Subject: Here give your film review Sat Apr 24, 2010 11:53 am
Here give your film review for the film
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Subject: Re: Here give your film review Sat Apr 24, 2010 11:57 am
Cast and Crew Executive Producer: Colin Wilson Executive Producer: Laeta Kalogridis Producer: James Cameron Producer: Jon Landau Co-producer: Brooke Breton Co-producer: Josh McLaglen Director: James Cameron Screen Writer: James Cameron Director of Photography: Mauro Fiore Editor: Stephen Rivkin Editor: John Refoua Editor: James Cameron Prod. Designer: Rick Carter Prod. Designer: Robert Stromberg Costume Designer: Mayes Rubeo Costume Designer: Deborah L. Scott Visual Effects Supervisor: Joe Letteri Music: James Horner Casting director: Margery Simkin Cast: Sam Worthington (Jake Sully), Zoe Saldana (Neytiri), Sigourney Weaver (Grace), Joel David Moore (Norm Spellman), C.C.H. Pounder (Moat), Laz Alonso (Tsu tey), Wes Studi (Eytukan), Michelle Rodriguez (Trudy Chacon), Giovanni Ribisi (Parker Selfridge), Stephen Lang (Colonel Miles Quaritch), Matt Gerald (Corporal Lyle Wainfleet), Dileep Rao (Dr. Max Patel)
Bottom Line: A titanic entertainment -- movie magic is back! A dozen years later, James Cameron has proven his point: He is king of the world.
As commander-in-chief of an army of visual-effects technicians, creature designers, motion-capture mavens, stunt performers, dancers, actors and music and sound magicians, he brings science-fiction movies into the 21st century with the jaw-dropping wonder that is "Avatar." And he did it almost from scratch.
There is no underlying novel or myth to generate his story. He certainly draws deeply on Westerns, going back to "The Vanishing American" and, in particular, "Dances With Wolves." And the American tragedy in Vietnam informs much of his story. But then all great stories build on the past ( "Avatar" premiered Thursday in London).
After writing this story many years ago, he discovered that the technology he needed to make it happen did not exist. So, he went out and created it in collaboration with the best effects minds in the business. This is motion capture brought to a new high where every detail of the actors' performances gets preserved in the final CG character as they appear on the screen. Yes, those eyes are no longer dead holes but big and expressive, almost dominating the wide and long alien faces.
The movie is 161 minutes and flies by in a rush. Repeat business? You bet. "Titanic"-level business? That level may never be reached again, but Fox will see more than enough grosses worldwide to cover its bet on Cameron.
But let's cut to the chase: A fully believable, flesh-and-blood (albeit not human flesh and blood) romance is the beating heart of "Avatar." Cameron has never made a movie just to show off visual pyrotechnics: Every bit of technology in "Avatar" serves the greater purpose of a deeply felt love story (watch the trailer here).
The story takes place in 2154, three decades after a multinational corporation has established a mining colony on Pandora, a planet light years from Earth. A toxic environment and hostile natives -- one corporate apparatchik calls the locals "blue monkeys" -- forces the conglom to engage with Pandora by proxy. Humans dwell in oxygen-drenched cocoons but move out into mines or to confront the planet's hostile creatures in hugely fortified armor and robotics or -- as avatars.
The protagonist, Jake Sully (Sam Worthington), is a disabled former Marine who takes his late twin brother's place in the avatar program, a sort of bone thrown to the scientific community by the corporation in hopes that the study of Pandora and its population might create a more peaceful planet.
Without any training, Jake suddenly must learn how to link his consciousness to an avatar, a remotely controlled biological body that mixes human DNA with that of the native population, the Na'vi. Since he is incautious and overly curious, he immediately rushes into the fresh air -- to a native -- to throw open Pandora's many boxes.
What a glory Cameron has created for Jake to romp in, all in a crisp 3D realism. It's every fairy tale about flying dragons, magic plants, weirdly hypnotic creepy-crawlies and feral dogs rolled up into a rain forest with a highly advanced spiritual design. It seems -- although the scientists led by Sigourney Weaver's top doc have barely scratched the surface -- a flow of energy ripples through the roots of trees and the spores of the plants, which the Na'vi know how to tap into.
The center of life is a holy tree where tribal memories and the wisdom of their ancestors is theirs for the asking. This is what the humans want to strip mine.
Jake manages to get taken in by one tribe where a powerful, Amazonian named Neytiri (Zoe Saldana) takes him under her wing to teach him how to live in the forest, speak the language and honor the traditions of nature. Yes, they fall in love but Cameron has never been a sentimentalist: He makes it tough on his love birds.
They must overcome obstacles and learn each other's heart. The Na'vi have a saying, "I see you," which goes beyond the visual. It means I see into you and know your heart.
In his months with the Na'vi, Jake experiences their life as the "true world" and that inside his crippled body locked in a coffin-like transponding device, where he can control his avatar, is as the "dream." The switch to the other side is gradual for his body remains with the human colony while his consciousness is sometimes elsewhere.
He provides solid intelligence about the Na'vi defensive capabilities to Col. Miles Quaritch (Stephen Lang), the ramrod head of security for the mining consortium and the movie's villain. But as Jake comes to see things through Neytiri's eyes, he hopes to establish enough trust between the humans and the natives to negotiate a peace. But the corporation wants the land the Na'vi occupy for its valuable raw material so the Colonel sees no purpose in this.
The battle for Pandora occupies much of the final third of the film. The planet's animal life -- the creatures of the ground and air -- give battle along with the Na'vi, but they come up against projectiles, bombs and armor that seemingly will be their ruin.
