play the great squaw-killer to "everything that squats in the mud". He makes you feel like snapping to rapt attention at first spell & running to get out of the room when his prevailing certitude wares thin into losing its grip & the meaning of what his barely restrained hate is leading up to sinks in then pops out at you. Performance: A- ( exceptionally notable excellence)
Sigourney Weaver's exobiologist head of the Avatar Program plays the most complex, quirky & cranky of all the primary characters. She's determined, inexcusably bossy, overbearing & arrogantly rude out of her avatar but mellows considerably when her avatar unleashes the boundaries to her curiosity for the surrounding landscape & especially her cherished rapport with the Na'vi & their eagerly learning children. She's a tough mama bear who's protective instincts make her good to the core. Her cynically caring delivery is expertly understated right past you & under your skin before its sting muffles its blow beyound your attention span. She brings out plenty of her Dianne Fosse from Gorillas in the Mist & does show more than a tincture of Alien's Ellen Ripley to boot. Performance: B+ (extremely good).
Giovani Ribisi as clueless callous corporate chief Parker Selfridge is just simply superb keeping one eye on the quarterly statement & one on his putter skills in the middle of his bustling central control tower hdqtrs.} B (very good). Michelle Rodriguez as Samson helicopter pilot chauffer & fellow defector is strong & self-assured.B(very good). Joel David Moore as fellow avatar defector Xenoanthropologist Norm Spellman } B+(extremely good). Dileep Rao, avatar science defector Dr. Max Patel } B. CCH Pounder as the Tsahik, Mo'at carries a great commanding presence & bearing } B+. Wes Studi as the Olo'eyctan Eytukan gives a dignified aloof impression } B . And Laz Alonso as the derisive Jakesully detractor who finally rides into the jaws of death with him when Jake turns into Toruk Makto } B+ in subtle Na'vi mannerism & grammer articulateness.
The final battle for the Tree of Souls comes down from out of the floating Hallelujah Mtns on Aug 22, 2154. Life will never be the same on Pandora or Earth there-after. } A (great)
Nav'vi was formally constructed into its present form by USC Prof Paul Fromm. Cameron's favorite school from before his movie career. } A (great).
Neville Page was lead creature designer with Wayne Barlow. Direhorse(Pa'li), Mtn Banshee(Ikran), Seze (Ney'tiri's Ikran), Great Leonoptryx(Toruk)rider(Makto)of the last shadow(Toruk Makto), Hammerhead Titanothere(Angtsik), Hexapede(Yerik), Prolemuris(eng;lemurs), Thanator(Palulukan), Viperwolf(Yes, but do they dance?)(huh?)(Nantang), manymany others too numerous to ever mention with the exception of the central herd animal of prey to all Na'vi sustenance & culture; the Sturmbeest, and the ubiquitous Stingbat pest of the forest. Allall amazingly well thought out in every detail of anatomy ,color, articulation, behavior, habitat, food, predators, anthropology application use & lore. They've imagined from out of nothing a vast menagerie as a whole ecology of co-dependently interconnected creatures that are every bit as fantastic as the amazing variety rapidly going extinct on earth. They're so real you could easily reach out to touch them without the least bit of embarassment. } A+ (greatest)
Floral design was by UC Riverside Botany Prof, the real Grace Augustine, Jodie Holt. Helping to work out the possible scientific premise that would explain signal transduction & its occurance as Eyewa or even otherwise in any case. Creator of many imaginary plants with a whole detailed ecology that explains how they all fit together & into Na'vi ethnobotany, sustainence, herbal medicines, tools artifacts & architechture. Including, but by no means limited to: Helocoradian(Loreyu)(carnivorous zoooplantae that heals the videogame player), Hometrees & giant Hometrees, Tree of Souls(Ayvitraya Rumunong), Tree of Voices(Utral Aymokriya), Woodsprites seeds of the Holy Tree of Souls(Atokirina)(very pure spirits) etc et al ad infinitum ... } AA+(greatest of all time).
Ryan Church researched declassified NASA & DARPA research papers for some of the avatar 'psionics' ideas as well as some of the weaponry, heavy & all terrain equipment, avionics & areo & deep space designs, of the all powerful fascist monopoly of the Research Development Administration. The RDA has stuff that's actually been under real study &/or reseach &/or possibly, for at least some time, development. Including, but not limited to: Amplified Mobility Platform AMP suits,Samson tactical small troop transport,Scorpian Gunships, Dragon Assault Ship,ISV Interstellar Vehicle,Valkarie shuttle craft, Swan GRV ground assault vehicle,plasma & slash cutters, ect et al. All looking perfectly real as some bad shit that just hit your fan whenever they're out on a good run of killing off the indigenous. } A(great for the moment).
This review is in many parts a flagrant plagiarism of Wikipedia's Avatar listing & all its links at the bottom of the page including the Avatar Wiki, the Pandorapedia, the official Avatar web site, the Bluray Avatar Program, etc et al, as well as Rotten Tomatoes & its review links & community reviews. Watch for the added 6 mins. in the August rerelease & the Ultimate Bluray Edition in Nov., 3D disc in 2011 or whenever they invent it, episode 2 in 2014. Adopt-a-Tree with your disc purchase. Avatar: A Confidential Report on the Biological & Social History of Pandora (224 pg) unauthorized stolen field guide by Maria Wilhelm & Dirk Matheson is available from the Avatar Insurgency Program from where I don't know, although contact with this outlaw pirate distribution operation may result in imprisonment or if found in possession or distributing any copy for all I know. ICU now signing off.
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