Toronto – And you thought James Cameron was retiring. After the Abyss, everyone was hoping for him to direct another big blockbuster. Then came Terminator 2 2 years later, and the expectation grew. Titanic was a whooping 6 years after T2. And it has taken him 11 or 12 more years since Titanic to give us Avatar. So if he continues this trend I’ll be retiring when I see his next major film. And all of these movies were LONG – Titanic was  194 min, T2 weighs in at 130 min or so, and Avatar is around 162 min. From this, it seems that he chooses to craft movies that prove a point or challenge himself, more so than to appease the viewers (which is inevitable… their bladders were being severely challenged). All the better – IF that’s true.

Avatar has a very simple plot. Ex-marine Jake Sully goes to alien planet Pandora, learns how to drive his tissue engineered, genetically hybridized avatar that resembles the local native Navi, learns the native culture, falls in love with a girl, and become the protector of their hopes and dreams, against the evil human gluttony for useful minerals (Unobtainium? WTF. That sounds like it came straight out of Harry Potter.) Let’s face it, the story is not the strong point of the movie – the CG is. This is a movie to watch in theaters, not to be reduced onto BluRays and your 32″ LCD. While we saw the movie in 3D (non-IMAX), the effects were not done as gimmicks that remind you every minute with a spearhead or something flying into your stereoscopic forehead. What it did, then, was moderately enhances the feeling of realism, because the motion, even though lateral, is now set with a reference. It’s a little hard to describe in words, but by the 5 min mark, I had completely forgotten that I was watching a 3D movie – which can be argued both ways. The only bad thing to be said about the glasses then is it dramatically reduced the brightness of the movie – it was a bit disappointing to me. Because the rendering of Pandora’s forest and landscape is literally out of this world- from the glittering forest floor teeming with wildlife, to the floating mountain chain connected only by giant tree roots. And with brightness everything would have looked more vivid. The attention to detail in this movie is staggering. Skin-tone being one of the hardest things to render, the Navi themselves are blue. But this color never came across as a glossy paint layer – something that plagues most CG characters. By now I think everyone knows that they used separate motion captures for facial expression. And I think it worked very well – a scowl by Jake’s avatar may not look human, but it feels inherently right . The physics of each piece of material also felt correct… to our eyes (which is in hindsight weird for an alien planet with multiple moons and gigantic lifeforms…). All you have to do is to scrutinize the hairs of the Navi, and the membrane flaps of the banshee to understand just how realistic this movie is. If nothing was shot on location – then this is realism recreated without precedence, because not for one moment did I think that the mechanical suits are walking on a green screen, and I even had problems with Lord of the Rings sometimes…

So with the good comes bad. There are already articles that talk about the science of the movie, such as this one, so I won’t go into it. But I think the appreciation there has far reaching consequences with the story. Although I didn’t make the connection while watching, it was basically The Last Samurai with blue, 12 ft tall Japanese people. Ricky tuned in immediately, though – the set up resembles the native Americans fighting the Old World arrivals. This being a fantasy, I was waiting for some twists. For example, knowing that all the lifeforms on Pandora is wired into a biological internet, couldn’t the Navi literally tap into the planet and squash human invasion by hurling the floating mountains at their base? If human consciousnesses can be transferred into a Navi body, wouldn’t it makes more sense that a 22 century military force  would want to learn to back-assimilate all Navi into human and avoid the loss in resources? Imagine if Jake’s problem is not that he drops out whenever the military jarheads yank him from a link tube, but that his being linked up to the planet’s lifeforms gives the humans a backdoor, to viral-infect everything. Then the word avatar takes a much better meaning… what if Colonel Quaritch stuffed Neytiri’s mind into the body of a lab rat? It just strikes me that the potential for this movie was only explored in its graphics and not the storyline, where there was a lot of interesting and more logical possibilities because there’s an entire planet full of it (don’t even get me started about the banal good/bad ending alternatives…) In the end, I think Avatar is totally worth watching, twice even. Like the Navi though… feel, don’t think about it while you are watching.

Graphics: if that’s possible.
Else: