Five weeks after its debut, Vicki and I finally got out to see
Avatar this afternoon. After being turned away two weeks ago, we decided to opt for an afternoon matinee during the week (hey, why not take advantage of being semi-retired?). It was great to be able to arrive only 15 minutes before the start time and watch the film in a theatre with only maybe another thirty or forty people in it.
I went into the experience with a lot of skepticism, based on several factors:
- the extreme amounts of hype around the film
- the fact that most of the trailers looked pretty pedestrian and boring
- past experience with overblown expectations falling short
This time out, though, James Cameron's visionary fable delivered the goods, big-time. While the 3D effects didn't have me clawing at the air in front of my eyes (as a few scenes from
The Birds did, at
Universal Studios in Orlando), they created an immersive environment for this version of the 22nd century that became incredibly real as the story progressed. I was blown away by just how different this experience was from what I'm used to with futuristic movies. That illusory third dimension completely worked at making me feel like I was in the middle of it all, and I suspect that just such a reaction was important to the empathy that Cameron was hoping to evoke from his audience. Yes, the morals of
Avatar are completely unsophisticated and delivered with a bludgeon rather than a scalpel, but I didn't mind that at all.
When I first read a reviewer's claim that "
Avatar is going to change the way movies are made", I almost laughed out loud. After seeing it in person, though, I almost wish that he were right: how hard will it be to enjoy a standard - flat, perfunctory - tale projected onto the screen, after this? I'm sure we'll all get over it, but wouldn't it be amazing if this sort of thing became the norm going forward?
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