Yes, to a large degree. I can’t stand Cameron personally, and that’s mostly because he just seems to take himself so seriously. Kind of like, for all that Oprah is pretty harmless, and generally seems to be doing good things, she bugs me for taking herself so damn seriously.
Cameron even more so. So that aspect of his personally, to the extent that it resonates throughout Avatar, is one of its weak points.
And yet, for many people, the two things are not the same.
I’ve already said, more than once, that i was entertained by Avatar. It was a compelling visual experience, a lot of the action was exciting, and i had fun watching it. But i still don’t think it was a really good movie. It was a mediocre movie that was also entertaining.
That’s just my opinion, and you are obviously not obliged to share it, but it would be well to remember that, just because someone doesn’t adopt your criteria for evaluating a film doesn’t mean that they’re “limit[ing] their own potential for a positive experience.” Your definition of “good cinema” is no more or less arbitrary than mine; it’s just different.
If it were true that a movie was “100% visual and 0% story”, then the reels of the movie could be played in random order and it would make no difference. This is true of a few movies - stand-up comedy, concert films, some arthouse stuff, etc. 99% of movies, however, definitely have stories, and depend on them. Michael Bay movies have stories. “Avatar” has a story. Of course visuals are important, but to be this dismissive of stories in movies is nuts. If stories and character were so unimportant, someone would have made a mint by putting together a bunch of demolition reels and fireworks displays and dumping it in a theater. That doesn’t happen because even in the most actiony action movie, people want characters they can identify with onscreen to react to the spectacle, and to live happily-ever-after at the end.
This is not to say the stories have to be complex or illuminate things about the human condition - a movie with a simple story well-told can be great. “Avatar” to me was bad because it had a simple story badly told.
Of course, it didn’t help that I wasn’t impressed with the visual part of it either: yes, I saw it in 2-D, but the look of the world itself looked to me like not much more than an overgrown neo Wii game. 
Fine, 99% visuals and 1% story. I agree that something to give the visuals coherency is necessary. But my point remains: you can have an interesting movie with almost no plot, while you’d be hard-pressed to have an interesting movie with almost no visuals.
There are plenty of great movies that have very low-budget, low-production-value, downright bad visuals, but which are redeemed entirely by character and story. There are films whose visuals consist of nothing but a closeup of someone talking, or a still shot of two people holding a conversation. There’s even a brilliant film by Abbas Kiarostami that consists of nothing by long, still shots of water breaking on the shore.
My point being, Bosstone, that in art there are simply no hard and fast rules. You can only judge the work in front of you, and any attempt to extrapolate universal laws from it will end in failure.
Indeed. And my point is that a weak plot isn’t enough for a movie to automatically be bad.
I think, though, if it’s a really bad plot, it can take you out of the experience and leave you unable to really appreciate the visuals. And then you have neither visuals nor plot.
And I think Avatar had a really bad plot.
I agree that a lot of people are really selling him short. He deserves a lot of credit here.
I’m less inclined to give him a pass here. I think the most of the criticism is pretty fair (when it isn’t too over-the-top). Even using familiar archetypes, he could’ve given us a bit more depth. I don’t think the plot as all that horrible, but “serviceable” is about the best I can say about it.
Interesting movies with almost no visuals are called plays.
No, sorry, you can’t even have that. The most extreme exceptions–experimental films, etc.–aside, the visuals in a movie are in service to the story. Silent films were a storytelling medium. A purely visual one, but the story is the reason for everything else. Watch the first part of WALL-E, or the silent parts of UP, for recent examples of silent film storytelling techniques.
And if a movie has a weak plot, as you put it, it doesn’t matter how spectacular the visuals are, it’s not a good movie. Not that Michael Bay and James Cameron and John Turtletaub and a whole host of Hollywood hacks haven’t built entire careers on the fact that many people don’t give a shit about such things.
To quote Pauline Kael, who might very well have been writing presciently about Avatar: “It’s crap. But it’s crap on a motorcycle.”
Yeah, seriously. I find the argument that stories are a secondary element to movies just bizarre.
This reminds me of the thread about watching movies in theaters as opposed to at home. I didn’t really articulate myself well in that thread, and the other person on my side was blatantly trolling, but it’s a matter of story. I don’t find snazzy visuals or hardcore audio immersive. I find compelling story immersive and I simply do not care about visuals and audio. Thus I get just as much from home viewing (in letterbox format) as I would in a theater. And usually more because it’s really distracting an hour in when I start jonesing for a smoke.
Avatar is the type of movie that I’ll get just as much out of at home on a crappy lo-def tv as I would in a 3D IMAX because I simply don’t care about the visuals. (I do look forward to seeing it next year on cable.)
To me, the concept of “it’s better in a theater” is an indictment, not a compliment. When I was younger, the idea of “awesome” had more appeal and so I was more swayed by visuals. Nowadays not so much.
Regarding story vs. visuals, where does something like Koyaanisqatsi fit into the debate? There’s some sort of narrative flow but no story as such.
FWIW, I’d rank Avatar above Titanic but below most of Cameron’s other films. I’m sympathetic to its themes, and it’s a technical marvel, but I found it surprisingly cold. The Abyss is far superior.
That was the only movie I could think of that was all visual with no story. I think of it more as a screen saver than a movie.
I’m not sure I’d agree. There’s a whole theory centred around cinema without stories, characters or actors – such films may not be mainstream, but they aren’t unheard of, so I’m not sure it’s fair to label it as not being a movie.
Rodgers01 claimed earlier that the litmus test for such films is if reels can be reshuffled without detriment to the experience, but I think this is confusing story with editing and, perhaps, use of dramatic structure: trying playing Stop Making Sense, for example, in random order and see if it’s as effective.
The point, I think, is that story is a device, but if other devices can be used to similar effect, it reveals story to be a non-essential (though oft-used) part of the modern cinematic toolbox.
That said, no story is better than a bad story, with the latter actively detracting from the experience.
Of course there are experimental films with no story. As a film student, I’ve watched plenty of them.
We don’t see many of them in theaters, though, because they generally are not very pleasant to watch. Something about the way our brains work seems to gravitate towards stories. Indeed, most forms of art- from writing to video games- have evolved to become narrative.
Anyway, this has little to do with Avatar, which does have a story, just a really lame one.
I can only think Cameron did it that way, was to even the odds a bit. Even though the Na’vi got the crap kicked out of them, the colonel still had to take the fight to them, and had to get in close, knife fighting close. Instead of using the stand off capabilities that those suits and helicopters had.
It also helped that most of the audience probably thought as you, and would have no problems understanding what was happening and relate to it in some way, either as the aggressor or the victim.
Declan
I didn’t even think the visuals were all that. Sure they were a spectacle but other animated films have done it just as well (Akira? Tron?) hardly groundbreaking. There was a real focus shift between props and the animated counterpart, eg. the Helicopters and also the overlaid actors in effects craft.
And I totally agree with “Hampshire” the 3d was a bunch of flat pop-up stuff with maybe the exception of some of the transparent controls in the command centre. As a million have said before me, a good film but not a paradigm shift.
See, to my mind, no movie that is actually entertaining can be classes as mediocre. “not great” I can understand, but mediocrity is … I don’t know, made-for-TV movies or the like. Not bad enough to be bad, but not entertaining.
While I disagree with you, this is my new one-sentence review of a bad movie. Better if imagined in a Truman Capote voice: “That’s not a movie, that’s a screensaver!”
Unless it’s so bad that it crosses the Infinite Badness Spectrum, does a shuttle loop, and rockets back into funny territory. But at that point, you’re laughing at the movie, not with it.