Wednesday, March 3, 2010

Hollywood Movie Avatar

Many critics around the world have claimed that the Hollywood movie Avatar has fallen way short of expectations. Despite the snobish critics rating it 2/5, the sci-fi thriller continues to rock the audiences throughout the world. The brilliance in the IMAX-3D work can't stop the viewers from exclaiming.

After 15 years, Terminator, Aliens, True Lies and Titanic fame director James Cameron has now come out with eco-minded epic Avatar that cost $500 million. The movie Avatar delivers a good message. It is all about an evil corporation using USA military to exploit the natural resources of a foreign planet.


The graphics work is awesome. Especially, the 10 feet tall creatures and the beauty of Pandora are just stunning. Avatar is an entertaining movie with the essence of love, family, relationship, humanity, action, and adventure. It can be recommended to those who love movies like Bridge to Terabithia, Jurasic Park, War of the worlds and 2012.

Besides graphics, the actors are also phenomenal in this movie Avatar. Sam Worthington, Zoe Saldana, Sigourney Weaver and Stephen Lang are truly a magnificent actor. They have delivered brilliant performance.

Bollywood and Hollywood movie ‘Avatar’, Cameron’s forthcoming action adventure is a fantasy epic made on a whopping budget of Rs. 1200 crores (approx USD 230 million) that clearly makes it the biggest film ever made.Just when everyone in Bollywood was talking about the humungous budgets of ‘Blue’, James Cameron (the maker of Titanic and Terminator) is here once again with his next film that seems to have crossed all records not only in terms of the budget but also the technique of filmmaking with its path-breaking technology.

Produced by leading Hollywood studio Twentieth Century Fox, Avatar is a blend of live-action photography and new virtual photorealistic production techniques where Cameron again combines elements of massive spectacle and intimate character to tell a relatable and emotional tale.Renowned Hollywood filmmakers like Steven Spielberg, Peter Jackson, Abrams, Guillermo Del Toro are already planning some big-budget films with Cameron’s latest technology, closer to home directors like Vidhu Vinod Chopra, Mahesh Bhatt and Sanjay Gupta were heard saying that the film will alter the way movies are made.

‘Avatar’ is the story of a wounded ex-marine, thrust unwillingly into an effort to settle and exploit an exotic planet rich in bio-diversity, who eventually crosses over to lead the indigenous race in a battle for survival.
With a budget of Rs 1200 crores, James Cameron’s ‘AVATAR’ is the biggest film ever.

Mr. Vijay Singh, CEO, Fox Star Studios India says, “There is an incredible buzz building up for Avatar across the India media, our theatrical partners and the core audiences. The dramatic increase in the number of 3D screens, as well as the strong interest that we are getting from the Hindi, Tamil and Telugu language markets reaffirms the strong buzz for the film.”

Since I am a certified sci-fi geek and most science fiction movies are quite bad this habit unfortunately forces me to watch a large number of bad movies. It’s one of my little perversions. I have just watched the most expensive B-movie ever made, the US$ 237 million Avatar by director James Cameron, famous for having produced films such as The Terminator, Terminator 2, Aliens and Titanic. Briefly summed up I would say that while it is visually spectacular, as is everything Mr. Cameron makes, Avatar has to be one of the most anti-Western and especially anti-white Hollywood movies I have seen in a long time.

The hero is the U.S. Marine Jake Sully who has been sent to the planet-like moon Pandora because humans desire the mineral resources found of Pandora, which is inhabited by a race of tall, blue-skinned aliens, the Na’vi. They have a non-industrial civilization technologically inferior to ours but apparently spiritually richer and in perfect ecological harmony with the natural environment. The hero predictably falls in love with the native culture and connects with a native girl.

“Going native” is in itself not an original theme; it resembles Dances with Wolves, only with aliens instead of Sioux. Neither is the preference for pre-industrial civilization, which was after all shared by a good man such as Tolkien in his The Lord of the Rings trilogy. Tolkien had personally experienced the meaningless horrors of trench warfare during the First World War and this naturally affected his view of industrialized society. What is different about the movie Avatar is how it portrays whites as a bunch of raging monsters, something which Tolkien never did.

