I finally went to see Avatar, the movie. My husband and kids had seen it while I was at my MFA residency and Hubby has been begging me to go see it with him ever since. I had no burning desire to see it, and I'm pretty busy, so I didn't actually get around to it until yesterday.
Now, if you haven't seen it you might not want to read ahead. I'm not going to give away any plot or story line, but you may not want someone else's opinion of the film influencing your viewing.
That being said, I wasn't overly crazy about it. Of course the visual effects are ah-MAY-zing. Seriously. I was totally engrossed in the beauty of it, and the 3-D wasn't stuff-popping-in-your-face 3-D. Honestly, after a few initial gratuitously jump-out 3-D effects I really forgot it was 3-D and just enjoyed the depth the effects added to the story.
Speaking of which...story...um...not so hot. Actually, it's not that the story wasn't great, it was just an old and oft-repeated story. In fact, it really reminded me of the Disney version of Pocahantes but with lots of splashy effects. That's not to say that it was bad per se, just predictable and kind of tired and already done.
The bad guy was just too over-the-top comic book which made him one-dimentional and I had a hard time hating him. He was just such a charicature that there wasn't any payoff when he finally died. It was just kind of ho-hum. And I got pretty dang tired of being battered about the head by the "morals" of the story. At some point I wanted to scream "Okay, I get it already! Back off! You're preaching to the choir!"
As we were driving home in the car, a 25 mile drive, Hubby asked me what I thought. He and the kids loved it a lot. Unfortunately, the MFA student in me began deconstructing the story and picking it to bits. I'm apparently ruined now by my education because I really just irritated Hubby. But I can't help it!
Anyway, if you haven't seen it, I say you should still go if for no other reason than to enjoy the sheer beauty of it. It's worth it solely for that reason. Just take the story with a grain of salt.
4 comments:
I do the same thing. I might see Avatar, but there are so many other movies that I want to see more.
I'm so glad to hear from someone else who deconstructs things like the movie. How true that digging into the technical aspects of writing can ruin some things for us, but at least for me, it also works the other way. I often annoy Hubby when I'm so blown away by the sheer eloquence of a well-written passage that I need to read it aloud and he is not remotely interested.
I haven't seen the movie for this exact reason. I've heard that the storyline just isn't as amazing as the visual effects. I figure I'll wait until it's released on DVD.
And as for deconstructing scenes and plot, I feel ya! I don't an MFA, but the more I write and learn about writing, the more I can predict just about anything in a movie or a book and then I get annoyed. While I love writing, I do hate that it's taken away some of the joy of reading.
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