More awards coverage As with everything in "Avatar," Cameron has coolly thought things through. With every visual tool he can muster, he takes viewers through the battle like a master tactician, demonstrating how every turn in the fight, every valiant death or cowardly act, changes its course. The screen is alive with more action and the soundtrack pops with more robust music than any dozen sci-fi shoot-'em-ups you care to mention (watch the "Avatar" video game trailer here).
In years of development and four years of production no detail in the pic is unimportant. Cameron's collaborators excel beginning with the actors. Whether in human shape or as natives, they all bring terrific vitality to their roles.
Mauro Fiore's cinematography is dazzling as it melts all the visual elements into a science-fiction whole. You believe in Pandora. Rick Carter and Robert Stromberg's design brings Cameron's screenplay to life with disarming ease.
James Horner's score never intrudes but subtly eggs the action on while the editing attributed to Cameron, Stephen Rivkin and John Refoua maintains a breathless pace that exhilarates rather than fatigues. Not a minute is wasted; there is no down time.
The only question is: How will Cameron ever top this?
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Subject: Re: Here give your film review Sat Apr 24, 2010 12:04 pm
After a run-up lasting 12 years, James Cameron has taken an almighty flying leap into the third dimension. His first new film for over a decade is in super-sleek new-tech 3D, and it is breathlessly reported to have taken the medium of cinema to the next level. And who knows? When Michelangelo completed his sculpture of David in 1504, he probably thought it made flat paintings look ever so slightly Betamax. Maybe he put a consoling arm round the shoulder of Sandro Botticelli as the two men looked ruefully at Primavera, and murmured caustically: "Little bit eight-track, isn't it darling? A touch Sinclair C5, a smidgen video top-loader – compared to, you know, sculpture?" That extra dimension makes the difference, and a recent village fete in Ilfracombe offered an absolute game-changer of a hoopla-stall in hi-def first-person interactive 3D – or 4D, come to think of it, if you count the time dimension.After the extremes of hype and backlash attending Cameron's solemn "unveiling" of a taster-trailer earlier this year, the film itself emerges as a watchable and entertaining if uncompromisingly ridiculous sci-fi spectacular, unable to decide if it wants to kick the ass of every alien in sight or get all eco-touchy-feely with them. It's a Dubya movie trying its darnedest to get with the new Obama programme.One hundred years or so hence, planet Earth is attempting to solve its energy issues by mining a rare new mineral cutely called "Unobtainium". This mineral is only to be found on a distant planet, in the very centre of a lush tropical forest, packed with quirky-scary CGI animals, under a giant Edenic tree which is the spiritual home of the planet's aboriginal inhabitants: 12-ft blue quasi-humanoids called the Na'vi, who have pointy ears, flat noses, ethnic dreadlocks, beads, and who all look like Angelina Jolie's ugly sister, especially the men. An American mining corporation has established a private army base there, getting ready to drive the natives off their land, led by the psychotically gung-ho Col Miles Quaritch (Stephen Lang) – a mixture of Robert Duvall in Apocalypse Now and Slim Pickens in Dr Strangelove. There is talk of fighting "terror with terror" and unleashing a "shock and awe" campaign.But as part of a PR-led hearts-and-minds programme, it also has a scientific unit led by Dr Grace Augustine, played by Sigourney Weaver, which plans to study the inhabitants, get to know them, and crucially create remote-controllable Na'vi bodies or "Avatars", which individual humans can pilot from afar into the jungle, to parley with the natives in their own exotic, subtitled language and ask what it might take to get them to withdraw voluntarily. And one such pilot is Jake Sully, played by Sam Worthington, a badass former soldier now injured and permanently in a wheelchair.He is thrilled at the glorious virtual-reality of his new 12-ft Avatar alien body; he exults in the jungle adventure, and at first wants only to spy on the Na'vi to facilitate the upcoming invasion. But then he meets the beautiful female Neytiri (Zoe Saldaña) and goes native. Sully sees a chance for something that, as a disabled war veteran, he thought might be forever denied him: a chance to have non-disabled sex – and fall in love. When the big battle comes, Jake finds himself fighting for the Na'vi, on the side of the colonial oppressed.The digitally created world meshes pretty much seamlessly with ordinary reality in an undoubtedly impressive way. But Cameron has always been a technical pioneer. Schwarzenegger's T1 robot chassis was a marvel of special effects, and in Titanic, it wasn't simply a matter of creating the great sinking itself. An extraordinary number of quite ordinary-looking locations and scenes were fabricated in front of a green-screen in way we didn't quite grasp at the time. The effects of Avatar are certainly something to see, especially on an Imax screen the size of an upended football field. But it's difficult to tell if the game has really been changed or not. How we all goggled at the detail and definition of the images in Shrek in 2001 – a film now admired for the quality of the script and characterisation. And I remember being in the audience for Jurassic Park in 1993, and hearing someone in the auditorium almost hyper-ventilate with astonishment at those ultra-realistic dinosaurs. And now … well … Jurassic Park … it's something you glimpse on ITV4 while switching over to watch Dave.But perhaps we're all looking in the wrong direction, frantically inspecting Avatar for evidence of James Cameron's hi-tech machismo and undiminished box office clout. Strip away from this movie the director's massive reputation, and you have a truly weird story about an aggressive futureworld corporation bankrolling avatar-technology so that human beings can insinuate themselves into the lives of aliens to seduce them. What an indie-freaky idea it is – and that is what makes it an experience.