Basically, the white characters are portrayed as brutal, greedy and insensitive beasts who rape the environment and destroy other cultures with a smile in the search for profit. The main antagonist is the white Colonel Quaritch, a brute who hardly possesses a single positive character trait. The final climax of the movie is when he screams “How does it feel to betray your race?” to the protagonist while he is trying to murder him. Although a few of the white characters such as Jake Sully are portrayed in a more redeeming light this is only because they totally reject their own civilization and join the other team in the fight. In other words: the only good whites are the ones who utterly turn their backs on their own destructive and evil culture. As reviewer Armond White put it, “Avatar is the corniest movie ever made about the white man’s need to lose his identity and assuage racial, political, sexual and historical guilt.”

Of course, back in the real world whites are among the most self-critical and least ethnocentric people on Earth, and have been so for a long time. Whites are also disproportionately represented in the environmental movement whereas many “diverse” Third World peoples couldn’t care less about the environment. But why let the truth get in the way of making a good anti-white movie? The fact that quite a few among the predominantly white audience cheered for this movie shows that anti-white hatred and stereotypes have become so widespread and accepted that most people cannot even see it, least of all whites themselves.

Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart,” said William Wordsworth. Thus, without letting our admiration for James Cameron come in the way of our verdict on ‘Avatar’, with a heavy heart, we’ll have to say that we found Cameron’s highly anticipated, expensive motion picture ‘Avatar’ not living up to our expectations.

Many who have seen the film have an opinion that since so much time (10 years), effort and sweat has gone into creating stereoscopic 3D effects for the film, and combining live and computer animation, one ought to appreciate it. True as it might be, at the end of the day, if a film fails to establish an emotional connect with the audiences, no effects whatsoever can salvage it or make it special.

Coming to the story, Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) is an ex-marine who is forced into participating in Avatar program. The program is setup by humans and comprises of encroaching a distant moon Pandora as it has an abundance of precious minerals on its land. However, getting hold of Pandora won’t be easy as humans can’t breathe on it. Also, the warrior Na’vi tribe resides in it.

In order to encroach Pandora’s land, one has to be able to breathe its air and thus become one of the Na’vis. Scientists thus create these genetically-bred human-Na’vi hybrids known as Avatars. The Avatars have a Na-vi body and a human DNA. Jake becomes one such Avatar...human kind’s weapon to make truce with Na’vis and thus force them to evacuate their planet. As Jake starts shuttling between his human and Na’vi body, he starts getting emotionally attached to Pandora and there begins the conflict between his medium of existence.

Avatar begins well but goofs up as it progresses. The story which seems promising initially starts faltering the moment Cameron shows Jake fall in love with a Na’vi woman. The film then on becomes just another clichéd love story where a hero will save his lover and her people from the villains. The villains happen to be humans here who now want to wage a war on the Na’vis as they refuse to give in to their demands. Jake even readies himself to battle it out with the humans to save his Na’vi tribe... things people do for love! If the love wasn’t clichéd enough, Cameron even makes his hero single out the lead villain and engage him in a one-to-one fist fight with him!

Avatar begins well, drags tremendously in between and then picks up on its pace towards the climax, but its too late by then. Titanic oozed romance and we loved it but the setting of Avatar didn’t require romance as its prime ingredient. This wrong move of Cameron transforms a sci-fi ‘Avatar’ into a highly clichéd run-of-the-mill dramatic love story set against a war backdrop.

The film is a visual delight, but lacks an original plot. This visual treat doesn’t make up for the weak storyline. The infusion of human trauma in an idyllic fantasy setting doesn’t seem to be a good idea! Avatar loses direction somewhere along the way, and its huge length plays spoil sport too.

Performances are decent, but not outstanding. Unfortunately, so is the film! However, ‘decent’ is not what one expects from a James Cameron.










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