More on Avatar

So the recent movie I keep hearing Avatar compared to out there over the past couple of weeks is the Lord of the Rings trilogy. As I may have mentioned yesterday, in my opinion Avatar succeeded brilliantly in almost every spot where every LOTR film failed.

Ultimately, the recent LOTR trilogy basically boils down to Peter Jackson whacking off and ejaculating all over himself for about 10 full hours. I mean, this guy never saw a scene in his life that he wanted to cut. So he took a story -- admittedly, a long one -- and stretched it out into 10 hours of incredibly slow-moving, dragging-along action. Sure, he made a real spectacle out of it, with the costumes and the fight scenes and all, and those aspects of the movie were good. But you can't change the fact that I must have looked at my watch 20 or 25 times during the first movie in the theater, and I never even bothered to go see the second or third until they came out on tv and I could watch them over a couple of months which is how long it takes to get that much time together in one place to watch an epic like the entire LOTR trilogy.

I hardly remembered I even had a watch while Avatar was on. Although 2 1/2 hours is still a long movie, for another spectacle piece like this it's not too bad, and it moves very fast. You're just learning so much, experiencing so much, and really feeling like you are part of the action thanks to the filming and the 3-D effects, it's a more active moviegoing experience in a lot of ways than ever before, and the 150 minutes blew by except for maybe some parts as the last hour built towards the conclusion. In LOTR I couldn't watch an hour of that garbage without flipping the channel onto something else, just to get some fast-moving action. If Avatar was on tv right now, I would punch you if you even tried to pry the remote from my clenched hand.

The costumes were another comparison point between Avatar and LOTR from what I am hearing, and again, as incredible as this was in LOTR, ultimately I just don't see how using real people and real clothing and real costumes can compare to what we can now create using computers and cutting-edge technology to synthesize directly to the reel. This certainly was the strong point of Jackson's LOTR trilogy, and again he did a fine job with it, but can you really compare the way Pippin or Frodo or even the dwarves or elves looked, with how the Navi looked in Avatar? How can you? The Navi didn't even have to look, or move, or do anything like real people, whereas everyone in LOTR except for maybe Gollum and a few of the monsters was still restricted by the chains of reality, of humanity. The Navi could be anything. The CGI technology has finally gotten so realistic with Avatar that they created an entire planet of aliens and animal-like creatures that seem 100% as real as if they were real life things being filmed by a real life camera crew on real life Pandora. I mean, just this past weekend the first of the new Star Wars flicks came on Spike at night, and I watched a good hour or so of it in the background while I did some work and played some poker. And you know what? Not only is Jar Jar Binks annoying as shit with that idiot voice, but the animation really isn't that good. It's fine and all, but it's a bit like going back and watching the first Terminator movie now -- Jar Jar really kind of bounces a bit awkwardly when he walks, and there are multiple scenes where you can tell the other actors are really talking to nothing, and that Jar Jar was simply added to the scene later by computer. There was none of that in Avatar, none that I noticed anyways. Through a combination of the very latest in cameras and cutting edge computer and 3-D technology, Avatar comes off to the viewer as if you are right there in the thick of the action going on all around you, and like it is totally and completely real. LOTR? Not even close to the same thing.

On the overall creativity scale, Peter Jackson's take on LOTR once again falls woefully short of James Cameron's effort in Avatar. Although this would have been a golden opportunity for Jackson to set himself apart by taking some unique or particularly interesting takes on what has been done before in at least two other movies of the famous trilogy, instead Jackson pretty much stuck right to the script, including making characters pretty much the same way as they have been portrayed before without adding a whole lot in the way of true ingenuity or original conception. LOTR would have been a great opportunity to throw in things like the shiny-tail bugs or the wisps from Avatar -- they could have been all over the place, really, but that's not really what LOTR was all about the way that Jackson cast it. Jackson's attempt to recreate every scene from the book in more or less sequential order comes off just like that -- an endless 10-hour progression of scenes, each one done up to the nines as far as costumes and such, progressing towards a conclusion in the mountains of Mordor. And even the ending of LOTR would have been a great opportunity for Jackson to give his own vision of Hell, Evil, Satan, whatever you want to call Sauron, but I like most people I know was underwhelmed by the attempt. There wasn't much of anything in Avatar that was not depicted with the utmost of originality and flair. From the floating mountains, to the choosing of the bird-things, that early scene on Jake's first night on Pandora, etc., it was all just done on a level above and beyond LOTR. Frankly I think that is a tremendous insult to Avatar and a tremendous understatement of the level of ingenuity and detail that went into creating the best movie in over a decade.

As I think I mentioned yesterday, I think a much better analog to Avatar is 1999's The Matrix. Now there's a movie that rocked people's worlds like Avatar is. There's a movie I might have seen twice in the theaters. There's a movie I literally still talk about with regularity among friends and colleagues. Who the fike talks about Lord of the Rings? Other than you D&D loving, chain mail-wearing, King Richard's Faire-going dorks that is. Like Avatar, The Matrix is visually stunning, including fight scenes and chase scenes pretty much better than any movie before it. Both movies are captivating on a level not approached by any other normal movie, and I chuckle at the thought of anybody sitting in the theater back in 1999 watching The Matrix and continually checking their watch to see when the thing was going to be over. No way. I looked at my watch more than the screen when I saw the first 85-hour movie of Lord of the Rings!

Like Avatar, The Matrix also employed new technology and new direction with camera angles and such as compared to everything that had ever been created before it. As such, it changed movies forever, as since then about 30 movies have been made using the same floating-wire technology to enhance their own fight and chase scenes. It, like Avatar, was a completely unique piece of direction, something which a movie like LOTR cannot possibly say. LOTR was down-to-the-detail done-up, that is for sure, but it didn't really push the boundaries or send movies off in a new direction at all. It just did the same thing that had been done before, but on an extremely mega and detailed scale. Avatar and The Matrix, however, were as I've said, completely unique. The Matrix used wires and a new perspective on shooting to create the coolest fight scenes ever made. James Cameron invented his own camera technology and 3-D to place you literally right in the thick of the action in Avatar in a way that has simply never even been approached before.

As I said yesterday, I don't think there is any reasonable argument that Avatar is not the best movie of the past decade-plus. I think The Matrix back in 1999 is the last movie to come along that really can make a good argument to be as good or better than Avatar. It's definitely not as visually stunning as Avatar is -- ultimately not even close, really -- but the uniqueness, the originality, and just the awesomeness of that story surpasses the plot of Avatar for sure. It will always be difficult to compare a visual movie like Avatar to a drama like Shawshank or whatever genre you would call The Matrix, but in my mind there is no doubt that Avatar ranks among the top examples of films ever made by humankind.