AVTR.

Είναι βέβαιο ότι θα υπάρξει ένα κύμα πολεμικής εναντίον του ‘Avatar’. Πολλοί ήδη το βρήκαν βαρετό, με σαχλή πλοκή και εντελώς «αμερικανιά». Ε ωραία, το ‘Lord of the Rings’ δεν ήταν απλοϊκό σε σημεία; Κι εκεί δεν είχαμε απιθανότητες κι ηρωϊσμούς; Αυτό δε σημαίνει όμως ότι δεν ήταν σπουδαίο σινεμά. Έτσι κι εδώ, τα CGI κάνουν τα εφέ προηγούμενων μπλοκμπάστερ να μοιάζουν παιδικά. Όχι τόσο αυτά των μαχών, όσο οι λεπτομέρειες στη φύση του πλανήτη, τη βοτανολογία, τα μικρά σημεία που δεν πιάνει εύκολα το μάτι.

Όσο για τις επιρροές του Cameron για το φιλμ, μετράω:

Alien(s)
Last of the Mohicans
Star Wars
Call Me Joe
Pocahontas
Robocop
Wizard of Oz (“you’re not in Kansas anymore..”)
Assault Girl
Dances with Wolves



Η δική μου αίσθηση είναι ότι σαφώς δεν είναι αριστούργημα, αλλά αλίμονο αν δεν περάσεις καλά σε ένα τέτοιο φιλμ. Ώρες ώρες ένιωθα σαν να παίζω σε κάποιο videogame (το ‘Crash Bandicoot’, κατά προτίμηση).



Κι άλλες λεπτομέρειες:

He started by hiring USC linguistic expert Paul Frommer to invent an entirely new language for the Na’vi, the blue-skinned natives of Pandora. Frommer came on board in August 2005 and began by asking Cameron what he wanted the language to sound like? Did he want clicks and guttural sounds or something involving varying tones? To narrow the options, Frommer turned on a microphone and recorded a handful of samples for Cameron.

The director liked ejective consonants, a popping utterance that vaguely resembles choking. Frommer locked down a “sound palette” and started developing the language’s basic grammatical structure. Cameron had opinions on whether the modifier in a compound word should come first or last (first) and helped establish a rule regarding the nature of nouns. It took months to create the grammar alone. “He’s a very intense guy,” Frommer says. “He didn’t just tell me to build a language from scratch. He actually wanted to discuss points of grammar.”

Thirteen months after he began work on Avatar, Frommer wrote a pamphlet titled Speak Na’vi and started teaching the actors how to pronounce the language. He held Na’vi boot camps and then went over lines one by one with each actor. “Cameron wanted them to be emotional, but they had to do it in a language that never existed,” Frommer says. If an actor flubbed a Na’vi word, Frommer would often step in with a correction. “There were times when the actors didn’t want me to tell them that they had mispronounced a word that had never been pronounced before,” he says.

With the language established, Cameron set about naming everything on his alien planet. Every animal and plant received Na’vi, Latin, and common names. As if that weren’t enough, Cameron hired Jodie Holt, chair of UC Riverside’s botany and plant sciences department, to write detailed scientific descriptions of dozens of plants he had created. She spent five weeks explaining how the flora of Pandora could glow with bioluminescence and have magnetic properties. When she was done, Cameron helped arrange the entries into a formal taxonomy.

This was work that would never appear onscreen, but Cameron loved it. He brought in more people, hiring an expert in astrophysics, a music professor, and an archaeologist. They calculated Pandora’s atmospheric density and established a tripartite scale structure for the alien music. When one of the experts brought in the Star Wars Encyclopedia, Cameron glanced at it and said, “We’ll do better.”

[source]

Φυσικά, βλέπεται ΜΟΝΟ σε 3-D. Διαφορετικά, είναι μια απλή περιπέτεια.