AVATAR

dMYD
Starring Myriad Blue Humanoids with Vaguely Rubbery Skin

M

Damn they look rubbery. Get up close. Let the 3D get up close to you. Look at those Navi, look at their skin. They look rubbery. The dawn of the digital picture is upon us and the ridiculously advanced computerized flesh looks rubbery. Like a man in a rubber suit.
So it’s one step forward and eight steps back then, stepping backwards and flumping back into that coke addled seat to watch the movie that took eighty six years to make and couldn’t find a likeable character. The mass experiment to develop the cameras of the omni-future, descending from timelines random to bring celluloid rapture to an undeserving world that couldn’t bring itself to think up a vaguely original story. The work of art with no script. The ‘unobtainium’. It’s easy to kick Avatar in James Cameron’s face because of the marketing, the steady tributary of revolutionary concepts and barefaced lies that propagated from the first inkling of his bashed about dream project. But taken just as a film it’s beautiful. It’s beautifully shot and beautifully conceptualized, with great leaps forward for the digital age of film. But it’s a Mills and Boon book printed and bound with diamond. Every aspect about it aside from the visuals is a film that you’ve seen before, from the acting to the script to the score. The themes are trite and basic, the characters stunted and stupid, the bad guys cliché-mongering American-cigar-chomp-yee-ha-boredom-deposits… But it looks like a Turner painting. In 3D. The audiences of one hundred years hence will sit and watch a clip in the New Johannesburg Celluloid Museum and think, ‘Wasn’t Heath Ledger amazing in The Dark Knight?’.