Avatar
Paraplegic fighter Sully (Worthington) is assigned to a 10 foot blue avatar in order to extract the foreign planet of Pandora's main source of energy, causing conflict between humans and the local Na'vi. Sully must battle his heart and his head.
David Cameron; yet another director attempting to surpass the modern benchmark of movie-making and leapfrog us into a new generation of entertainment. He also made Titanic. Avatar is one of the most highly anticipated films of the 21st century, and let’s be honest; if we heard in early 2009 that this renowned director was constructing a film about smurfs which had £300 million shoved in its back pocket, the majority of us would have been intrigued. At first glance Avatar may look your mediocre, seen it all before film, but this proved to be a stubborn little beauty to criticise.
Supposedly Cameron has concealed the idea for this film inside his phenomenally imaginative mind for quite some time, and only now has it been unveiled for all eyes to see, and my god, what a show our eyes receive. The first and foremost factor which plunges Avatar into a modern great masterpiece is the stunning environment we are introduced to. Cameron and his crack team of movie-boffins have pieced up a visually stunning spectacle which would even suprise and baffle Stephen Hawking. Especially if viewed upon an IMAX screen, the world of Pandora welcomes you as if you are truly a visitor, with its amazing attention to detail. From the floating sections of land to the small seeds from the God tree of Eywa; it takes a lot to silence a critic, but I myself was encapsulated by the phenomenal scenes, all aided by the ugly specs perched on the end of my nose. Brilliant 3D; isn’t it?
Accompanied with the landscape are of course the characters, the main of which played by upcoming actors Sam Worthington and Zoe Saldana. Surprisingly the pair have gone reasonably unnoticed during the recent awards but I personally feel their performance deserves a mention. Not only from their brilliant roles and acting in Avatar, but Saldana’s performance in Star Trek was equally impressive, as is Worthington, with his new film Clash of the Titans fast approaching our screens. All the actors in this film exceed expectations, their roles are hit to perfection; you will be engulfed into a war of emotions just as Sully is. Cameron really goes all out to deliver in this department, reflecting a deep character development during the course of the film which inevitably love is the catalyst of.
Ah, but if all things in life were so amazingly fantastic that they simply could not be criticised; I’m afraid not even David Cameron’s mind achieves that goal. Avatar, is as previously stated, a “seen-it-all-before” film. Set aside the masterful effects, the flawless acting and the next generation technology, there is no unique story. Not at all to say the story is a pathetic clump of A4 paper, torn up and stuck together again, infact the script is intelligent and entertaining. However, Cameron seems to have delivered a leap forward over that modern benchmark of movie making, but only just made it fully over. Yes, new technology was pieced together to make the film, yes it is a new generation of cinematic experience, however will we be suprised by the plot? In a word; no. Avatar has no real epic twists to deem worthy of the scale and hype, and the ending despite opening a huge possibility for a sequal simply was not satisfying enough to keep up the standards of the previous two and a half hours I had just watched.
So, although the plot was a bit familiar, with nothing really except big guns and loud music, Avatar as a whole did not dissapoint. Cameron has yet again succeeded in his mission of top class entertainment, and Avatar will inevitably, and deservably, be a classic.
