There is a lot wrong with Avatar which every friend of a hip film lover and former film major in the country has heard and doesn't fucking care LET ME ENJOY A MOVIE! It's lazy character development and design. It's set in the future yet the american military seems to have advanced any further than our genocidal past. It focuses on amazing visuals rather than a strong plot as would be expected from James Camerons near constant self back patting about his environmental film.
Look at him... saving the environment and lookin' good while he does all blue and... blue.
We're supposed to be touched by his plea to respect beautiful things before we lose them but the message from environmentalists is rarely just Save the Pretty Tiger. It's usually save the planet. The whole planet. We already want to save flowers and tigers, it's other areas like dirt, amphibians and fucking AIR that's still at the top of the Stop Poisoning This list. But I digress.
I mean look at how pretty that is! It's like if the ocean had sex with the best dog and had mutant ocean cute kitten babies!
Avatar is bullshit BUT it is successful bullshit. And yes that is half brilliant marketing and half incredible visuals and that is sad. BUT this has opened the door. We all know to cram the hippie message of save the world you have to cover it with enough icing to crack a smile on any down-home doin it for the little people politician. If a geeky twenty-something walks up to a fifty-year old stocker at Walmart just getting off the graveyard shift and says "You know, fossil fuels won't last forever and gas is never getting cheaper so why don't you hop out of your Ford diesel and into this Prius" he'll probably wake up on a trash barge heading to garbage island. But if a beautiful sexy woman walks up to the same guy and says "Tigers make me feel sexy but they're endangered and it won't get any better until we find alternative fuel" Lacking logic in the statement or not, the guy will jump into that Prius. For the tigers. Those sexy sexy tigers.
My point is, with everything going on in the average American's life, debt, kids, shitty jobs, hearing that they need to turn their whole life around from some dirt is not going to fly. Unless it looks inviting, beautiful and fucking AWESOME. Ah the trick of marketing. If slugs had the PR team Avatar did, banana slugs would be the it pet of the year. So fuck you Puggle.
Sorry puppy, a slug fits better in my purse next to my eye shadow and tampons.
But aside from the tacked on environmental message the technology used in Avatar are leaps in visual communication. In a year of every movie coming out in 3D, Avatar is the only one that used and created technology that when utilized in more interesting ways could create some interesting pieces of art in the future. The thing about 3D is not every movie is necessarily even when it says it is. There are two ways to create 3D. First way, you shoot the movie second person like we're all familiar with then add some lenses and editing and... look I don't know the specific technology just wikipedia it. The second way is using an actual 3D camera. That's why some 3D films look and feel strange and usually give you headache and others fit your eyeballs in a much more pleasing natural way. Avatar is it's own animal. And while it is depressing the idea that droves of people would still only show up to a film for the "experience" which is equivalent to showing a newborn the pictures in a storybook, we can't expect the first of it's kind to be a sort of 3D Godfather. If we go back in time, the first color picture (shot in color not had color added later) was a A Visit to the Seaside released 1908. Remember that film? Yeah I just looked it up too. Rotoscoping (drawing over live action like in Titan AE, Waking Life and A Scanner Darkly) was invented in 1915 to animate the directors friend in a clown suit for Out of the Inkwell and again to animate, wait for it, Betty Boop.
Here's Betty Boop one of the first famous rotoscoped ladies.
And Keanu Reeves and Winona Ryder, two ladies in later rotoscoping.
And for good measure here's Out of the Inkwell
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tszUgxP9kog
Both color film and rotoscoping began and continued in small projects without the gain of narrative prowess but were harnessed later to add a visual truth to a strong plot. To put it simply, fun tool created just to be seen used later to create atmosphere.
So Avatar is bullshit and a proud of example of the power of money. But, if it did anything wonderful, it opened two doors. Talking about the environment in a forum that doesn't require a Mate tea and a big chip on the shoulder and a technology advancement that really could advance a media further than it's gone in decades.
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