avatar

Oh, and my back hurts as well and has done for the last week - that was another reason for my bad mood.

This is avatar the James Cameron film, rather than the air bender one.

It was also in regular old 2D.  I still haven't seen any of these new wave of 3D films that was kicked off by avatar.  I can't honestly say I really fancy them, but also I don't really go to the cinema very often and getting 3D at home seems both expensive and like a massive faff.

Anyway, the USP (unique selling point dont'cha know) for avatar was therefore not available to me so I could only judge it on the effects and story, etc, though I did watch it on Blu-Ray.

I actually enjoyed it more than I thought I would.  I'd heard how it was basically Pocahontas in space, but I've never seen Pocahontas.  One thing I would say is the plot did seem relatively predictable, but even with that it's actually really well executed and throws in some nice little bits that keep you interested in what's going on.

The effects are, quite frankly, amazing.

The choice to do aliens was a very appropriate one as one of the difficulties with previous CGI movies is that the human characters have felt slightly creepy.  By using humanoid aliens it allows you to suspend disbelief and they don't feel creepy because they're different.  Of course I'm sure there will have been plenty of CGI humans in there too, but when you're being presented with aliens I think your brain is less able to notice them.  Plus things have come a long way.

It's also quite clear Cameron and the whole design time has had a blast with designing their own world.  It's quite a testament that it feels really believable on the whole - you don't feel like they've just stuck things in for ease but they've really tried to think about what an alien ecosystem might look like.

It wasn't all tea and cake, though as there were a few things that didn't quite work for me.

Firstly it was very long.  I'd say it just about stayed inside an envelope of acceptability, especially given the visual spectacle, but it was rather on the cusp of acceptability.

Another thing was the half-alien (where the avatar part comes from) Sigourney Weaver looked weird.  The problem was that she has such a distinctive look that it was the wrong side of looking like her such that it felt like they'd taken a photo of her, stretched it and dyed it blue.  The other characters weren't so bad, since the original actors either weren't hugely distinctive or the half-aliens looked more like caricatures.

But my biggest bug-bare was the use of "unobtanium" for the McGuffin - the thing that drives the plot but that actually doesn't really matter.  The problem was every time someone said it I felt jarred out of the narrative in that it was like a big spike to the brain going "clearly it's made this up but we're trying to be a little post-modern about it".

It's like a while back I put something into a story where there was a plane giving their code number reference name to the air traffic controller and I thought it would be a sort of a clever not to use "Whisky-Tango-Foxtrot" - so "WTF" in other words.  The problem was that as soon as I'd done that it had the effect of totally undermining the whole thing.  It was like I'd burst the balloon of the story's reality and it had just become a mess of self-aware nods and winks.