Avatar has been the center of everything in the past couple of months. People praise it. Pope dispute it. Why is it getting so many attentions?
I think it is safe to say that James Cameron is difinitely a factor. The whole thing about he has been planning this movie his whole life. He basically has been lobbying the whole film industry to build the right atmosphere for his movie. He went to Sony to persuade them to change the brand new motion camera so he can use the gigantic thing on the go. And of course, the best blockbuster of all time can’t be ignored either. Then the movie got the Fox’s financial backing. Finally slap the staggering price tag to make this film on top of this whole pile of stuff. It means it’s going to be great.
For me, the most amazing part of the movie is the planet Pandora. It’s probably the first virtual world that has been created for any movie. You can argue that there are a lot of movies take place in the other planets but none of them has created a new world based on the movie. The stunning night scene of Pandora captures my eye from the beginning to the end. The Eywa’s ability to absorb the dead people’s spirit so they may live on and the amazing bio-networking concepts are all fascinating! The Na’vi language is my second favorite part of the movies. It seems like it is becoming the third fully developed fictional language after Klingon and Quenya. This is major because with language, you can establish a new civilization and that’s what Avatar has done.
The thing that brings up all the hypes is how the characters are generated. Basically you have an actor with these cameras attached to him/her while they are performing. It captures their emotions and facial expression so in the film, it doesn’t feel awkward when you see these Na’vi people when they laugh, cry, angry, or sad. It don’t look fake or artificial because it’s the real emotions that has been transfered onto the alien body.
Other than the three things I mentioned above, the movie is just an mediocre film. It’s up-lifting, it talks about protecting the environment, it talks about love and race. In summary, the usual Hollywood plot: One bad guy turned good and ultimately saved the very thing he/she was set out to destroy. There’s betrayal, there’s redemption, and there’s forgiveness. And part of it was even cheesy because Neytiri forgive Jake so easily. And the whole movies reminds me of a lot of other movies: Battle for Terra, Dance with the Wolfs. The floating mountains, the home tree, the flying mount, all resembles the elements from another fictional universe. Even the ceremony to acquire a flying mount is similar to another TV series on Syfy channel which I happen to forgot the name of it. So I think the film without the three reason I listed above is just another mediocre movie.
Now, it is not all that bad. For me, Avatar is a stepping stone to make the best film of all time, the World of Warcraft movie! For WOW community, what this film did was to opened up a door for this future project. Now that production and publishing companies know a whole virtual world can be build for a movie and people will loved it. The Warcraft universe has long to be a feature rich, background rich, character rich world. There has been at least nine books, a Wikipedia dedicated to everything that is World of Warcraft. There has been four games that related to this universe and the story is everywhere in these games. The fire breathing brood mother Onyxia, the cunning Nefarious, the betrayer Illidan, and the ultimate foe Arthas. The land of Azeroth has had it’s fair share of history. From the old gods to the Titans; the corruption of Sargeras to the fallen of the dragonflights. The magnificent Nagrand, the chilling, Northerend.
Now that spider 4 is dead. Sam can finally focus on WOW movie and I’m excited.
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