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Avatar, yeah me too.
16 years ago
General
Should I rephrase this? Nah, nevermind. It's gonna get misinterpreted anyway.
So I finally saw Avatar last night, and apparently that means that I have to comment about it on FurAffinity. I don't know who makes these rules but I'm going to have to have a talk with that guy. Anyway, the first thing that I occurs to me to say is that the hype really ruined the experience for me. My first impression of Avatar was being pissed at the developers of Avatar the Last Airbender for not fighting harder for the rights to the name. Especially since they had plans for a movie of their own. I thought that they would have a lock on it. The Last Airbender TV series premiered on Nickelodeon about five years ago, officially giving them legal rights to "Dibs." I didn't know it at the time but apparently Avatar was first thought up in like the eighties or something and James Cameron had it put into cryogenic sleep for awhile there to wait until technology had advanced sufficiently to enable him to make the largest and most pretentious middle-finger to George Lucas he possibly could. The important detail that Cameron seemed to be missing was that Lucas' ability to make a great movie using primitive stone tools makes him a better director than you and no amount of supercomputing future space technology that tattoos the visible light equivalent of crack onto my retinas is going to change that.
It appears as though I've gotten off track though. I was trying to talk about how the experience was ruined by online reviews of the movie. (Yes, like the one I'm writing, very much aware of the hypocrisy thank you.) All the good reviews had me getting my hopes up, something I promised myself I would never do ever since I discovered the magic and logical infallibility of complete and uncompromising pessimism about everything. Then of course all the bad ones had me looking for fatal flaws wherever I could find them. I've always subscribed to the theory that if you look for something hard enough you'll find it whether it's there or not. Never was this more clearly demonstrated than when I was watching Avatar and was obsessively nitpicking in the back of my head the whole time instead of enjoying the movie. I couldn't tell myself to shut up and watch the spectacle loud enough, but have you ever tried not thinking about something? Don't think about the word hippopotamus. Don't think about the theme music of the Simpsons. Yeah, right now in your head there's a hippopotamus humming "duh da da dah daaaa dah da da dun dun dun DUN!" that is utterly indifferent to your attempts to banish it from your psyche. I suppose it says a lot in Pandora's favor that the positively dazzling world was able to punch that hippo's gigantic teeth out a few times and let me have some freaking fun. Yes there were indeed a number of shining moments where the only thought in my internet-addled brain was "whoa..." and Avatar deserves no end of praise for achieving that even when I was pretty much actively trying to prevent it.
I guess the Three-dee did help. The film pulled it off with remarkable style, something you don't usually see with a gimmick like that. I counted only two egregious "OMG look this thing sticking out of the screen holy crap technology is awesome!" moments. And for the rest of the movie the 3D went the much more aesthetically pleasing route of being nearly unnoticeable at a conscious level. It's like the way background music used to walk the line between noticeable and ambient before the days of epic movies where the musical accompaniment seems to have more talent than the actors. Music used to be something that you wouldn't think about. It would fade into the background (So to speak) and you wouldn't be aware of it because you were concentrating of the story. You wouldn't really be listening to it but you would feel the tone of the music and it made the action on screen much more meaningful. If you've ever tried watching a dramatic scene with the music track stripped out I'm sure you'll find that a lot of the emotion and depth of the scene is gone. The extra D in Avatar takes a similar route. You're not going "ooooh spectacle! Shiny curved surface!" the whole time, (Just most of the time...) eventually you just accept it as the medium and don't even realize that you're getting sucked in until something like your leg falling asleep reminds you of the truly insane amount of time that has passed. I don't know if it had anything to do with the glasses, but there were a few times where I felt like I could see into the future. It could've been predictable writing, good foreshadowing, quantum tunneling, or some combination thereof, but I could practically smell deus ex machina at times. I choose to believe it was a good thing because I pretty much giggled with unretsrained glee exercising my new superpowers.
I really didn't figure out how great that film actually was until it was over. As a man of science I am usually the type to cynically grin at the vain attempts of Hollywood writers to make whatever magic phebotinum their plot devices are fueled by sound plausible. It pretty much always falls flat with everyone. The people that don't understand it or don't really care and just dismiss it as meaningless technobabble, and the people who do know what you're talking about understand it well enough to see that you're just blowing smoke up their ass in a vain attempt to give your movie mass appeal and tend to react the way the way I do. That is to say, jaded chuckling accompanied by my amusement at the fact that they think they know how physics works. But getting back to my original point, (again) it wasn't until well after the movie was over and I was driving home that I realized that they had not only placed in front of me levitating mountains held up by the energy of the Na'vi's dead ancestors, and stated that this was completely within the realm of possibility contingent upon advanced alien biochemistry, going so far as to do the same with genetic God-playing, body switching, miraculous spine-mending, dreadlock-based brain surgery, space traveling, and developing a planet with a biosphere that is self aware and has a will that influences all living things, they had made me believe it! The significant part being that none of this occurred to me while I was watching the movie. All this was laid out before me and I was okay with it. I just accepted all that through some sort of neural bypass around the logic firewall in my head that tells me not to listen to any of this crap. Usually that conduit is only used by my dreams. Yeah, that implies that Avatar is at present contesting my own unchained imagination for dominance in terms of thinking up awesome shit. That pretty much says it all right there so I'll shut up now. Avatar officially gets my "Suspension bridge of disbelief" award for finally getting me to let go of my bitter and morose view of the world and actually be happy for a while there. And I don't mean like "misanthropic laughing at how much other people suck" I mean like "There truly is good in the world" genuine fucking happiness and didn't I say I was going to stop talking? Apparently I lied. (No I didn't.)
