Roger Ebert is on fire in Slate’s vastly entertaining The Movie Club feature — it’s all good stuff (as are the contributions from other critics), but his discussion of his plot issues with “Avatar” had me nodding in relieved agreement. I thought I was the only one wondering this:
Assuming that an avatar can live with no connection to the mother ship, what does it think with? When its human master dies, who is upstairs? Does the mind of Jake Sully transfer? I have an eerie feeling I may once again have missed a crucial plot detail, but if Jake Sully’s mind can be inside his avatar, then that really is Michael Keaton inside the snow man in Jack Frost.
His statement on the potential “Avatar” vs. “The Hurt Locker” Oscar battle after the cut.
The Hurt Locker is the year’s best film. Should Avatar snatch that Oscar away, it will be because it grossed zillions of millions, not because it’s better. Avatar is an enormously effective experience, an awesome technical achievement, a universal success, but a great film, it’s not. If it were, we’d still be on the floor of the theater. Some of you are quite right about its dialogue and story, and I’m sure you’ve all seen the comparisons to other screenplays. Those shortcomings are beside the point. I’m pretty sure it’s impossible to make a great film with a $250 million budget.
More here.
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50 responses to “Ebert on ‘Avatar’ logic”
I never thought I’d hear Jack Frost mentioned again. As for the question, keep ’em guessing! Maybe they’ll answer it in Avatar 2.
“but a great film, it’s not.”
So why does he give it 4 stars?
To me, that reads as a 3 or 3.5er. I just don’t know.
Great as in GREAT OR great. “Greats of all time” or “that was a great movie”.
Well he’s right about one thing: it’s not a great film. It’s a great experience, but that shouldn’t win it a best picture Oscar.
“Assuming that an avatar can live with no connection to the mother ship, what does it think with? When its human master dies, who is upstairs? Does the mind of Jake Sully transfer? I have an eerie feeling I may once again have missed a crucial plot detail, but if Jake Sully’s mind can be inside his avatar, then that really is Michael Keaton inside the snow man in Jack Frost.”
An Avatar can’t live with no connection to the mothership? What is he talking about. Sully becomes a Na’vi at the end through a magical ceremony that switches bodies (Doesn’t matter if you believe in that, in their world it works).
Anytime they are disconnected “from the mothership” the bodies go “lifeless”, figuratively and literally.
I’m in agreement with everyone over the script, but this is the one part that makes perfect sense, unless I’m missing the question.
The best part is when he calls Jeff Wells a douchebag.
Im still praying The Hurt Locker doesnt win the best picture Oscar.
Meh, I don’t care what anyone thinks. I thought Avatar WAS a great film and The Hurt Locker was not. I seem to be in the minority though.
I’m still curious why its supposedly between these two, I think Up in the Air has a better chance than Avatar. That being said The Hurt Locker will porbably win.
That’s probably because you’re wrong.
Rogers mention of Jack Frost was pretty funny.
That’s beyond ridiculous: “It’s impossible to make a great film with $250m.” That’s the kind of snobbish critics’ attitude that results in the infamous “disconnect” between the Academy and the public that’s so often decried… That is, if and when the Academy adopts that stance, and it often enough does. The idea that a film that’s primarily an entertainment and successful (also: doomed to be successful because it was expensive) cannot be a film of quality is what has kept several movies from reaching Oscar glory in the major categories where they should have been rewarded, many of which are sci-fi, by the way… Alien (and Aliens), The Matrix, to name just two. But many of these films have of course stood the test of time better than many of the films that critics, in their year, thought to be “great”. So now once in a blue moon a film comes along that critics agree on as being very, very good (to avoid the word “great”here) and that also millions of people love, we suddenly have to backlash against it before Oscar *nominations* are even out? Give me a break.
And no, I have just seen The Hurt Locker for a second time, and it’s still just solid. No less than solid, and well-made, but also not more than that.
What the fuck is he talking about? Did he even see the movie? No, an avatar CANNOT live without a connection to the mothership. When its human master dies or becomes disconnected, then the avatar becomes lifeless, as shown SEVERAL times in the movie. Jake’s avatar awakens at the end of the movie, as Ryan says, because his human conscience is literally transferred by the Na’vi into another Na’vi body, so he will be one of them for eternity.
And “Avatar” is absolutely a great film. “The Hurt Locker” is absolutely not.
