All aboard the hype train! Choo Choo... Part II

Moving swiftly down the tracks to our next station, we come upon Avatar.  What is/was being hailed as James Cameron's biggest project ever, a holy grail in terms of CGI, story, setting and many other wonders.  The hype meter behind this one nearly burst raining shards of nerdy fanboyism all over the place.  There is a lot of history behind this movie, and far be it me to try and tell things that Cameron explains so much better, go check out the wikipedia page or the 100's of other movie sites boasting his words about the story and technology behind the movie.  For now, this is a review of a movie brought to us by the man responsible for Terminator 1 & 2, True Lies, The Abyss and Titanic.  This is about Avatar.

Now before people flame me and blow up at me after reading the first few paragraphs of the review, I'll put this out in the open.  I ENJOYED AVATAR.  Meaning I did not think it was a bad movie at all, in fact I liked it a fair amount, that being said it didn't blow my mind like it blew everyone else out there.  This one for me, fell short of the buzz that it was generating out there.  So again, please do not think that I hated the movie, or that this will just be a bash to the movie, I am simply here to point out my likes and dislikes with the movie.  Also spoiler free here folks so enjoy.

No cold feet here, I'm jumping right into what I didn't like about the movie.  First off was the story, not that it was bad or anything, it was good, it was just something that I have seen (presented in so many different forms) before.  No one pegged this movie to be about the story really though, I mean yes it's integral to the movie itself, but hell I wasn't expecting it to be some fancy well known novel.  The plot had that all to familiar man undercover who gets to involved with the organization he's infiltrating and ends up wanting to help his new friends.  This had a better moral scale to it which I liked, Worthington's character was fighting for something he had grown to love and become a part of rather than the whole good guy turns to bad guy in turn becoming a bad guy but helping the somewhat likable villain...I pretty much just described the plot to The Fast and the Furious, and it just go to show how Avatar didn't fall into that trap of lamedom.  Either way the plot fit the movie, and I wasn't expecting something like Terminator 2.  I never pegged Cameron as a great writer, since I much more stand by his work with technology and directing as his strengths.  The pacing of the movie was ok, I felt it was a bit to long, with way to much time setting up for the big battle that we all knew was going to come in tn the end.  With the huge digital landscape that Cameron set up, I wanted to see more of it.  Yes, there was a fair amount of Pandora shown, but I craved more, I wanted to see every valley and cave that this planet had to offer.  Oh well, maybe in Avatar 2!

But out with bad in with the good, while I had a few gripes with the movie, I generally enjoyed it, mostly because I really like Sam Worthington as an actor.  Granted he really hasn't done much stateside, really its only this and Salvation until Clash of the Titans comes out, but this was a different role for him, in my eyes.  In Terminator he had the task of just being an action hero, a robot and a supporting actor.  In Avatar, he was the show.  There was much more of a dramatic element to Jake Sulley, while still holding onto that hero's edge.  Granted for a good chunk of the movie it was his face somewhat grafted onto a 10ft. tall blue alien but still, the scenes with him in it I loved.  Sigourney Weaver and Joel Moore filled out the science team well, and I really enjoyed Stephen Lang's tough as nails Colonel Quaritch.  I haven't seen him in anything else expect Public Enemies in which he pretty much didn't say a word the whole film.  The one thing that I don't think needs any recognition is the technology and CGI.  I mean there's not much else to say other than it was amazing.  Pandora looked fantastic, and the fact that the main female lead is completely CGI just proved how far we have come in terms of graphics.  Again, the technology has been talked about to death, and I can basically sum it up in one word, amazing.

The hype was huge for this movie, and now I never went into it thinking that it was going to change the face of movie making (even though in terms of CGI & 3D it will) or be the best movie I have ever seen, but I was still looking forward to it.  But I walked out of the theater generally apathetic to the whole thing.  I walked out and thought it was cool, but at quite a few parts in the movie, I was thinking about scenes in Sherlock Holmes which I had scene a week before.  I didn't walk out jaw dropped in awe of what I saw, and part of me felt sad about that.  I WANTED to love the movie more than Sherlock Holmes, Dark Knight or even District 9, but I didn't.  Maybe my tastes are changing, maybe it's just the fact that when movies build that much buzz it can't be as good as everyone says.  In some cases it can be that good, Dark Knight had a lot riding with it, and it delivered.  The story kept me hooked, the action kept me on the edge of the seat, the acting was awesome, it was 5/5 for me, Avatar hit like 3.5 out of the 5 for me. 

In the end, the enjoyed the movie, I plan to buy it on Blu-Ray because the movie looked fantastic and will only look better in high def.  While it didn't blow my mind all of the theater, I respect what Cameron did with the technology and can't wait to see what he has in store for everyone next.   Maybe the sequal will better impress me.  With that, my somewhat uninformative review (only because I wanted to leave out spoilers) comes to an end.

We finish up this three part review with The Hangover, but now I'm hungry and its lunch time so I take my leave of this digital journal.

Thanks for reading,
-Nerdsbeware