Avatar (No Spoilers)

I saw Avatar on Tuesday, to get me out of a cold house.

I enjoyed the movie, but mostly because of the 3D, which I admit was very good. I thought the story was pretty thin and predictable, the characters stereotypes and I became irritated by the preachy nature of the script, which I felt was kind of insulting to the viewer – it was hard to miss the environmental message in the story, so I thought it was totally unnecessary to go on about it in the dialog as well.

As is inevitable with such a film, I felt it dwelt on many scenes for too long, showing off the 3D and CGI. I would have preferred it if they had kept the script tighter, so that the 3D/CGI enhanced the film, rather than being the raison d’etre. As a result I think the film would have been improved by being 20-30 minutes shorter.

Some people have reported headaches when watching this film in 3D – I didn’t suffer from that, but I did find that my eyes kept tearing up, requiring me to remove the glasses several times. I know that this was not due to emotion, so I can only put it down to some kind of eye-strain. Because of this, my jury is still out regarding the future of 3D movies.

2 Comments

  1. Chris Croughton
    March 5, 2010
    Reply

    I wanted to see it for the linguistic aspects (the language was actually designed by a linguisticist). I did find the 3D effects good, but in an odd way — after a short time I found them natural, and was only surprised afterwards that everything wasn’t like that. The only discomfort I had was with the ear pieces over my ordinary glasses (and a psychological problem because of losing peripheral vision, it felt as though I was sitting completely on my own).

    (Posted here directly because the LJ version has comments disabled — presumably not intentional because it still says that comments on LJ will be reflected here.)

    • chris
      March 8, 2010
      Reply

      Not sure why that happened. The post was created like all the others. Just experimented and set the LiveJournal version to accept comments, then updated from here, and it turned comments off again. However, a test post (now deleted) passed through fine.

      Anyway, have set LJ to allow comments again, and will keep an eye open to see if this happens again.

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