I don’t think the Academy membership will break this down to a race between AVATAR and THE HURT LOCKER. That’s just an easy thing to write about and honestly, it’s a little lazy. AVATAR made zillions, THE HURT LOCKER didn’t – it’s classic David and Goliath. The more likely race, in my opinion, is UP IN THE AIR vs THE HURT LOCKER. Avatar simply is NOT a good enough movie to win best picture, as cool as it is. A film’s box office prowess, or lack thereof should not be, and I would venture IS NOT a bellweather of its ability to win. Academy members who are serious about their voting now have some reasons to actually watch THE HURT LOCKER and while it would be the lowest grossing best picture winner in Oscar history, stats were made to be rewritten. UP IN THE AIR, by contrast, is a movie most of them have seen and only gets better the second time around. It’s more watchable, and more of a “want to” watch rather than a “have to” watch than THE HURT LOCKER. And at the end of the day it’s a really great picture that is far more universal. The win is UP IN THE AIR and that would be fine by me. I’d be fine with BASTERDS, LOCKER or UP IN THE AIR – but if AVATAR wins best picture I will be very disappointed in those card carrying AMPAS members.
Jim, Matthias, & others (who are in the same boat as me) …
… if you were to ask me which films is BETTER, ‘The Hurt Locker’ or ‘Avatar’ … without a doubt, it’s ‘The Hurt Locker’.
If you were to ask me which film I ENJOYED more … ‘Avatar’, by a clear margin.
Considering how detail-oriented Cameron is, and what I’ve read about Avatar that he was involved and very specific in every little thing having to make sense, from weapons, helicopters, animals, I would guess that he probably has a 200-page manual on how exactly the whole avatar program works.
Personally I didn’t have a problem with it, even if it’s not explained in exacting detail. It’s called suspension of disbelief. And frankly, getting on Avatar for not fully explaining it is beyond unfair considering how little sense most Hollywood blockbusters make. Why isn’t he asking how on earth those accelerator suits in G.I. Joe worked, or how that paper-thin robot made up of fucking beads in Transformers 2 worked, while he’s at it?
“Assuming that an avatar can live with no connection to the mother ship”
A flawed premise from the start. We see clearly that when Sigourney’s body is disconnected, her Avatar falls down “asleep”. The Avatar is only “alive” in-so-much as it is breathing and its body is still functional. Does it think? Why would it? Clearly it doesn’t think with anything until a connection is made, otherwise it wouldn’t be in what is basically a coma when not connected.
Roger is obviously losing it. This is no flaw whatsoever. It’s clearly explained and shown in detail in the film.
“BASTARDS” or “AVATAR”, the rest just go home, please! maybe next year…
“Craig” – I’m wrong because I’m in the minority about how I feel about The Hurt Locker and Avatar?
That hardly seems fair.
I don’t even see how it’s debatable that The Hurt Locker has the better screenplay, performances, and arguably, direction. Avatar is a big summer blockbuster masquerading as an awards contender, which it absolutely should not be.
Kris…how about this poll…which of the following films was your favorite film of the year (or the one you would most like to see win Best Picture)??
Avatar
Up in the Air
The Hurt Locker
Inglourious Basterds
Other
Roger thinks Avatar is not a great film?
Well, excuse me, but…Didn’t Roger give 4 stars to Avatar in his original review? Ehm, didn’t he compare it favorably to the original Star Wars? I invite all to read Ebert’s review of Avatar. It’s a freakin’ rave review! How is it possibly for him to write with a straight face that it’s not a great film!? LOL.
“That’s beyond ridiculous: “It’s impossible to make a great film with $250m.” ”
Not so ridicules. Only a handful of directors (Lucas, Spielberg, and Cameron) are allowed to man productions with those budgets without studio interference. Studio interference plays significant role in the overall quality of many multi-million dollar movies.
Oh! I know how he can say with a straight face that it’s not a great film! It’s because it’s not.
When you walk out of the theater for that movie, you’re all pumped up and shit and you’re just thinking about how awesome it was and how gorgeous it looked. Very like, Ebert wrote his review mere hours after sitting through the film.
Then he starts to think about it a little more. The characters names are quickly forgotten and he realizes that they’re completely cardboard and given the development of a Saturday morning cartoon. Then he thinks about the plot and the dialogue and begins to realize how flawed the movie is, and then suddenly, when the visual shock has worn off, he looks at his review and wishes he could drop a half or full star off of it, but it’s already published.
I don’t really have a problem that his opinions shifted on the film, because that happens to everyone, whether you want to deny it or not. It doesn’t matter what he wrote a month ago if he is saying now that it’s not a great film, because that’s what he thinks. Unless you’ve never changed your opinion on a film after giving it a little bit of thought, then don’t make yourself look like an idiot by criticizing other people who do it.
I don’t think his opinion necessarily changed on the film. He generally seems to base his star rating on the target audience, and I think he realized that for big budget summer blockbuster type films, this is really good, which led to the four star review. However, compared to more serious fare, it’s certainly not great.
