Something to watch tonight: Monday 15 December

Avatar (Cameron, 2009)

So this week­end was taken up by the Australasian première of the third Avatar film (Avatar: Fire & Ash) and the attend­ant media junket.

I was rep­res­ent­ing RNZ at the press event but declined an invit­a­tion to the red car­pet screen­ing at the Embassy. I’d seen the film already (we had a pre­view at the Queensgate IMAX on Thursday night) and I’m not super-comfortable at those sorts of things.

On Saturday I called in to RNZ’s Saturday Morning show to chat with Susie Ferguson about the pre­par­a­tions and the mood of the media at the InterContinental. Then about 45 minutes later, I sat down with dir­ect­or James Cameron for a 20-minute inter­view. I was nervous as heck but it went really well and you can listen to it here (embed­ded half way down the art­icle I wrote on Saturday after­noon). Also on that page is a two-minute clip of the video to prove I was actu­ally there.

I also had a ten-minute ses­sion with act­ors Sam Worthington, Cliff Curtis and Jack Champion which I used mainly to try and get more back­ground on what Cameron is like as a dir­ect­or of actors.

The embargo on reviews lifts on Wednesday morn­ing and mine will appear on the RNZ web­site (and I’ll link to it in Wednesday’s newsletter).

As my mind has been on little else except Avatar this week, I thought it might be fun to go back to my con­tem­por­an­eous review of the first film which opened exactly 16 years ago tomorrow.

There have only been asked two ques­tions that any­body has been ask­ing me this week: “Have you seen Avatar?” and “Is it any good?” Thanks to the help­ful people at Readings I can say “Yes” to the first one and thanks to James Cameron I can say “Whoah” to the second.

Like many Wellingtonians, I have been fol­low­ing Avatar’s pro­gress since pro­duc­tion star­ted in 2007 and it’s almost impossible to be genu­inely object­ive. It’s only nat­ur­al for loc­als to try and claim some own­er­ship of a pro­ject like this and we are all a tiny bit inves­ted in its suc­cess. The hype has cer­tainly been hard to avoid so I was slightly pleased when the fif­teen minute extract on “Avatar Day” didn’t fill me with delighted anti­cip­a­tion. I couldn’t quite my head around the char­ac­ter design of the Na’vi (the indi­gen­ous race peace­fully pop­u­lat­ing the beau­ti­ful but deadly plan­et of Pandora). The blue – the tails – the ears. I couldn’t for the life of me work out how these char­ac­ters were going to be cool and I thought that *cool* was going to be important.

Well, I’ll hold my hand up and admit that Cameron was right and I was wrong. Avatar is the finest example of com­mer­cial block­buster enter­tain­ment in years but still con­tain­ing more than enough subtle sur­prises to sat­is­fy the film nerds.

Paraplegic Marine Sam Worthington (described by this report­er as an “Aussie boof­head” in the review of Terminator Salvation, a com­ment which prob­ably should be grace­fully with­drawn about now) is sent to Pandora to take his dead brother’s place in an exper­i­ment­al anthro­po­lo­gic­al team attempt­ing to bond with the nat­ives before the min­ing com­pany starts rip­ping the heart out of their home. His DNA will be fused with the Na’vi and the he’ll be able to remotely con­trol the res­ult­ing creature – an avatar – learn their ways and get them to trust us. The evil cap­it­al­ists in charge of the pro­ject have oth­er ideas, how­ever, and it is up to big Sam (along with his new Na’vi chums) to save the plan­et of Pandora from exploit­a­tion and genocide.

There’s noth­ing start­ling about the story. Given how long Cameron has been gest­at­ing this, I sus­pect that he has been recyc­ling char­ac­ters and ele­ments for his earli­er films (like the Paul Reiser char­ac­ter in Aliens) rather than the oth­er way around but it’s the tech­no­logy, and Cameron’s supremely con­fid­ent use of it, that really makes Avatar soar. It’s easy to for­get when watch­ing the end­less line of for­get­table dull product passing through mul­ti­plexes that cinema has always been as much about the ride as any­thing else, and when the ride is excit­ing you really can leave your own life behind for a while.

Somehow I also had room that week to review the Liam Neeson drama Five Minutes of Heaven, “tooth­less” com­edy Bandslam (“David Bowie should be ashamed for let­ting him­self get any­where near it.”) and the dis­hon­est doc­u­ment­ary about intel­li­gent design, Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed (“… it’s a scan­dal that the Paramount, for 90 years the home of cine­mat­ic enlight­en­ment, should be giv­ing a show­case to this small-minded fraud­u­lent horseshit.”).

Where to watch Avatar

Aotearoa, Australia, Canada, Ireland, USA, UK : Streaming on Disney+

India: Streaming on Hotstar