TWOW’s broad-brush sentimentality and somewhat off-the-shelf narrative elements rarely stirred the heart as much as the expertly handled action scenes – although no one is as expert at combining narrative and action as James Cameron.
#Avatar picture movie
But to be fair, no one came out of this movie talking about, say, the power of Sam Worthington’s performance (they were more likely to be going, “so which one was Kate Winslet?”) And apart from fluent Na’vi-speakers, few people appreciated the intricacies of the dialogue. To describe this simply as “film-making” is like calling the Moon landings a transportation exercise.īut what about as a piece of art? Surely that’s the thing that counts for best picture? Visually, TWOW is frequently gorgeous – a movie to bask and luxuriate in. All of this technological innovation and world-building imagination required colossal amounts of brain and computing power. No more weird movements or uncanny-valley creepiness it’s all been figured out here: the CGI, the motion capture, the 3D, the textures and physics of creatures and objects moving in space, and underwater! (Speaking of which, why doesn’t this movie qualify in the “best animated feature” category?) Not to mention all of Avatar’s fantastical creatures and cultures were designed and rendered from scratch. It is state-of-the-art digital film-making perfected. Few would dispute the fact that TWOW is visually dazzling, bordering on amazing. Even if the Academy would rather not admit it, cinema started out as a glorified fairground attraction as much as a dramatic art. The sceptics will argue that a lot of TWOW’s appeal was simply down to flashy spectacle, but that’s not to be discounted. But they clearly missed something that regular moviegoers connected with. Critics enjoyed panning The Way of Water for its hokeyness, its length, its garishness, its heavy-handedness, etc, etc. You can sucker a lot of people into seeing a movie in its first week (see the recent Ant-Man 3, or rather don’t – its US box office plummeted 69% in its second week), but you can’t fool half the world into going to see a three-hour movie, some of them multiple times.
As usual, the doubters were lined up waiting for James Cameron’s latest giant leap to fail, and as usual, it didn’t. Although by such measures, The Way of Water would win hands down: $2.2bn and counting.
This is not to say we should just stick to objective measurements, otherwise it would just be the highest-grossing movie that wins every year and there’d be no point to awards season. How do we measure what the “best” picture is? Best at what? Quality is subjective, and as we have seen time and time again, the subjective opinion of the sum total of academy voters when it comes to this category is very often terrible: Argo? Crash? Driving Miss Daisy? Shakespeare in Love? Please. And my argument hinges on that word “best”. To many out there, arguing that Avatar: The Way of Water should win best picture is akin to defending Charles Manson in court.
0 kommentar(er)
