
I recently watched the new Star Trek directed by J.J. Abrams, and my reaction was: why? Why did this film need to be made? Why pretend to adhere to the established mythology of 40+ years of storytelling, and then abandon it with a gimmicky time travel script unworthy of the lamest fan film? The answer turned out to be about $400 million gross (what do I know) but even so I hadn’t felt that gypped since the Star Wars prequels.
So this week went to see Avatar, with similarly inflated expectations, and my response was: wow.
Avatar has made news for so many innovations in feature film production, but the wonderful irony is that none of the spectacular technological achievements of this film would mean anything without a solid, satisfying story line underlying it all.
Perhaps Star Trek lowered my expectations (and everyone else’s), but I imagine Avatar would be just as exciting to read on paper as it was to watch onscreen. That said, the visuals blew me away, and this was seeing it in old-fashioned 2D.
I can’t begin to do the visual work justice by describing it, but one problem with so much CG-heavy science fiction is that special effects are too apparent, and there is always an obvious demarcation between real and fake; one of the major achievements of Avatar is in how it integrates CG and live action so seamlessly.
Another dimension of quality to this film is the level of detail in the story’s richly developed alien world, which director Camera has said was inspired in part by the complex Star Trek/Star Wars universes that have developed over the last 40+ years.
Some reviewers have criticized the story as fairly unoriginal or a rehash- it certainly evokes Dances With Wolves - but at least this one didn’t rely on time travel; moreover, some of the underlying themes are surprisingly relevant, considering the story was written in the mid-nineties.
Regardless of what Avatar goes on to do at the box office and awards shows, what Cameron has managed to do is restore the cinematic balance of story and spectacle, within one film, and it’s a relief. Apparently Avatar has also ushered in a new era of 3D, which I’m completely ignorant about; so I’ll see that version soon and write about it in another post.