Smithology

Last Sunday, Steph suggested I get a bit of nerd time and go see Avatar so I hopped in the car and drove two minutes into town and filed into Sale’s dinky little cinema. I really like our cinema, it lacks all the neon lighting and flashy carpet of city cinemas and instead has a kind of charming excitement in the foyer which is generated by the buzz of people gathering to see films: lining up for tickets, buying popcorn, being ushered into the darkened theatre to be whisked away to another world.

And whisked away I was! At first I wasn’t sure the movie had started, it was just some guy talking about his brother and the next thing I knew, it was all space ships, a planet, a shuttle and as soon as that shuttle landed, they had me and I couldn’t take my eyes off the screen. Wow! What a visual feast. Apparently it’s mostly animated but there was hardly a trace of the uncanny valley here. I’m sure when I rewatch it, I’ll start to notice bits that are obviously animated but on first viewing it all just looks real.

I’ve read a few places people criticising the plot saying it’s too simple and cliched but that’s another thing I liked about the film. The story is refreshingly simple and uncluttered, no stupid about-faces in characters and clunky hidden twists that so many movies hit you with. It’s all written up in the first ten minutes and you just know what’s going to happen but the thing that hooks you is you need to see it, the movie looks so good you sense what’s coming and just think “hell yeah, I want to see that”. The predictability of the story just creates anticipation.

Another thing I appreciated about the film was the amount of context. The expense of this film is all in the details. There are no plastic ferns in this film, every plant you see on the screen seems to have been created with some amount of thought. The wildlife is both alien and familiar and there are recurring similarities between the different species of animals on the planet so that you can imagine that they evolved from common ancestors.

When it finished, I wanted to go home, eat some dinner and then come back for the next session, it was just so enjoyable. Perhaps I enjoyed it so much because I haven’t seen a film for awhile or I’ve been stressed out with the move or whatever but from the reaction I’m seeing elsewhere on the net, people are really excited about this film and it’s going to go on a lot of people’s DVD shelves next to Star Wars and Lord of the Rings.

avatar, movies, scifi