Avatar was great.... really!
In 1986, mvt and I went to Vancouver for Expo 86, the World's Fair that year. In what is now BC Place, we saw some 3-D animation in IMAX films. They were cool. Honestly I don't recall what the movies were about, but the technology was amazing.
Many years, later, and many years ago, when we were talking about splitting the "dramatic presentation" Hugo award into film and television categories (I know they call them "short" and "long", that's fandom for you, and that's another topic). I was discussing this at a convention with someone who was trying to make the point that books were somehow so much better at storytelling. I did not agree. I think books and films and television are different media, not just different ways of telling the same stories, but ways of telling different kinds of stories. Certainly you can cram a lot more scientific exposition, and plot and characterization and everything else, into a 400-page novel than you can into a 100-page movie script (with a lot of whitespace at that). But reaching the viewer directly through visual and auditory senses allows media to bypass the filter of preconception and imagination and pour the story more directly into the viewer's brain. Suspension of disbelief is many times stronger; the story becomes a real part of the viewer's experience.
That's what Avatar did. I don't know that it was a giant technological leap, but it was interesting; more a matter of a director realizing his vision in a new way. The technology and the skill of putting this movie together made it far more vivid, far more than the mere story line would have been otherwise. I will remember details of this film for years to come, because of the way it was done. In terms of how I experienced it, I was there.
Yes it was Dances with Wolves. So what? I read some of the "white guilt" reviews, and I just don't care. I didn't kill the Aztecs or the American aboriginal groups, or the Jews, or the French at the Plains of Abraham, or the Vietnamese, and I wasn't in favor of bombing the Iraqis either. I just don't feel a lot of guilty. History is the cards we were dealt. I only have to go back half a dozen generations to find plenty of ancestors fleeing war, tyranny, famine, and death. Everybody has their share of history, and that's not to say the potato famine or the tyrannies of the post-Napoleonic regimes compare to slavery or the Holocaust. But I wasn't there to cause every injustice in history, and all this baggage isn't the point. Science fiction isn't history, it's fiction. It's about the choices we could make, or maybe those that we are making, but it's not about the choices our distant ancestors made. Maybe we can make the world, or other worlds, a better place, and maybe we'll learn a thing or two about the choices we can make. And yes, for every blockbuster film, there are a hundred science fiction novelists putting more original ideas per page into books that will be read by, maybe, thousands or tens of thousands of readers. But the way things work is the Hollywood meatgrinder takes the best ideas and blasts them out to millions or tens of millions of viewers, and that's how those ideas are disseminated to society at large.
There are plenty of moviews with profound stories that deserve to be told. What I saw in the theater was, maybe, the beginning of the end of two-dimensional media. This technology is going to get cheaper to use and companies are going to find more ways to give this to people. This is as big as HD or color. Fifteen years from now, we'll snicker at people who only have two-dimensional home video the way we now do at people who still use VHS. Directors and producers are going to use this technology to reach further into our experience and memory and make their stories part of our lives, with much deeper stories than this pretty fluff. "My cup is empty." It's not Shakespearean dialog, but we're still going to remember it, because of the way we saw it and heard it.
Good or bad, I have to leave to professional revieweres. What I can say is this movie was worth seeing. I'll probably go again when the lines are shorter, just to take in the experience again. Might be a year or three before we see something quite this remarkable again.
Many years, later, and many years ago, when we were talking about splitting the "dramatic presentation" Hugo award into film and television categories (I know they call them "short" and "long", that's fandom for you, and that's another topic). I was discussing this at a convention with someone who was trying to make the point that books were somehow so much better at storytelling. I did not agree. I think books and films and television are different media, not just different ways of telling the same stories, but ways of telling different kinds of stories. Certainly you can cram a lot more scientific exposition, and plot and characterization and everything else, into a 400-page novel than you can into a 100-page movie script (with a lot of whitespace at that). But reaching the viewer directly through visual and auditory senses allows media to bypass the filter of preconception and imagination and pour the story more directly into the viewer's brain. Suspension of disbelief is many times stronger; the story becomes a real part of the viewer's experience.
That's what Avatar did. I don't know that it was a giant technological leap, but it was interesting; more a matter of a director realizing his vision in a new way. The technology and the skill of putting this movie together made it far more vivid, far more than the mere story line would have been otherwise. I will remember details of this film for years to come, because of the way it was done. In terms of how I experienced it, I was there.
Yes it was Dances with Wolves. So what? I read some of the "white guilt" reviews, and I just don't care. I didn't kill the Aztecs or the American aboriginal groups, or the Jews, or the French at the Plains of Abraham, or the Vietnamese, and I wasn't in favor of bombing the Iraqis either. I just don't feel a lot of guilty. History is the cards we were dealt. I only have to go back half a dozen generations to find plenty of ancestors fleeing war, tyranny, famine, and death. Everybody has their share of history, and that's not to say the potato famine or the tyrannies of the post-Napoleonic regimes compare to slavery or the Holocaust. But I wasn't there to cause every injustice in history, and all this baggage isn't the point. Science fiction isn't history, it's fiction. It's about the choices we could make, or maybe those that we are making, but it's not about the choices our distant ancestors made. Maybe we can make the world, or other worlds, a better place, and maybe we'll learn a thing or two about the choices we can make. And yes, for every blockbuster film, there are a hundred science fiction novelists putting more original ideas per page into books that will be read by, maybe, thousands or tens of thousands of readers. But the way things work is the Hollywood meatgrinder takes the best ideas and blasts them out to millions or tens of millions of viewers, and that's how those ideas are disseminated to society at large.
There are plenty of moviews with profound stories that deserve to be told. What I saw in the theater was, maybe, the beginning of the end of two-dimensional media. This technology is going to get cheaper to use and companies are going to find more ways to give this to people. This is as big as HD or color. Fifteen years from now, we'll snicker at people who only have two-dimensional home video the way we now do at people who still use VHS. Directors and producers are going to use this technology to reach further into our experience and memory and make their stories part of our lives, with much deeper stories than this pretty fluff. "My cup is empty." It's not Shakespearean dialog, but we're still going to remember it, because of the way we saw it and heard it.
Good or bad, I have to leave to professional revieweres. What I can say is this movie was worth seeing. I'll probably go again when the lines are shorter, just to take in the experience again. Might be a year or three before we see something quite this remarkable again.