Last night, we saw Avatar. To quote Roger Ebert, "Watching Avatar, I felt sort of the same as when I saw Star Wars in 1977. That was another movie I walked into with uncertain expectations. James Cameron's film has been the subject of relentlessly dubious advance buzz, just as his Titanic was. Once again, he has silenced the doubters by simply delivering an
extraordinary film. There is still at least one man in Hollywood who
knows how to spend $250 million, or was it $300 million, wisely."
Like Star Wars, we enter a whole new world:
Like Star Wars, it is not a great movie – it can even be argued that it is not a particularly good movie. It has a formulaic plot lines and characters we have all seen lots of times. But it is a total immersion into a new world. The depth and detail of the new world – especially in 3D – are mind boggling. Like Star Wars, it is as shocking – in it's way – as jumping into a cold river. We were away and all the distractions of the dry world were forgotten.
The best non-video example I can think of is to go to the Internet Movie Database (IMDb). On the IMDb, the page for an old movie (for the best effect – any effect, really – use the following links), like, Casablanca to pick a random example, is a very handy, fact-filled page of information. For new movies, Clint Eastwood's new Invictus, for example, the page is the same. But Avatar is a whole new ball game.
Interesting observation from David Edelstein:
The last decade (and millennium) ended with the Wachowski brothers’ The Matrix, the ultimate expression of our alienation from the physical world, our vague sense that we’re living in a simulacrum and desperately need to reconnect with our fellow humans and actual bodies. Now, on the brink of the next decade, we await the release of perhaps the most expensive movie of all time, James Cameron’s Avatar, in which a crippled American soldier gets turned into a blue … pixel-ized … thingie, plunges into another dimension, and attains a level of vigor and moral purpose that eluded him in his own world.
Read more: David Edelstein on Visions of the Subconscious Mind- The 00’s Issue — New York Magazine http://nymag.com/arts/all/aughts/62515/#ixzz0bK8j1rby