Ben Child from The Guardian newspaper:
James Cameron’s 3D box office behemoth is back in the multiplexes, with an additional nine minutes of footage to tempt cinemagoers back to Pandora, the far-flung moon inhabited by majestically terrifying jungle beasties and 12-ft tall, blue-skinned extras from a Tangerine Dream album cover shoot. Now almost three hours long, the movie is as visually spectacular as ever, and the 3D work is still the best yet seen in what remains a pretty fickle field. But there's not much here to delight anyone who did not adore Avatar the first time around, a mere ... ooh ... nine months or so ago. Of the new footage, the much-trumpeted "Pandoran porn" scene, in which we finally get to see some Na'avi nookie, is hardly worth the editing time, while a new death scene for tribal chieftain Tsu'tey is so tonally weird that it's obvious why it never made it in the first time around.
Sukhdev Sandhu From the Telegraph newspaper:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/film/filmreviews/6832593/Avatar-full-review.html
Avatar arrives swathed in hyperbole. It’s meant to be the most eagerly awaited film of the last few years. The most expensive movie ever. The film with the wildest, most breathtaking and out-there digital effects any director has ever hatched up. It’s the envelope pusher, the film that redefines the possibilities of cinema, the work whose trickle-down effects on other artists will be felt for decades to come. At a point in the decade when critics are looking back, this is a film that is meant to be looking forward and boldly going where no film has gone before.
Some people love movies to be talked up in this way. They respond to the drama and buzziness of it all. Others — including you? — perhaps feel a little bullied and coerced. What if you neither knew or cared about how Avatar was the long-drawn out follow-up to director James Cameron’s Titanic? Does that make you any less of a film lover? Movies as aggressively marketed as this feel less like art, and more like maximum-impact juggernauts.
Avatar is set in 2154. The world is dying. Its energy resources are almost spent. Its inhabitants, represented by the US military, have travelled to a distant planet called Pandora where they hope to extract a valuable mineral called Unobtanium (My sides! My sides!) that will save the earth. In their way stand the Na’vi, fierce, proud and very blue-skinned tribespeople who are determined to resist the rape and plunder of their precious eco-system.
The earthlings, led by bull-headed Colonel Miles Quaritch (Stephen Lang), aren’t able to handle the atmospheric pressure on Pandora. Helped by star biologist Grace (Sigourney Weaver), they create an avatar — a half-human, half-Na’vi hybrid — to go on information sorties and to act as a cultural diplomat.
The person chosen for this role is Jake Sully (Sam Worthington). He’s a former Marine who lost his legs in action. Worse, his twin-brother, a super-intelligent scientist, has died. Grace dismisses him as a “Jarhead dropout”. This of course means (Cameron is not a director for whom complexity and moral ambiguity rate large) that the story, among other things, will be one of personal redemption.
Jake, on one of his recces, is saved by a Na’vi called Neytiri (Zoe Saldana). She may have strange yellow eyes, but she can speak English, tame wild creatures, and has the toned body and skimpy clothing of a beach volleyballer. She’s a hippy, Climate Camp version of Lara Croft. They fall in love. He goes native. Soon, helped by Grace and a gang of humans (or Sky People as they’re known to the Pandorans), he tries to save them from what seems inevitable annihilation.
To this fusion of science fiction and environmental parable Cameron adds a contemporary spin by lacing his script with War On Terror allusions. “Well, well, well!” smirks Quaritch as he looks forward to the bloody violence he’s about to wreak on the tribe he regards as 'blue monkeys’ and 'savages’, “I’d say diplomacy has failed.” Later, he laughs: “We will blast a crater in their racial memory so deep they won’t come within a thousand clicks of here ever again.” These topical jibes feel superfluous. Largely, because Quaritch — like Grace, Jake and every other character — represents a type rather than an individual. The actors do what they can with their roles, but they don’t get the chance to invest their roles with the gravity of Weaver in Alien or the emotional heft of Winslet and DiCaprio in Titanic.
Cameron, whose fastidious micro-management of the film’s journey to the big screen has been endlessly marvelled at by interviewers, has cloth ears. Neytiri’s post-coital statement — “You now Jake. We are mated for life” — has all the lyricism of “Me Tarzan. You Jane.” As for James Horner’s soundtrack? Imagine if you will a collaboration between Sting, Enya and Celine Dion — a ululatory, cross-legged, over-ripe symphony of faux World Music. Actually, it’s worse.
As a visual spectacle, Avatar works much better. Not all of you will be in a position to watch it in 3D, and those of you who wear glasses may tire of donning two sets of spectacles for 161 minutes. But still: the fogginess and dimmed images of so many previous 3D films — Pixar’s Up the most recent offender — have been replaced by an impressive crispness and clarity.
The scenes in which Jake’s avatar runs out of his compound, skidding and sliding with glee at his new ability to use his legs, are rendered in almost tactile fashion. Later, when he wanders through the alien forests of Pandora, the sense of a world opening up — its lush orange flowers, its mysterious fragrances, its hissing animals that lunge at him from all angles — are brought to life to magical effect.
Later still, when a landscape of floating mountains hovers into view, or when a Lord of the Rings-style epic battle between humans and the Na’vi is in full force, it’s hard not to be a little awestruck. Most pleasingly, teams of artists and digital tweakers have succeeded in making the blue faces of the Pandorans twitch and grimace and wrinkle with rare realism.
