Sunday, January 24, 2010

Avatar'd (2009)


It is always a bad sign when I have the title of the Mad Magazine parody of a big movie, down cold halfway thru the picture.
Oh don't get me wrong it is an amazing movie, a technical achievement of the first rank. But the script, in which a space marine (Sam Worthington's digital doppelganger) goes native on a planet coveted by a mining corporation only to lead the locals in an attack on their occupiers draws on everything from "Little Big Man" out to "Dances with Wolves"....And doesn't do much else quite frankly.
Spectacular, but unmemorable.
All I can say is, that it ain't no game changer til the script breaks as much new ground as the technology, and that is never gonna happen as long as James Cameron is in the director's chair.
***
No, Avatar is interesting chiefly for it's meta-context, digital avatars in Hollywood of Sam Worthington and Sigourney Weaver enacting a script about DNA avatars loping around verdant jungles of the planet Pandora.
Can Sigourney Weaver trademark and copyright the 40-ish version of her own sweet self that Cameron ended up using in the picture? Does that mean that a 40-ish avatar of Sigourney Weaver could be still working in Hollywood for the next ten years?
Can the digitize Buster Crabbe's physique and start making new Flash Gordon movies?
Start touching up everyone's time worn faces?
Why stop there?
Why stop anywhere for that fact?
Does the past now have an ending, with this technology in play?
I'm just hoping on the next application someone makes a better movie, I think I've got a long wait though.

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