Academic

AN AVATAR REVIEW from Knoxville reader Marlon McAvoy: Thought I?d offer the tiniest possible back?

By Glenn Reynolds

AN AVATAR REVIEW from Knoxville reader Marlon McAvoy:

Thought I’d offer the tiniest possible back-backlash to Avatar, after taking the nieces to see it yesterday on the really big screen.

Oh, it’s stupid. It’s so relentlessly, ubiquitously stupid that my b.s. sensors burnt out early in Act I and left me free to enjoy the spectacle. We had to sit third row from the front, which was too close, but there were some beautiful vistas and swooping scenes that occasionally felt more like a ride than a movie. I’ve got a 65″ TV at home and will buy this in BluRay whenever the price dips below retail. Can’t wait to see a good movie at this level of tech!

But as regards the outcome of the Avatar “war”: obviously a consequence of interstellar travel is that it physically restructures the brain, so as to make kinetic weapons delivered from high orbit an impossible concept. Sort of the way that Star Trek’s warp technology wiped the very idea of “seatbelts” from human consciousness.

Heh.

UPDATE: A less positive review, from Christopher Althouse Cohen.

ANOTHER UPDATE: a pan from John Podhoretz. “The movie is nearly three hours long, and it doesn’t have a single joke in it. There is no question that Avatar is an astonishing piece of work. It is, for about two-thirds of its running time, an animated picture that looks like it’s not an animated picture. On the other hand, who cares? . . . The real question is this: If Avatar were drawn like a regular cartoon, or had been made on soundstages with sets and the like, would it be interesting? Would it hold our attention? The answer is, unquestionably no. There’s no chance anybody would even have put it into production.”

Full post as published by Instapundit.com on December 19, 2009 (boomark / email).