These moments are spellbinding, but not enough to obscure the fact that Cameron should have been more brutal in his editing: the start has too much talky exposition, the middle section meanders, and the final half hour, while it manages to avoid the Transformers-style mayhem it threatens to ape, doesn’t do enough to convince you that all you’ve been watching is a tricked-up, digitally-sophisticated mash-up of Pocahontas, Dances With Wolves and Last of the Mohicans.
So no: Avatar is not the future of cinema. It’s not the present. In fact, it’s barely even the past of cinema. It’s an achievement to make 3D look as good as it does here, but that counts for little if the characters are all in 1D. The film is a triumph of effects over affect.
Andrew Jack (senior journalist at the Financial Times):
http://www.culturekiosque.com/nouveau/cinema/film_review_avatardetailajack449.html
I felt increasingly uncomfortable as I watched James Cameron’s vastly expensive, exhaustively-gestated film Avatar. It wasn’t to do with the astronomical budget and light-years-long production, nor the result of my recently sprained back (although the length of the film, on top of a full 45 minutes of previews and adverts, didn’t help that either).
It wasn’t the general sense of being sucked involuntarily into a thrilling adventure with some impressive special effects, which works well on a superficial level and had my 10-year-old son and his friends instantly clamouring for a fresh viewing.
It wasn’t even primarily the consequence of the enormous and excessive marketing and merchandising hype, making it impossible for anyone who walks around town, watches television or reads a newspaper to be unaware of those strange white blotched, be-tailed and blue-skinned giant humanoid Navi with distorted faces who dominate the film.
My main concern, as the epic dragged on ineluctably towards its ever more predictable conclusion, was the underlying message. The good aspect, I suppose, was the righteous, politically correct theme: that evil, unethical, capitalist man in the ruthless pursuit of natural resources is destroying both his own environment and the traditional peoples who live in harmony with it. A bit of anti-imperial, pro-nature propaganda is no bad thing.
But it’s a convenient cop-out to transfer the story to an exotic far-flung planet in the distant future, with much of the action played out by Avatar surrogates. It cowardly avoids any too-direct and sensitive parallels with our own present and all-too-Earth-bound, human-driven dilemma. Such a film closer to home might involve a few more shades of grey rather than stark monotone Navi blue. Despite the 3D vision, the characters and plot in Avatar rarely rise above 1D.
The distance from our own reality also allows an easier transition to implausibly corny extremes, as we are initiated into a Gaia-like religion that manifests itself through glowing white aerial tree-roots. Its anthropomorphic name, incidentally, is the goddess Eywa — intriguingly close to the Arabic word for "yes."
Equally stretching the credibility limits of the known universe are the Navi themselves, whose telepathic-like communication with the wild animals they tame requires the temporary entanglement of the mass of mini-roots on the ends of their pony-tails to equivalents on the poor animals they tame.
But the really depressing aspect of the whole saga is still more fundamental. The Navi may be tall, strong, nimble, eco-savvy and intelligent (for the sake of our human "heroes," some even conveniently speak English). But the plot inevitably requires an American Earthling (or rather his virtual avatar) to come to the rescue, taking charge of his new-found exotic friends in order to save them.
And, still worse, their only defence, inevitably, is violence. Used in the hands of the righteous, it seems, the laws of Hollywood are indeed universal: aggression delivers. Subtlety, cunning, humour, negotiation, trickery, or even a gentle application of force are apparently not in the toolbox of this latest creation that requires the usual deployment of serious firepower, most of it apparently hardly updated since Vietnam let alone Iraq.
Despite the inter-galactic travel, in that sense Avatar dovetails closely with our modern era, when pimply CIA and U.S. Army hirelings operate joystick-controlled drones that kill real people in Pakistan, while their own inconveniences are limited to the level of air conditioning or the extent of available popcorn.
Nevertheless, there are some upsides, and more positive messages, too. After all, our hero Jake Sully is a marine who breaks free of his military bonds and conventions to switch sides and support the just.
Furthermore, he is played as a paraplegic — albeit within limits (Sam Worthington, the actor is able bodied, and he really comes into his own as his able-bodied avatar).
Sigourney Weaver does a great job in surpassing her Alien moment, as a tough but righteous scientist who defiantly smokes cigarettes (an act that is presumably now all but illegal on screen, except perhaps in a parallel, avatar-dominated solar system?).
A modest, but rather unsubtle, Cameron clin d’oeil to Apocalypse Now has Stephen Lang as the evil human colonel playing a touch of the Valkyries as he goes for the Navi kill.
If other characters also fail to move even into 2D, there are nonetheless some impressive 3D effects. You swoop with the protagonists off cliffs and bound across vertiginous forest tree-top branches. Personally, I found some of the 3D adverts that preceded the film itself were more striking.
There again, by popular child pressure, we are off to see it again shortly.
LOG: When I was looking for this kind of research (journalists opinions), I didn't have to look for long or too hard. There were so many to choose from but I thought that I would like to keep mine short and snappy so I only got the short reports entered in. I enjoyed the fact there was hardly any stress when doing this research as it wasn't as complicated as the others in this project. I finished this page sufficiently in time.
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