Chad Taylor

About The Blues

Avatar. Oh, so many things. In Paris, working, but in summary, Memo To JC style:
  1. Worst voice over ever. Ever. Worse than Terminator 2. Give me half an hour and what you spent on designing one handheld weapon and I'll write you something better.
  2. 3-D is of negligible benefit. It is immersive, but I don't want to be immersed in something -- I want you to tell a story, and if I'm distracted looking at something in the background then I'm not being directed.
  3. But it's much much better than Titanic. Not as good as T1 or T2, more mature than True Lies... It's buff and self-absorbed, like The Abyss. A big anime Abyss.
  4. I don't really care about the animals. There's a big red one and a small one and so on - did this really take four years to invent? Really?
  5. The CG is good. Nav'i almost totally believable. Tactile sense is quite amazing: when the Nav'i kiss or touch each other, you can really sense it.
  6. The forest at night is amazing. Almost did some of the thematic talking for you.
  7. The Marines are boring.
  8. What does Unobtanium do? Is it anti-grav or what? Because for a movie that explains everything, you cannot have a McGuffin. If you explain the plants and flowers, you have to explain what the plants and flowers are being killed for, and why.
  9. Sigourney Weaver's not really used.
  10. Sam Worthington's wasted legs are the most amazing effect of all.
  11. Nav'i language very good -- chants and songs Not Silly.
  12. Why does Michelle Rodriguez's character turn? I would like to know. (See #8)
  13. Why was Sully's brother just gunned down in a mugging? I would have had him die while being trained by Colonel Quaritch -- more motivation for conflict, betrayal, etc, especially if Sully discovered this later on. Just a thought. Would have thrown that in with the voice over.
  14. For all the actors and CG-actors, there are really only four or five characters in the movie, so Quaritch has to embody all evil, like the driving instructor in Mike Leigh's Happy Go Lucky.
  15. Shot where real Sully is cradled by real Nav'i Neytiri is the best Cameron ur-mother moment since the sleeping Ripley faded into the curve of the Earth.
  16. How can Sully be awake as Sully during the day while at the same time being awake as an avatar during the day? I think you got the timing wrong. The detail bothered me only because you went into such detail about everything else.
  17. I'll probably go see it again.
  18. Hurry up and make Fantastic Voyage. More your thing.

Addendum: Saw it the second time, and it was better. I'd pre-booked to watch it at the BFI Imax 3-D and would have happily given up my ticket if I'd had someone to give it to, but I didn't, so I went. The projection quality was good when I first saw it but Imax projection made a remarkable difference. For a start, the 3-D composition was clearer, so shots became more dynamic and engaging, which did make parts of the story more exciting. (The slow bits were still slow, and the Pocahontas storyline was unaffected.) The Nav'i worked better as characters because rendered digital animations read better in 3-D than real actors filmed with the same 3-D system. I don't know the technical reasons for this but it seems logical when you think about it. Zoe Saldana's mo-cap performance as Neytiri and Sam Worthington still carry the film. The handheld sequences were hard to take in: without the slo-mo pauses in the Sully-being-chased-by-the-whatever sequence I would have been unable to track what was going on. And the aircraft looked solid in the Imax version: on a smaller screen they seemed greyed out and flat, more like drawings than real physical craft. Ships and craft were, according to this story, "built" (i.e. rendered) by a separate special effects shop, which probably has something to do with it.

Overall, the Imax 3-D experience was a revelation. It did improve the film. So now I'm wondering what happens in reverse: would the movie be proportionally less satisfying on a small TV screen? I suspect it would. This film needs a big screen and 3-D projection to work.

Story's story. Whether it's Breathless or Casino, a great film is a great film whether you see it on a big screen or a TV set. I don't think anyone would make the mistake of putting Avatar in the category of the former. But as a piece of entertainment it relies more on technology than its predecessors -- far more than Cameron's first Terminator movie, for instance. That's an interesting development.