Avatar

Real... but incredible too. Cameron delivered all I was expecting and much more. He embellished this simple or fairytale story (a dash of Pocahontas, a dash of Beauty and the Beast etc.) with an incredible amount of ideas and details that take your breath away. Of course, I made sure to watch Avatar at the IMAX and I must say that the movie really was created for 3D with a screen as large as possible. Pandora plucks you like a raspberry (parallel with Jake) and you feel the new world in all its beauty and unknown secrets and you want more and you get more. Each animal is more fascinating than the one you met before and every shot reveals new image after new image that remains ingrained in your memory. Luckily Jim didn’t skimp on technique and so we get the best performance from everybody. Militant and reckless humanity (represented by the great Ribisi) for destruction lovers and on the other end of the scale the naturally sweetened Na’vi race for beauty lovers (all the talk about ecological agitation are wrong, nothing specifically stands out, it all creates a whole where questions of racism etc. are also dealt with). All of this forms into a wonderfully working story and a breathtaking experience. I can’t remember seeing anything as intense (and anything that acts on all levels) for a really long time. I just noticed that I didn’t write about the special effects at all. Maybe because they didn’t seem like effects. They seemed real. When Neytiri cried, I felt with her like with a real person, not like with a nine-foot clown. She looks that real. So it should be said here that the effects are of the highest possible quality (if they are revolutionary or not, you’ll have to ask an expert in the field), personally I was completely gobsmacked, and I’ve seen a lot of movies. Almost all the actors shined, but Sam Worthington really was the best of them all. The nice guy who guides us on this wonderful journey without a doubt deserves great praise. As does Stephen Lang. A proper baddy who reels out one tough line after another. All in all, it was worth the wait. I felt like I was dreaming with my eyes open. I see you... (21/12/2009)

In terms of film-craft this is the most precise work that can be achieved under current conditions, but above-average film-craft defining new standards alone doesn’t necessarily make a good movie. Luckily, Avatar is good, but unfortunately no more than just good. It’s like despite all the attention that Cameron devotes to polishing everything down to the last, tiny detail, he forgot about the movie as a whole. Who cares that it suffers from all imaginable maladies of “blockbusters", if only Cameron had managed to enthrall us, draw us in, simply forget that this is still just a movie (it only happened to me in one scene). And the saddest thing about this is that, despite the message, in the end it will be Cameron who causes mass deforestation on out planet due to the mountains of wood needed to produce the paper on which the millions of movie theater tickets sold around the whole world will be printed, and this thought chills me more than any of the best scenes in Avatar. And all of the above applies to the extended version which didn’t concentrate primarily on emotions and characters, but again on technical brilliance. P.S.: This review was written after seeing the regular version; my subsequent visit to see the IMAX version neither improved or impaired my impression of the movie (and why should it, it’s the same movie, isn’t it?), but it did enhance the brilliant effects. ♫ OST score: 3/5 (17/12/2009)

A great adventure fairy tale for those of us who have been waiting all these months and years for it to come, and a grand spectacle that becomes so huge in the end that human senses cannot absorb everything and a regular director can't control it. And it is right here where it shows that giving so much time to a movie sometimes really pays off until the last minute and dollar. Although the compassionate ethnic-ecological message did not hit the mark in my case, everything else is part of an opus that has never been seen before. 90% blown away for a movie that will at least not have any equivalent on a global scale in its sequel. (17/12/2009)

The first time my eyes saw the effects, they stayed still and gaped. Yes, artistically, the film may well be above reproach. A feast for the eyes. The effects simply must win an Oscar, I can't see it any other way. But after a while I got used to them, and they didn't dazzle me so much. For a film that runs 162 minutes, it has an incredibly weak plot. I'm truly sorry, but the effects just didn't hold my attention the whole time, after a while I started fidgeting, looking around at others, taking off and putting on 3D glasses, taking off, putting on a sweatshirt – I was bored. For me, there were just empty spaces. And don't let anyone try to tell me that through all the fabulous, nature-celebrating effects and digital advancements, Cameron can't offer a better story. He can – see, for example, Terminator. Plus, there were those awful pathetic "as if to the American people who are rising up, shouting, cheering, crying for glory, and rushing into battle to be slaughtered" speeches again – and I'm allergic to those, I just cringe. But one big plus for me is that he let the Pandorians have their own language, that he didn't force them all into English. I don't know, perfect effects aren't reason enough for me to give a better rating when I was bored and wishing they'd finally kill each other and live happily ever after. Ciaossu. Very, very interesting commentary: IMPAIRED (agree with almost all of it :-)) (08/01/2010)