Posts from — March 2010

I’m having a good week so far: had a pancake with nutella, bacon and a bagel for breakfast this morning. That’s going to be tough to top for the rest of the week.

Anyway, here’s a song I heard on Pandora a few weeks ago and have been enjoying since: Amsterdam by Peter Bjorn and John.

(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LbcfAlGuqVE)

(This is a post I wrote a while ago but forgot to post. This was before I sarcastically nominated Avatar for the Oscar for “Best Screensaver”)

I saw Avatar about 6 weeks ago, but I guess it’s not quite too late to write a review. Last week, I watched the review by the guy who ripped apart The Phantom Menace for 70 minutes and had a discussion with two of my roommates about the movie, both of whom thought the writing in the movie wasn’t defective.

First off, to get this out of the way: overall, I liked Avatar. If you haven’t seen it, you should, and you should see it in 3D. Despite this, I have very little interest in spending 3 hours watching it again. Actually, I’ve stated that I’ll watch it again if I have access to a fast-forward button. This doesn’t seem feasible.

This post contains spoilers, but the whole point of this post is that the spoilers aren’t really spoiling anything anyway.

The video review I linked to above contains a lot of the same criticism as this post, but he got rather sidetracked in things that were just anecdotal or somewhat interesting instead of focusing on review/criticism.

Begin!

Avatar’s writing is not good and it makes the movie boring. Being visually stunning isn’t a workaround for this flaw: other movies with revolutionary effects, like Star Wars (original trilogy) and The Matrix would still be enjoyable with your eyes closed. Good writing builds characters that you care about, makes you experience emotions when things happen to them and sometimes makes you think. Avatar rarely did any of these things.

The main arc of the plot is Jake’s defection to the Na’vi and subsequent fight against the human invaders. Since Jake is a marine, a betrayal like this must be difficult for him. Sounds like a strong plot device, except it isn’t. While the defection should be hard for Jake, it’s not at all hard for the audience. We immediately know that Jake is on the wrong side and should switch, and we have no reason to feel conflicted about that. We don’t share any of the emotion that he’s supposed to have. Having clear villains is fine, but if a major plot arc is a character’s switch from one side to another, the difficulty of that switch needs to be impressed upon the audience, otherwise it’s worthless. Heck, even Star Wars Episode Three did a better job of this. I never thought I’d write that sentence…

An easy way to make Jake’s conversion more difficult for the audience would be to make the terribly-named “Unobtainium” meaningful in some way. What if it were needed for fuel or medicine? That would at least give us some pause before condemning the mining. But no, we are left with cartoonish un-nuanced villains.

The characters exacerbate this problem. The Colonel Quaritch and Parker Selfridge (the corporate guy) are completely unambiguous caricatures reinforcing the problems above. There’s nothing redeeming about either of them.

Meanwhile, Neytiri and Jake’s love story seemed ridiculous for reasons that are a bit more difficult to pin down. This is a lot more subjective, but had it not been completely obvious that the script demanded that they get married or whatever eventually, the romance would have seemed like it came out of thin air. In other words, it didn’t seem like they had any real chemistry until they were a couple.

The fact that the plot isn’t original (see Fern Gully, Pocahontas, and Dances with Wolves) isn’t a deal-breaker on its own. Heck, some remakes are great movies, but great writing requires nuance and detail in characters and events that make us care about them, one way or the other.

I’m not saying that Avatar is a terribly written movie, just that it’s not a well-written movie. It’s a shame, too, as it could have been so much better since it was visually quite beautiful.

“Shock and awe!”

The Shins covering The Postal Service’s “We Will Become Silhouettes”? Don’t mind if I do…

(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0HECF_RHAYo)

Mostly caught up on life now, will resume blogging soon. Definitely looking forward to it.