Avatar

I must admit that when I first read about Avatar I thought that James Cameron was going to have a huge flop on his hands.  It just sounds like a recipe for disaster.  A love story between a man in a genetically fabricated alien body and a female alien set on an entirely made-up world, featuring a heavily green and anti-war message...hmmm..I can just see how that synopsis would make a veteran Hollywood producer’s eyes roll.  But amazingly, Cameron pulls it off.  At almost three hours, it was in danger of making my bum a little numb, but the action in the last act is so spectacular that in the end it didn’t seem overly long.  Its visually stunning.  Cameron is at heart a technician and here again he advances what is technically possible on the screen as he did with Titanic.  Avatar is not officially an animation, but it relies so heavily on CGI that it might as well be.  The blurring of the boundaries between live action and animation continues to gain pace.  I was reading The Envelope, the LA Times supplement which precedes the start of the award season, and seven or eight of the top movies of the past year have been animations. I don’t know whether this is good or bad.  Time will tell.  One interesting side effect may be that we get film actors who do not necessarily look like movie stars.  What does it matter what you look like in real life when you can be portrayed in any form by your screen Avatar?