by Koblentz Wed Dec 01, 2010 4:19 am
Redline wrote:So Rhosauce and I were having a discussion while walking the dog recently and, put simply, can a movie with a concept made of UTTER SHITE be redeemed by its graphics?
The greatest thing excellent CGI in a terrible movie has ever done for me is make me wish that the producers of better films had access to the kind of money that I was currently watching go to waste. In that way it distracted me enough so that I did not appreciate the full enormity of the crime against filmmaking that was being committed on the screen in front of me.
Rhosauce wrote:Our debate was over Avatar. My argument was that rating it low out of 10 purely because the storyline was generic was unfair.
I agree that it is unfair. A film is more than a storyline, when reviewing it you have to also take into account the artist's success at making their vision a reality. And by "vision" I don't just mean the visual aspects of the film, I mean the original vision of all aspects of the completed product.
Cameron's intent in
Avatar was to create a believable alternate reality through pervasive CGI and make it work well in 3D. Obviously, he was hugely successful at this, no one is arguing that he wasn't. Story was secondary, though he was still successful at incorporating an interesting narrative because the worst anyone can say about it was that it was "generic".
The whole "looks vs. substance" debate can basically be resolved by simply examining artistic intent and seeing how well the artist did. In fact, I'm willing to go a step further and say it's a false dichotomy -- you need not pick one over the other. The fact that we're having this debate says more about a film industry that makes most of its money by churning out a dozen big, expensive, CGI-filled, and ultimately mediocre movies and year while the real
films with artistic merit are made on budgets far smaller and thus not conducive to lots of CGI.
Avatar is a well-made film with mass appeal that upsets this "looks vs. substance" frame of mind that many have. Combine that with automatic hate from certain sectors for anything expensive and/or popular and we end up with weird arguments like the one in this thread.