If Roger “changed” his opinion, he should re-write his review. He’s done it before. Ebert’s original review of Unforgiven was 2 1/2 stars, later on he revised it as a 4 star review.
He probably thought that since Avatar is gaining momentum and that it might win the oscar BP against the Hurt Locker, he ( and a whole lot of critics) has to make a statement proclaiming The Hurt Locker is the best film of 2009, which I think it isn’t.
I think it’s important to note that he also said this in the piece:
“In watching such a film, I find myself not really caring about details of the plot. They’re not what it’s about.”
In light of this comment, I think his criticisms of the lack of realism in the film are not explanations of why it’s not a great film but more a criticism of the whole spectacle-as-substance nature of many films. They can be, as he repeatedly opines that Avatar is, great experiences. However, with little of worth beyond the spectacle, such a film does not deserve to be called the year’s best.
Here’s Roger Ebert’s own explanation of his “star” ratings system, from Roger Ebert’s Movie Companion book:
4 stars-a great film
3 1/2 stars-a very good film
3 stars-a good film
2 1/2 stars- a “fair” film
2 stars or less-mediocre to bad films
I find it so funny when the Avatar fanboys keep bashing The Hurt Locker yet they fail to come up with any substantive reason to hate it, save for, “It was good, but not THAAAAAT good.” Meanwhile, people who didn’t like Avatar have a whole laundry list of reasons why the movie is falls well short of “best of the year status.” Meanwhile, Roger Ebert is suddenly an idiot when I’m sure just yesterday the Kool Aid-drinkers loved him for giving the film four stars, wrote an entry on his blog praising the film, and so far has published two letters from readers espousing their love for it. But how DARE he say another movie released that year was better! We MUST tear it down!
Now I’m starting to see what all those people who weren’t crazy about The Dark Knight were complaining about.
Yeah, I’m a bit lost as to why Ebert gave the film 4 stars then if he states here that it is not a great film, although I do agree with him 100%.
I actually do think “Avatar” is a great movie. Yes, the story is not original, but it’s beautifully told, and there’s one thing Roger Ebert said in his review that I wholeheartedly agree with. Like many films, by the third act it devolves into a shoot-em-up fight, but by that point we’ve become intimate with the world, there’s so much at stake that we actually care about the outcome. So much that hurt me every time a tree was destroyed, or an animal was killed, or any of the Na’Vi. This is why I think Cameron is a genius as a visual storyteller. He uses the visuals to tell a story as opposed to just show what he can do, and in this film, there’s so much that goes into this world, that even if the story is generic formula, it works beautifully.
Even in building the characters, there’s a logic behind it, and I love how he resolved this one detail about his protagonist. For a film like this, the protagonist needs to be a man of action, someone who is in the military, someone who knows how to fight and lead battle for the third act to work. But, what would a soldier be doing in the Avatar project? I loved the way Cameron resolved this (I’m studying this stuff, and I find it fascinating).
Now, I’m also a fan of The Hurt Locker. That was another film that kept me at the edge of my seat the whole time I was watching it, and I loved what Kathryn Bigelow did with such a modest budget, and Mark Boal’s script has so much detail that he makes the environment and the characters fascinating (and Jeremy Renner carries the film admirably). But Avatar took my breath away both times I saw it, and a film that can do that to me I believe to be a great film, warts and all. I agree Cameron needs a co-writer to polish his dialogue (and maybe strengthen a few plot points here and there) but as a visual storyteller, he is a genius in my book.
The Hurt Locker was indeed brilliant, however I preferred Avatar. I’m more into the epic scale movies than the smaller ones.
The Avatar backlash was inevitable. I still think it is winning best picture.
And about the “I’m pretty sure it’s impossible to make a great film with a $250 million budget”. I don’t know about anyone else but I consider all three LOTR films to be great, as well as Avatar and Titanic.
The Lord of the Rings is simply in a different league than either Titanic or Avatar, but I agree it alone should prove that it’s not impossible to make a great film with a $250 million budget.
I havent seen THL yet, but you have got to ask yourself, if it was so great, why was it such a box office flop??
BTW, I think Avatar is the Picture of the Year but not the Best Picture
PRECIOUS is the best film of the year.
THL was a flop because it was horribly promoted and hardly even got what could be considered a wide release. Box office has absolutely NOTHING to do with how great a film is.
@ Andrew2: Ignoring for a moment that The Hurt Locker’s box office revenue – roughly $16 million – has surpassed its $11 million budget, let’s go back in time and rearrange your query a little bit: “I havent seen The Shawshank Redemption/Blade Runner/Harold & Maude/Peeping Tom/The Night of the Hunter/Citizen Kane/Bringing Up Baby yet, but you have got to ask yourself, if it was so great, why was it such a box office flop??”
