The wrath of nerds

As a die hard nerd boy, Ben was dying to see Avatar. It was released in Australia yesterday, so we toddled off to the theater to check it out last night. I knew nothing about the movie – I hadn’t seen a trailer or hadn’t read about it online. I was the blankest blank slate you could imagine.

And I think what I’m about to write may bring on the wrath of nerds.

As with virtually all of James Cameron’s films, it could have used a good heavy handed edit. I’m not opposed to 3-hour movies on principle, but if you’re going to keep your audience holding their pee for that long, you need to make every scene count. After about the fifteenth sequence of the hero learning the ways of the Native Americans Na'vi, I was starting to squirm and think, “OK. I get the point. IT’S TIME TO MOVE ON.”

And the animation. It was impressive. Beautiful, even. But everything was so…smooth. New. Nothing looked like it belonged to a old, historic race. I wanted to see something old, something worn, something used, something that spoke of being passed down from generation to generation. Instead, everything was so shiny and pretty, smooth and glowing, tinted like it had just popped out of an Easter egg (the entire color scheme could be summed up in three words: "My Little Pony"). Creating accurately worn textures is difficult, and I could see the problem with trying to apply them to a film where a good 95% of the visuals are computer generated. But I need a bit more meat with my gravy, and the entire thing felt more like a sophisticated cartoon than a punchy live action movie.

None of this is to say it was a bad movie. The plotting may have been a bit cliché (to be truthful, it reminded me of nothing so much as a sci fi version of Dances With Wolves), but that’s to be expected and still doesn’t make it bad as such. And I do think it’s the kind of thing that is meant to be seen on the big screen, so if you want to see it, make sure you go before it leaves the theaters. That said, I also don’t think it’s the magnificent epic it’s being lauded as, either; ironically, I think the recently released game would probably be fantastic, especially since the animation effects would be really well suited to that medium.

At any rate, it probably says something about my feelings on the film that that the best part of seeing it with my husband’s Nerd Herd was the conversation after the film: “Wow! Can you imagine the server farm it would have taken to render all of that CGI?!?” Geek boys. Gotta love ‘em!

Righty-o, nerds. Bring on the flames.

P.S. I could also add that it irked my graphic designer background that the title font for such a high budget movie so greatly resembles an overused font that comes as standard on half of Windows's operating systems. But I won't. Because that would just be obnoxious.