It appears as though I've gotten off track though. I was trying to talk about how the experience was ruined by online reviews of the movie. (Yes, like the one I'm writing, very much aware of the hypocrisy thank you.) All the good reviews had me getting my hopes up, something I promised myself I would never do ever since I discovered the magic and logical infallibility of complete and uncompromising pessimism about everything. Then of course all the bad ones had me looking for fatal flaws wherever I could find them. I've always subscribed to the theory that if you look for something hard enough you'll find it whether it's there or not. Never was this more clearly demonstrated than when I was watching Avatar and was obsessively nitpicking in the back of my head the whole time instead of enjoying the movie. I couldn't tell myself to shut up and watch the spectacle loud enough, but have you ever tried not thinking about something? Don't think about the word hippopotamus. Don't think about the theme music of the Simpsons. Yeah, right now in your head there's a hippopotamus humming "duh da da dah daaaa dah da da dun dun dun DUN!" that is utterly indifferent to your attempts to banish it from your psyche. I suppose it says a lot in Pandora's favor that the positively dazzling world was able to punch that hippo's gigantic teeth out a few times and let me have some freaking fun. Yes there were indeed a number of shining moments where the only thought in my internet-addled brain was "whoa..." and Avatar deserves no end of praise for achieving that even when I was pretty much actively trying to prevent it.
I guess the Three-dee did help. The film pulled it off with remarkable style, something you don't usually see with a gimmick like that. I counted only two egregious "OMG look this thing sticking out of the screen holy crap technology is awesome!" moments. And for the rest of the movie the 3D went the much more aesthetically pleasing route of being nearly unnoticeable at a conscious level. It's like the way background music used to walk the line between noticeable and ambient before the days of epic movies where the musical accompaniment seems to have more talent than the actors. Music used to be something that you wouldn't think about. It would fade into the background (So to speak) and you wouldn't be aware of it because you were concentrating of the story. You wouldn't really be listening to it but you would feel the tone of the music and it made the action on screen much more meaningful. If you've ever tried watching a dramatic scene with the music track stripped out I'm sure you'll find that a lot of the emotion and depth of the scene is gone. The extra D in Avatar takes a similar route. You're not going "ooooh spectacle! Shiny curved surface!" the whole time, (Just most of the time...) eventually you just accept it as the medium and don't even realize that you're getting sucked in until something like your leg falling asleep reminds you of the truly insane amount of time that has passed. I don't know if it had anything to do with the glasses, but there were a few times where I felt like I could see into the future. It could've been predictable writing, good foreshadowing, quantum tunneling, or some combination thereof, but I could practically smell deus ex machina at times. I choose to believe it was a good thing because I pretty much giggled with unretsrained glee exercising my new superpowers.
I really didn't figure out how great that film actually was until it was over. As a man of science I am usually the type to cynically grin at the vain attempts of Hollywood writers to make whatever magic phebotinum their plot devices are fueled by sound plausible. It pretty much always falls flat with everyone. The people that don't understand it or don't really care and just dismiss it as meaningless technobabble, and the people who do know what you're talking about understand it well enough to see that you're just blowing smoke up their ass in a vain attempt to give your movie mass appeal and tend to react the way the way I do. That is to say, jaded chuckling accompanied by my amusement at the fact that they think they know how physics works. But getting back to my original point, (again) it wasn't until well after the movie was over and I was driving home that I realized that they had not only placed in front of me levitating mountains held up by the energy of the Na'vi's dead ancestors, and stated that this was completely within the realm of possibility contingent upon advanced alien biochemistry, going so far as to do the same with genetic God-playing, body switching, miraculous spine-mending, dreadlock-based brain surgery, space traveling, and developing a planet with a biosphere that is self aware and has a will that influences all living things, they had made me believe it! The significant part being that none of this occurred to me while I was watching the movie. All this was laid out before me and I was okay with it. I just accepted all that through some sort of neural bypass around the logic firewall in my head that tells me not to listen to any of this crap. Usually that conduit is only used by my dreams. Yeah, that implies that Avatar is at present contesting my own unchained imagination for dominance in terms of thinking up awesome shit. That pretty much says it all right there so I'll shut up now. Avatar officially gets my "Suspension bridge of disbelief" award for finally getting me to let go of my bitter and morose view of the world and actually be happy for a while there. And I don't mean like "misanthropic laughing at how much other people suck" I mean like "There truly is good in the world" genuine fucking happiness and didn't I say I was going to stop talking? Apparently I lied. (No I didn't.)