See why that’s a stupid question?
As impressive as The Hurt Locker was, I’m a bit… befuddled regarding Ebert’s assumption that it is definitely “the best film of the year”. I mean, critics certainly think so and they’re making their opinion clear, but honestly it isn’t a perfect movie. For such an intelligent and practical movie it took some very huge leaps of believability (not to mention logic) in the third act. Oh well, it’s the critics pet and they feel wonderful championing it, so I guess we can leave them with that.
However, all this talk of Avatar being a frontrunner sorta horrifies me. It’s definitely one helluva good time at the movies, but God’s sake it lacks quite a lot in terms of substance. If this had been released in the summertime, the zeitgeist would have subsided by now and people wouldn’t be so carried away. It deserves many technical awards, no doubt, and I do personally think that Saldana warrants the first recognition of a CG-captured performance; but it doesn’t fucking deserve to be called the best film of the year. I mean, think of it this way: in ten years from now, when there will have been many films that have implemented the same technology, if you were to pop Avatar into your DVD player and watched it would you say that it was this GREAT film? Just think about that.
I dunno, I also think that all of this is horribly unfair to Up in the Air. Noted, it’s not my favorite film of the year (that would be Inglourious Basterds), but I think it’s pretty recognizable that it is the best, hitting the most poignant of emotional notes and (overused phrase, I know) truly being a film of our times. It’s a smaller film, so it’s being overshadowed by the box-office success of Avatar. And then you have the critics, who are flogging their pet film The Hurt Locker (no offense to the perfectly good film, but seriously they are totally shoving it down everybody’s throat), so there’s even less people talking about Reitman’s film. I dunno, it’s all subjective but I’ll be disappointed if The Hurt Locker or Avatar win. The Hurt Locker is a very good film that I feel very little passion for and a win for Avatar would be the antithesis to what they did last year regarding The Dark Knight: instead of glaringly snubbing a quality blockbuster, they’d be doing something that is the opposite but just as wrong; whoring out to the film with the most cash.
“I havent seen THL yet, but you have got to ask yourself, if it was so great, why was it such a box office flop??”
wow. people like you still exist? avatar and transformers 2: greatest films in the history of cinema!
and the funniest part: you haven’t even *seen* the movie yet.
I would like to see The Hurt Locker winning, but won’t happen. It’s a small film that not everyone enjoys. Avatar is a big film that most people do enjoy and that’s enough for the Academy. The screenplay is rubbish, the production design was copied from another movie called Delgo, but that won’t matter.
If Andy Serkis couldn’t get a supporting actor nom for Gollum, why the hell is Saldana getting talks with a performance a fraction as impressive? Wasn’t Serkis disqualified?
Yeah, Saldana was the best character by far. But I agree that she is’t a fraction as good as Serkis’ Gollum. It’s all about momentum. Serkis never would have gotten a nom in 03 while Saldana is an outside possibility.
I wouldn’t even say Saldana is an outside possibility. After all, it’s not exactly the kind of performance they would recognize in live-action form.
Yeah, I can’t see Saldana happening either.
Ebert said, “I have an eerie feeling I may once again have missed a crucial plot detail.”
Director/Producer Stephen Simon of the Spiritual Cinema Circle says, “To infiltrate the N’avi, humans create biological Avatars of the N’avi into whom the consciousness of human beings can be transferred. The Avatars can then interact with the N’avi, even though the N’avi can easily detect the difference…The spiritual metaphors of Avatar are truly dazzling. Aren’t all of us humans truly Avatars – spiritual beings inhabiting human bodies that our consciousness adopts as a temporary home while our spirits evolve.”
http://groups.gaia.com/scc/conversations/view/515264
Wow, I really like that. I don’t know if I buy it, but it’s beautiful. If we truly are spirits, then aren’t we all Avatars? What if when we die on Earth, we wake up wherever we’re sleeping? That’s basically what happened to the character of Norm Spelling (as soon as his Avatar is killed in battle, he wakes up in his station and reaches for an oxygen mask). Another reason why I love this movie. It can be viewed at different levels.
Wow. Jack Frost. That’s one of the earliest memories I have of going to see a movie in a movie theater. Ah, memories. I believe it had the immortal line “Snow dad is better than no dad.”
Lord of the Rings is a great big-budget film. The Dark Knight is a great big-budget film. Maybe you just shouldn’t spend $300 million on a movie because then you think you can just coast on effects and then get lazy on the substance.
And if Avatar is not a great film, then WHY Ebert did you give it 4 stars? Jesus, the dude gives out 4 star ratings to anything that doesn’t completely suck these days.
Saldana is not even in the Best Actress race. At all. Zero precursors.