Tuesday, January 5, 2010

Avatar

Got to see it last night in Lincoln. Fun flick. It's set in the lush and colorful jungles of Pandora. The jungle night is filled with deadly beasts, gorgeous glowing super fireflies, and the Nahvi, a race of noble savages, all tall, lean, and beautiful despite blue complexions and thick noses. The Nahvi ride on "horses" and fly on dragons, hunt with bow and arrow, and except for being blue, look a lot like American Indians. They dwell in/under/around a humungeous and sacred tree that reaches up many stories into the sky. The scenes of jungle travel on foot, hunting, riding, flying and living in the jungle are fantastically well done and keep your attention.
The charm of this movie is in the excellence of the sets, scenery, and Nahvi. The acting is difficult to assess, when you suspect all the Nahvi facial expressions come from the depths of a computer. In fact this is not an actor's movie. The main characters are all Nahvi and are computer generated/augemented/whatever. The Nahvi are done with bits and bytes and pixels, not makeup and costuming. It's well done, the Nahvi are very believable. Give the CGI folks a few more years and we won't be able to tell live actors from CGI ones.
The plot is pure space opera, the good guys (Nahvi) and the bad guys (earthmen) clash in spectacular fashion. Characters are cardboard, who cares about the bad guys motives, we just enjoy watching the fight.
Lots of electrons have been spilled on the web about the deep inner meaning of this flick. Me, I don't think there is one, the movie puts on a great show, I enjoyed watching it. It's like Westerns or Bond movies, fun but not serious. Enjoy it. I did.

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