Movie Reviews: "Avatar"

[JamesG]

Movie Reviews: Avatar

Even before it officially opened Avatar easily cleared one hurdle -- the movie critics.

Critical acclaim may no longer be an important factor in the success of a film, at least not with the core audience of teens and twentysomethings.

But it does often help determine whether older moviegoers turn up at the theaters, and they can sometimes determine whether a movie becomes merely a hit or a bona fide blockbuster.


Several reviewers confess that they walked into the press screenings for Avatar with low expectations, expecting a film with lots of technical razzle-dazzle but little, well, soul.

The Chicago Sun-Times's Roger Ebert was one of them. But, as he writes in his review, Cameron "has silenced the doubters by simply delivering an extraordinary film. ... It is an Event, one of those films you feel you must see to keep up with the conversation."

Ebert concludes: "It takes a hell of a lot of nerve for a man to stand up at the Oscarcast and proclaim himself King of the World. James Cameron just got reelected."


Cameron has also won over the notoriously faultfinding New York Times critic Manohla Dargis, who writes that Avatar reveals Cameron as "a filmmaker whose ambitions transcend a single movie or mere stories to embrace cinema as an art, as a social experience and a shamanistic ritual, one still capable of producing the big Wow."


Equally impressed is Kenneth Turan of the Los Angeles Times. "Think of Avatar as The Jazz Singer of 3D filmmaking," he writes, referring to the 1927 movie that ushered in sound.

"Think of it as the most expensive and accomplished Saturday matinee movie ever made. Think of it as the ultimate James Cameron production. Whatever way you choose to look at it, Avatar's shock and awe demand to be seen. You've never experienced anything like it, and neither has anyone else."


Bottom line, Steven Rea indicates in the Philadelphia Inquirer: "For the folks who plunk down their dollars (and pick up the plastic 3-D glasses), Avatar delivers.

Combining beyond-state-of-the-art moviemaking with a tried-and-true storyline and a gamer-geek sensibility - not to mention a love angle, an otherworldly bestiary, and an arsenal of 22nd-century weaponry -- the movie quite simply rocks."



While there are no outright negative reviews for the movie, several critics show restrained enthusiasm.

"Avatar isn't a perfect film -- and a few clichés short of a great one," Amy Biancolli writes in the San Francisco Chronicle.

But, she writes, it is a "monumental feast for the eyes."


Michael Phillips in the Chicago Tribune finds the first 90 minutes of the film "pretty terrific" but the other 72 minutes "less and less terrific."

He continues: "If your exhilaration with the first half is undercut by an increasingly deflating pfffftttt sound, Cameron nonetheless has delivered the screen's most anticipated and persuasive blend of live-action and motion-capture animation to date. The movie really does look fantastic."


And Rick Groen in the Toronto Globe & Mail anticipates criticism of the film from an unexpected source.

Avatar, he writes, is "definitely a movie to boost our faith in movie spectacle, and to remind us that Cameron is that rare technocrat who knows how to tell a story.

Ironically, a really old-fashioned story, in this case, and so steeped in liberal sentiment that our director, who has never been short of detractors, runs the risk of attack from a whole new direction. Damned if he isn't daring the Fox News crowd to brand him a tree-hugging pacifist."

-IMDB News