Avatar

Well, I suppose introductions are in order. My name is Devin Griffiths. I am a twenty-five year old male living in Pennsylvania. I have dark brown hair, bright blue eyes, I weigh approximately 280 pounds and I am 6’5. But, enough about that, I feel like I’m signing up to a dating website.

I’ve been a fan of movies since I was a kid. I remember growing up watching The Little Mermaid when I was about six years old, and having the power go out in my house, and being afraid that Ursula was going to get me. Sometimes she had help from the Shredder as well. But, apart from being a young child with an active imagination, I never outgrew movies (I still watch The Little Mermaid and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles to this day).

A few years back, I even took a crack at making movies. I worked with my best friends, Nathan, Andrew and Eric, and we made an hour and a half long movie called The Necklace about a mystical necklace that a dark lord wanted to get because the necklace made people do whatever he ordered. Anyway, long story short, the good guys took the necklace to him in exchange for the good character’s sister, and then they sucked the dark lord into an alternate dimension (I had a lot of fun playing the dark lord, Groc). Needless to say, it was about as good as you would expect from four guys and one girl with no experience other than a drama class in Jr. High.

About a year later, Nathan and I had improved our acting skills, just a little, and we made another attempt at film making called A Father’s Love. It was quite a bit better than The Necklace. We entered it into a film competition, but never heard anything back. I will put a link to A Father’s Love somewhere on this page for those who care enough. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gGwJTdUMnnY Part 1 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mwuStwJimns Part 2.

Since then, Nathan and I have written a screenplay, and will eventually do something with it…we hope. Well, that just about sums up my movie life. Oh yeah, I also have a girlfriend whom I love very, very much, but we have very different movie tastes (she dared to call The Mist stupid!). She’s great though. My lovely Tandra.

Well, I guess I will start my first movie review. Between that sentence and this, about half an hour passed trying to think of my first movie to review. Something good, something pure. Nothing says good and pure like James Cameron’s Avatar.

The movie begins with the main character, Jake, a paraplegic, being woken from cryogenic freezing on a large space ship because he took his twin brothers place after the brother was murdered in a mugging. He travels to the planet Pandora with a large group of marines.

When he gets there, he is introduced to his brother, Tommy’s, ‘avatar’. An avatar is a mixed race between human and Na’vi, the native creatures of Pandora. The avatar’s are bred to a specific person, so Jake is able to use his brother’s avatar because they have the same genetics. The avatar’s don’t have minds of their own and are completely user run through a pod the humans hook themselves into, very similar to virtual reality.

Jake is put in his pod and synched up to his avatar and immediately runs off, due to being overly excited about being able to use his legs. He’s then stopped and is taken on a mission into the forest to study the trees. He then gets chased off and separated from the group by a Thanator (a larger panther like creature).

The bad guy then reveals that they are on the planet simply to mine all of the mineral called ‘Unobtanium’, and it sells for twenty million a kilo.

Jake is found by a female Na’vi named Neytiri and she saves him and takes him to the Na’vi and he begins to learn their ways.

I don’t want to give too much away in case you haven’t seen it yet, and in case you have, then it may be worth seeing again. I unfortunately did not have the chance to see it in 3D, but I still enjoyed myself.

There were a couple complaints I had, small plot holes. Such as one character who refuses to follow the orders of the military, but she isn’t punished for it at all and it’s never brought up. Also, another character who is a double agent for the good guys stays and spies on the bad guys, but in a futuristic military base I would imagine would have thousands of security cameras, so they should have seen him betraying the bad guys on the cameras.

The editing wasn't too bad, but the beginning felt choppy to me. The rest of the movie seemed to flow pretty well. The graphics truly were amazing. About sixty percent of the film was CGI, but it was so good that you barely notice at all.

The film though at points felt rather condensed, almost like a large book being made into a 2 and a half hour long movie. I felt a lot of it didn't get explained in the end, and that it would have made a fantastic 700 page book.

Overall it was a good movie, and it was definitely a good return of James Cameron. I give it 8 out of 10 stars.