[miketardis]

Finding my calendar clear the Tuesday before Christmas, I headed to Dearborn's gargantuan IMAX to see AVATAR at a 10:30 am show (the only one not sold out). I got there plenty early and planted myself all the way at the top back row. Now, I don't know if this show got oversold, mismanaged, understaffed, whatever. But there were an increasing mass of unseated refugees filling up the aisle behind me that lead to the exits. By the time the film started (5 minutes late with no trailers whatsoever) there was a mass of kids and their guardians sitting down on the floor and fidgeting behind me. Trouble, I thought. But I chose to shut it all out and concentrate on the visuals. Thankfully, all the kids seemed to become quickly silenced by the overload of imagery. Still, good thing for the management of the theater that there wasn't a medical emergency during the show that required a fast evacuation, don't ya think?

As for the film, I'm still chewing over this mixed bag Cameron handed me. The visual experience of seeing AVATAR in IMAX 3-D should not be underestimated. The visuals ARE the experience. The experience IS the film. The levels of detail put into the worlds of both the tech-heavy human realms and the lush jungle of Pandora were literally awesome in this format. If you like sci-fi imagery at all, don't wait to rent this on DVD... there's no point. See it now in the best 3-D format you can or don't see it at all. As ALIENS is one of my all time favorite movies, I couldn't help but geek out at seeing Cameron revisit all the military and future tech on a much larger canvas (even including Sigourney Weaver and a corporate weasel named Parker). Being that PRINCESS MONONOKE is another lasting favorite of mine, I also couldn't help but feel some decadent glee at seeing the Cameron-ized IMAX 3-D version. Having both worlds collide in a third act mega-battle with sexy naked cat people riding dragons? Well, my inner 12 year old could not have asked for more.

And that's the problem. I wish I had seen this when I was twelve, in those innocent years before I'd seen LITTLE BIG MAN, LAURENCE OF ARABIA, DANCES WITH WOLVES, THE LAST OF THE MOHICANS, NAUSICAA, and all the other films that told this story or had the elements that this film borrowed. Now, I don't slam a movie just for taking ideas from other works. Stealing with taste is fine, as long as you mix it up and bring something new to the table. But the densely visual nature documentary acid trip is all that is added here. Under that hallucinogenic skin, you have an incredibly basic and boring rendition of that White Man Going Native Among The Noble Savages story. No real twists, not really. I don't think one single plot development surprised me. Cameron follows the playbook of this type of story step by step.

Zoe Saldana gives a terrific performance as Princess Mononoke... or whatever her character's name was. She's nuanced and full of fire, making her cliche character come to life. None of the other actors are given much of a chance to be more than rote character types. Stephen Lang kicks ass in his role, not because Cameron wrote him an interesting character, but simply because he's a great actor given all the bad-ass action moments that Cameron used to give his heroes back in the 80s. (The bit with him ignoring his shoulder on fire and then casually swatting at it like it was a mosquito was almost worth the ticket price.) Weaver disappointingly folds under the weight of crap dialog and crap direction.

Argh. This could have been so much more, so easily a classic. Would it have killed Cameron to have swallowed a little pride and used some of those mega-millions to hire a world class screenwriter to revamp his story, characters, and dialog? Didn't all the painstaking technical work done here demand such a rewrite?

And if he's building a sci-fi world from scratch, why bother making just about everything like things on Earth... but a little different? When the Tuskin Raider in STAR WARS attacked Luke, it made a noise like... 30 plus years later and I still don't know what the hell that thing sounded like, other than a Tuskin Raider. But in Avatar, the Na'vi whoop like Native Americans and the various animals in the jungle laugh like hyenas, growl like dogs, roar like tigers. And they all pretty much move and act like their relative Earth cousins. Why not really blow our minds with things we've never seen or heard before? It's not like Cameron is starving for budget money here.

Maybe that's the problem. The bigger the budget, the more one has to homogenize the product. Imagine if this film were like the primate scenes in 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY, with no humans or tech, just unsubtitled Na'vi going about their business in the harsh jungle-scape of Pandoran beasties. In IMAX 3-D. Woulda been fantastic. Woulda never got funded.

Whatever. I'm sick of bitching and I'm sure those who liked the film are sick of my bitching. It's a shame, because I truly loved looking at this film. I had a giddy smile during the dragon flying sequences, because the imagery on the IMAX 3-D screen was as close as I'm ever going to get to understand in my gut what it's like to fly a dragon on an alien planet. And I really want to have experiences like that at the movies. I'm reminded of what a buddy of mine in Rome said about BROTHERHOOD OF THE WOLF, struggling to translate the Italian phrase: All smoke and no mint.

I loved what I saw, but I wanted more mint.