Avatar

I watched Avatar today at a matinee downtown. Honestly I left a bit disappointed. I mean this film has gotten a ridiculous amount of hype, its won big awards already, and made shit tons of money. So I thought my mind would be blown. It was not... I rank the new Star Trek much much higher.

I will admit that I have never seen a film like this before. It was out of control how crazy cool the special effects cinematography was... opening up a whole new type of film. Watching it in 3D definitely helped amplify the spectacle. The scenery was ahhhmazin. I want to live there.

My problem with the film is that it is 2 hours and 40 minutes long but I felt that the only exciting bits were condensed into maybe the last 30 minutes. Which left a good 2 hours and 10 minutes of extra stuff. When the film started it was paced really fast, within about ten minutes they were in their Avatar bodies, which made me expect that the rest of the film would be equally paced. But then it got bogged down in learning how to fly pterodactyls and becoming one with nature or whatever. Like, its cool yeah, but lets do this for 20 minutes and have 2 hours of fighting scenes ok? Not the other way round.

The fighting was awesome and could have been way cooler. I mean none of the made up animals breathed fire... something that should have been thought through a bit. Those bird things would have been way cooler if they were dragons, just saying.

The acting was fine, I didn't expect any breakout performances or anything. The guy who played the bad guy colonel was excellent, the rest were mediocre at best. The blue creatures were weird, but they didn't really make any sort of real impression on me.

Ultimately I would give the film a B- (which is still above average). It could have been cooler, but it was still pretty amazing.