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As Avatar picked off one obstacle after another after it was released, it barreled to the top of the Oscar game, and within weeks of its release, Hollywood’s top honor seemed within its grasp.
More than a month on, that hasn’t necessarily changed. But as with any front-runner, the vaunted Avatar brand has shown some signs of fatigue. The PGA, a very solid barometer of future best-picture winners, chose to honor The Hurt Locker instead. More than one Oscar observer has suggested that the movie’s revolutionary visual ethos may actually hurt it awards-wise even as it propped it up financially, since actors remain squeamish about the movie’s long stretches of performance capture.
Inane though all of this might sound, Hollywood takes the best-picture Oscar seriously. The eventual winner is a sort of benchmark, the movie that represents the year in the industry. In that vein, perennial Oscar enthusiast Roger Ebert has used his Twitter to stoke the anti-Avatar unrest. Despite a four-star review when it opened, the venerable critic has called for a tempered approach to the movie, suggesting that its true impact registers only in its hyperbolic 3D format, and without that, the movie’s power is elusive.
Although Paste has made its enthusiasm for Avatar clear, it’s a fair question: How can a movie like this, touted for so long as a different kind of experience, really hold up as it goes through the medium’s grind? Can it have the same life in 2D, much less on DVD?
So, we went ahead and saw Avatar in 2D. It’s still spectacular, but curiously so, especially for anyone who originally saw the movie in 3D. It is much quieter, for one thing, which underlines how remarkable the film’s extravagant sound design really is (those are two Oscars we can all agree it deserves). Without the intensity of the 3D images, it’s also a more laid-back experience, more conventionally entertaining than transformative, as it is in its optimal 3D format.
What this really weathers down to is a question of how Avatar should be judged. Shouldn’t we evaluate the movie the way it’s intended to be seen, in 3D? The Oscars are still about a month away (later than normal this year thanks to the Winter Olympics), but of course it’s bigger than one movie or one Oscar. As blockbuster technology reaches superlative heights, what happens in the long run to movies like Avatar, now sealed as the highest-grossing movie ever worldwide?
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For me, the film was much better in 2D. I originally saw it in 2D on Christmas Day and thought it was a great movie, if a little drawn out in certain scenes. Last week, I went to see it in IMAX 3D thinking it would be spectacular and I was incredibly underwhelmed.
I suppose I'm more used to the Universal Studios type of 3D shorts where it seems like things are flying out at you and audience members interact with the movie in a way. I don't see the point of 3D when it's just for background enhancement. Also, I personally dislike 3D because more of the movie seems out of focus, and it's very distracting for me. For at least the first half hour I find myself concentrating pretty hard on trying to feel comfortable in the glasses, and trying to focus without getting headaches or feeling motion sickness.
Also, there were several points in the movie where the scale seemed off. Others didn't notice it, but to me I perceived that the person in the foreground was gigantic and the person in the background was tiny until the scene shifted slightly and the scale seemed to be correct again. That's something that I never saw in 2D, but experienced many times in the IMAX version.
I kept waiting for the 3D to knock my socks off, but I never found it particularly impressive. Overall it only distracted from the story for me. I would be hard-pressed to give 3D another shot in a future movie.
Well, maybe we need to discuss what makes a best picture a best picture. Personally, I think that if such a significant part of the experience is lost in the conversion from 3-D to 2-D then something is lacking in "the meat of the movie," so to speak. Call me a traditionalist, but what makes a movie great for me has a lot to do with the writing, the strength of the characters,how well those characters are interpreted by the actors, etc. Yes, film is a visual medium so the visual are integral, however, film is still first and foremost story-telling. If removing the "wow" of the 3-D experience really injures the film in such a profound way, this must signal that the "wow" visuals were propping up a movie that is sub-par in other (and in my opinion, more important) areas.
I imagine the Oscar screening copies are in 2-D. All the better, I think.
I don't think it makes the movie itself better but it gives a little more flavor for many people and they like that extra flavor. It would be just like having a movie in stereo and surround sound. The movie would be just as good in stereo but a lot of people want the surround sound with the subwoofer. So for many it is that extra icing on the cake that people want. You are trying to make 3d more than it is. It is just icing on the cake, not the difference between radio and color film, which is the huge leap you are trying to making it into. Most people that like 3d just laugh at these over extended comparisons. You guys need to come up with better arguments against 3d. Same ones over and over again and it is not working.
Slicey, I completely agree. 3D isn't just underwhelming, it is ridiculously overrated. It was nearly impossible to focus on fine details, and anything that moved was blurry (the scenes in the forests of Pandora were the worst--I wanted to see the interesting wildlife and detail, but anytime anything showed up it was nearly impossible to see it clearly).
What bothers me the most is that Avatar's overwhelming success is going to cause all money-hungry studios to greenlight their forthcoming projects as 3D extravaganzas--that's going to ruin movies for me.
Avatar was cool, but not worth the hooplah.