[Editor’s Note: Please welcome Tim Adkins to the Gladiator Movies team. You will hopefully be seeing more from him around these parts going forward and can catch more of his writing over at Backwards from 30.]
On Monday, an hour after word first began circulating that Kobe Bryant may end his two-week injury-cation from the Los Angeles Lakers lineup to suit up for Tuesday’s game against the Memphis Grizzlies, I received this text message: “I would like to have date night on Tues.”
The Liberian Girl who sent that text did not know the status of Kobe’s health, but she does know exactly how high the Lakers rank on my Priority List. Then again, she also knows where she rates on that same list.
So … on Tuesday night, as the game started in Memphis, I slid a pair of 3D glasses up the bridge of my nose in anticipation of my second screening of Avatar. The Liberian Girl burrowed into my left rib and nibbled on Nerds. She hadn’t seen the film yet and had finally caved to all the buzz about it. (After we ate a proper dinner first, of course.)
At this point, what more can you really say about Avatar?
The mythology of the film has been shredded, diced and gnarled by critics from all sides. “Why does the white man gotta save the natives again?” “Why is capitalism always the villain?” “How did we survive three hours without a single nipple slip?” (Whoops. That last one is more pornographic than political. But those two disciplines are so alike that who can really tell the difference?)
The story (and this won’t spoil anything if you’ve not seen it yet) is underwhelming. The characters are reduced, ironically, to flat caricatures. The dialogue is the height of cliché. There is more than one nagging continuity question. And, most alarmingly, there’s no actual nudity despite the fact that those barely-clothed, lithe blue bodies dance through the jungle for two-thirds of the flick.
All of which is to be expected.
Avatar is nearly three hours long. But it moves. It jukes through a brilliantly imagined world. It sprints through a simple narrative designed purely to provide back-up for a MASSIVE creative accomplishment.
There are so many teams of people who collaborated on the film that you need a second mouse to scroll through the whole cast and crew list on IMDb. If you know anything about the process of trying to make a film, the more people involved, the more likely it is that something about the finished product could suck. Long chains do tend to have lots of slack.
So if you’re spending eight kajillion dollars to invent a whole new way of making movies, something has to give, no? If you’re going to get anything really, really right, you need to conjure up all the genius your acres of collaborators can muster to make sure the world you create together is jaw-dropping. Anything else — like the story — should probably be executed as simply as possible. That compromise, regardless of what nonlethal stereotypes it furthers or what agendas it ham-handedly espouses, can ultimately be forgiven.
Upon exiting the theater, the Liberian Girl evaluated the film with a fitting eloquence: “The story was not amazing, but everything else was.”
As those words dribbled out of her mouth, my phone vibrated with a slew of new text messages about the outcome of the Lakers game. We slipped into the bar next to the movie theater in time for ESPN to show us that Kobe’s game-clinching shot for the Lakers had been just as precise as her evaluation of Avatar.
Both were simply amazing.
DYL MAG Score: 8
