Avatar

The following is purely my own personal view only.

Biting the bait thrown by the media and well made trailer, I went and watched Avatar. Well, to say frankly, if you have seen the Thamizh movie Vietnam Colony (I think it was also a remake of a Malayalam movie), you will see Avatar’s similarity to it. This one is a very expensive version though. Surprising it is, considering the economic slowdown all over.

Like Prabhu, in Vietnam colony, the hero of this movie is also sent into a community as a mole. Only here, the community lives in a different planet (actually, a moon called Pandora) as opposed to a colony in the Thamizh version.

He has to give inside information to a set of greedy people, and eventually help them in throwing the natives (called Na’vi) out of their home. The home in this case, is a huge tree and underneath the tree is the richest deposit of Utonium, a mineral, can be mined and sold back on earth for a million dollar a Kilo. This guy does his work initially by passing the info. As time pass by, he ends up liking the people, the nature. He doesn’t stop there. He goes on and falls in love with the chief’s daughter. And Of course, she reciprocates.

This makes him to turn against the people who sent him there and fight against them to protect the natives. Obviously, he wins in the end.

On the positive side, I can see how fertile Cameroon’s imagination is, on seeing how he has conceived the world of Navi. The small Jelly like creatures, the 7 foot tall Navi and the tree on which they live on. I particularly liked the scene which shows how they sleep. Cool stuff. The computer graphics is so good that the animated characters look very real. Amazing, how these guys stretch technology to the extreme to provide such an experience. All this in 3D. This kept me fascinated for first half an hour. Then I am done with it.

The next two hours was so boring and to make it interesting I started looking at the similarities of the scenes in Thamizh movies. This guy has to go through the process of choosing a dragon. It is not easy though. The way he does it reminds me of the old MGR movies where our Thalaivar has to prove his masculinity by taming a bull (‘Kaalai’) in one of the scenes. In this movie it is the Dragon that has to be tamed though. Then in another scene, they try Vittal Aachariya. The actual body of a scientist is kept near the Navi version of her and they try to transfer the life (“Koodu vittu Koodu Paayardhu”).

This made me think why our Captain can’t have this much fund and do a Computer Graphics rich movie in 3D and watched by people in I-Max. We will see people in the front rows dodging Captain’s back kick. At times they will also dodge captain’s “flat” tummy. And, those red, angry eyes of Captain in Close Up will terrorise everybody and make Spielberg rue about the money he wasted in making a close up shot of a T-Rec in Jurassic Park.

Anyway, if you ask me to give a one line comment about the movie,

‘It is a sci-fi movie with equal amount of action, technology, love, emotion and with a message’.

Damn, sounds like a director’s comment on his Vijay starrer (except for the Sci-fi part)

Happy new year to you all.