InnerTeub

I’m usually loathe to disagree with my brother Mike. We’re good friends, and get along very well, but we have a tendency to revert to our 7 and 11 year old selves (respectively) when we disagree, and many disagreements tend to end with me frustrated and close to tears and him smirking and say “Ha! I told you you were stupid!”

But, you know, we both well over our teen years, and you would think we’d be able to intelligently discuss why he is completely and utterly mistaken about the movie Avatar.

The crux of his argument is this:

Avatar is a great movie.  It has a generic story but the look and feeling of the film was spectacular.  When i left the theater, and everyone else i left with, we had a collective sense of “holy crap, that was really something” feeling that never happens.  Ten years from now, i’ll remember my Avatar viewing but probably not my Hurt Locker experience. Thus, i’m voting for Avatar.

And this is where I disagree: I won’t remember Avatar in ten years. Hell, I can barely remember it now; I had to go re-read a review to remind myself of what the actual plot was. I left Avatar thinking “Wow, you know, that looked really cool.” But Best Picture? Really? No. To steal from Linda over at Monkey See:

It’s fine to admire Cameron’s technical advances with the movie — what he did with motion capture is clearly an advance in the sense that certain aspects of it moved the idea of CGI films forward. But the question becomes: in service of what?

…it reminded me of an incredibly gorgeous web site design where all the text was the dummy nonsense Latin that’s used to fill space and avoid distraction. Avatar works well as a demonstration of technology — particularly for other filmmakers who might use it for, say, better films.

But consider this, for a moment: If Cameron had made the movie with actors in rubber masks, and he hadn’t used special motion capture or a special camera — if he had made it as a conventional sci-fi movie — how good would it be?

And that’s really where I’m coming from with this. Avatar absolutely deserves as many awards are available for it’s technological coolness, but as an overall movie — by which I mean, a combination of story, acting, visuals and execution — it ain’t there. When I think of Inglorious Bastards, I remember the amazing acting by Christoph Waltz and Mélanie Laurent, the captivating story, the haunting visual of a blue eye peeking out from under a floorboard. That movie hit it out of the park on every level, almost serving as a master class on how to bring together a million different elements into a highly enjoyable film, whereas Avatar just kind of … looked cool.

And that’s Ok for Avatar to look cool. It’s impressive. But that doesn’t make it the best movie of the year, not by a long shot.

(I should note now that my brother compares the Oscar race between Avatar and Hurt Locker to the Star Wars v Rocky Oscar race for Best Picture, and where he comes down on the side of Star Wars on that one, I’m firmly in the Rocky camp. So it’s likely we’re just dealing with a difference of styles and expectations here, which is Ok, but doesn’t change the fact that I’m right and he’s wrong.)