Just over a month ago, much of the spectacle of Avatar was still unknown to moviegoing audiences. Early reviews told us that it was a “triumph” and full of “jaw-dropping wonder” but the real test would be in how the masses reacted to it. If anything, 2009 taught us that critical opinions aren’t always in line with what people really pay to see, but in the case of Avatar, it seems that reactions are mixed across the board from glowing praise to abject derision—including our own. As a departure from our normal format, here Paul, Robert and Scott discuss the impact Avatar has had on them and the movie landscape.

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Robert (RC): First things first. Since the big selling point of Avatar is the technology involved in making it and breakthroughs in the 3D process, how did you see the film? I went to the Avatar Day event in a “fake” IMAX theater and saw it in 3D and was pretty blown away, so I knew I had to see it in 3D no matter what. I’d have liked to seen the movie itself in IMAX (or even fake IMAX) but settled for a regular-sized screen. How about you guys?

Paul (PS): I saw it in in 3D with digital projection; it wasn’t an IMAX-sized screen, but it was big and bright enough that at no point did I feel insufficiently immersed. Leaving the theater, I had no doubt that I’d gotten my fifteen bucks worth of movie. I wonder what the per-frame cost works out to?

Scott (SH): I saw it in IMAX 3D, because I’m just a sucker for IMAX (I nearly saw the Keanu Reeves Day The Earth Stood Still remake just because I could see it all big-like). I’ve never liked 3D – not when I saw Captain EO with the red and blue glasses, not when I saw the Superman Returns and Harry Potter 3D IMAX with the thinner gray glasses – and this didn’t change my mind. 3D movies don’t involve me, they distract me, and the glasses are really uncomfortable over my regular glasses, cutting into my ears and pressing the lenses into my face. A well-filmed movie already has a sense of dimensionality, just look at the best Blu-ray transfers. I did love seeing it in the massive IMAX scale though, and I think seeing it in 2D on an IMAX screen would’ve been a much more immersive experience for me. The segments of The Dark Knight filmed in IMAX, for example, gave me a “you are there” immediacy much more than anything in Avatar 3D. Do you guys think I’m just a 3D hater though? It seems like Hollywood is banking on this to save the movie industry.

RC: I’ve always thought 3D was little more than a gimmick and except for a couple of IMAX 3D movies I’ve seen, it’s always been more annoying than anything else. But I have to admit, Avatar was the first movie that changed my mind about that entirely. The old red and blue glasses have never worked for me. Something about my eyes fights the weird color trickery to it, but the new RealD glasses don’t bother me one bit. I sat through all two and a half hours of Avatar and came out sold on 3D as a way to create an immersive moviegoing experience. That said, if the news out of CES last week] is any indication, I do think Hollywood’s putting too much emphasis on 3D as a viable consumer technology in the home. I think most people like their 3D is small doses—if any at all—and certainly not on every TV channel.

PS: I thought the 3D worked well. I’ll be interested to see how it looks on a regular old screen, but what impressed me more than just the effect was how comfortable Cameron seemed to be with it. He—and the technical guys under him—really seemed to have a good sense of how to use the illusion of depth to create a truly immersive effect. I know most everybody is saying this, but in this case it’s really true.

But I have to say I think the character animation and motion capture stuff is at least as impressive as the 3D. I found the Pandoran wildlife and the Na’Vi completely convincing. (Well, except for Sigourney Weaver’s nose.)

RC: Good point. Since that’s the other big technological breakthrough being thrown around in all the Avatar coverage (the photorealistic, motion-captured animation), this just reinforces my belief that Peter Jackson and WETA really hit gold with Gollum in Lord of the Rings and refined it in King Kong but Avatar is showing us just how far this process can go, capturing not just one but several performances at once. To me, there were a few instances when the Na’Vi looked a little cartoony but for the important moments where it counted, I thought it was spot on. By the end, I was sold on the idea that these were living, breathing creatures.

SH: I can’t say that I was able to fully give myself over to the giant blue folks. I love that this is a film direct from James Cameron’s mind, unadapted from anywhere else, but at the same time, my puny human mind could never fully grasp these noble blue savages and forget that they were computer creations.

Enough of my complaining though. I can pick apart details all day, but on a macro level, I really loved this movie. I concede all the problems with the unoriginality of the story and Cameron’s tin-eared dialogue (a problem with every movie he has ever written), but I went into this expecting an explosive, sensory-overloading spectacle and it definitely delivered. I’m really surprised that more people aren’t seeing Avatar as a spiritual descendant of gigantic old-timey roadshow movies based around an archetypal stories like The Ten Commandments, The Longest Day and How The West Was Won. All of those movies had derivative plots you’d seen a million times before, but they were all about spectacle, not story. I love a great script as much as anyone else, but not all film has to be plot-based. It’s a visual medium, and anyone who brushes off Avatar’s insane visuals is completely missing the point. Has anyone ever trashed a Woody Allen movie because of the dull cinematography?

RC: And yet, I think there’s a substantial difference between Avatar and let’s say, Transformers 2 (the other big visual effects extravaganza of 2009) because there’s a certain reverence that it tries to adhere to. They’re both exercises in simplistic storytelling, but to me, Avatar doesn’t become degrading in what it sets out to do or try to appeal to me with dick and fart jokes. It’s just a simple premise that doesn’t distract or get in the way. In fact, I think it’s a very intimate premise—a man agrees to do something for his own interests and discovers his way of thinking is all wrong and decides to change his own future—that’s played out a thousand times before in smaller, quieter films to a substantial emotional effect. If anything, my problem with Avatar is that the rest of the film plays on a scale so big it makes the story of Jake Sully look miniscule in comparison.

Now that doesn’t include the dialogue—which I can agree caused a couple of winces and groans—but it’s true, just about every movie Cameron’s written has that quality to it. It’s nice when something good shines through but that’s never something I go into one of his (or most other) action films looking for. That’s not to say it all falls flat but it didn’t inspire me like what I was seeing on the screen. Even then, the best dialogue can turn into garbage in the wrong hands, and I have to say I wasn’t really disappointed with any of the performances in Avatar. I think it says something that Sam Worthington’s performance is more inviting as a Na’Vi than when he’s Jake, and I’d like to think that was no accident.

PS: It’s not the unoriginality of the story that bothers me. There are plenty of enjoyable, even moving films whose stories owe a debt to stories that have come before. I don’t demand brilliant originality in every film—and particularly every genre film—that I watch. Nonetheless, my issues with the story are twofold.

First, it’s not the cliche of the going-native trope that frustrates me. It’s the fact that it’s an inherently problematic idea, and modern storytellers should be aware of the issues of race and privilege that it packages—Cameron is either not aware of these issues, or doesn’t care. People are talking about the obviousness of his environmental and political message, but there’s another message here—that what these blue folks really need is a white guy to save them, in a way that relieves the white guy of his complicity in their oppression.

I still think there’s a way to tell a story like this in a much more incisive way, but not with Jake Sully, which brings me to my second issue. I find Sully to be almost unwatchably self-serving in the choices he makes. The most emotionally affecting moment in the film, for my money, comes with Ney’tiri’s anger and sorrow when she discovers that Sully’s been leading her and the rest of the Na’Vi on all along. She has every right to be furious with him—I was furious with him, too.

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