Avatar

I was rather late to the whole Avatar party. I had heard the buzz about the special effects long before the movie came out, but I think the initial reports about the story being a repeat of other movies as well as the long lines and sold-out theaters kept me away until today. But today was one of those cold, rainy January days that are perfect for a three hour movie and off I went.

Since I was a bit behind the curve on seeing the movie, I had previously seen puzzling reports in the media about viewers suffering a post-movie depression – the “Avatar blues”. What could possibly cause people to be depressed about seeing a cool special effects movie? After finally watching it, believe it or not, I went from puzzled to empathetic. Without giving the end of the movie away here, the rebirth theme is so strong and the guilt trip so intense, that I can understand people feeling that perhaps their reality is a bad dream that they cannot wake up from.

The guilt trip I am referring to is what is alluded to in the movie’s storyline – that humans destroyed their “mother Earth” and were seeking new planets like Pandora to take resources from (I must interject here that calling the mineral unobtainium was a bit cheesy). I’m not a new age Gaia worshiper who believes that the planet is actually alive or is some kind of a deity. But as I was leaving the movie theater I was reminded of how much we take our planet for granted. The theater I went to in Manassas, Virginia, is located in a shopping center that was literally built against the border of the protected land of the Bull Run National Battlefield Park. The suburban sprawl around the park has gotten so bad in the last few decades that the park is essentially surrounded by residential and commercial developments. Thousands of people live on one side of the park and work on the other.

To me the park is a small sanctuary from modern life where I can go for walks to escape the houses, cars, power lines, and Starbucks, that dominate this area. But as I was driving home through the park (sadly, it has been proposed that the 2-lane road through the park be replaced by a mega-expressway to more easily allow people to traverse the few miles) I thought to myself, “Why is this park here?” It’s not because we humans appreciate the pristine landscape or the trees, waterways, or wildlife. No, the only reason the park exists at all is because the land is preserved to commemorate a horrible war that took place there. The land is considered a sacred Civil War memorial (although evidently in Virginia even Civil War battlefields are not sacred enough to escape the grasp of Wal-Mart).

I also found myself asking many other questions as I idled at a stop light watching the exhaust from the car in front of me: Why do we live like this in our modern societies so far removed from nature? Why do we feel that 5 minutes of driving time is more valuable than 500 acres of wilderness? Why is the chunk of coal in the mountain more valuable to us than the mountain itself? Side note: I grew up in West Virginia and still visit my parents frequently. I often see billboards that say “Coal – It Keeps the Lights On”. Were we born thinking that the earth was given to us to exploit, or were we slowly brainwashed by propaganda like this?

Yes, the Avatar story has been done before – in “Dances with Wolves” or “The Last Samurai.” But maybe we need to see it again, because I don't think we've learned anything and we sure haven’t changed our ways. As the humans were destroying the Na’vi home tree in the movie, I couldn’t help but think about the parallel to the Republican national convention in 2008, and the rallying cry of thousands of people yelling “Drill Baby Drill” to show support of drilling for oil on the Alaskan wildlife preserve. The world of Pandora might be fictional, and the story of Avatar unoriginal, but the message bears repeating until enough people wake up.

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Acting: 3 out of 5
Story: 3 out of 5
Special Effects: 6 out of 5 (they deserve some extra credit)

Invictus

I heard that Morgan Freeman once said that whenever Clint Eastwood called him up about a movie he was working on to see if he was interested in playing a part he responded yes without even looking at the script. Smart man. I have been a huge fan of Eastwood not only as an actor but a director my whole life. To this day my favorite Western movie remains "The Outlaw Josey Wales" which I believe was Eastwood's directorial debut. And of course as far as Westerns go the Freeman/Eastwood tandem in "Unforgiven" has to rank highly on anyone's list.

So walking into the theater to see Invictus, I expected good things. And the movie exceeded my expectations.

I thought Freeman's role as Nelson Mandela was easily has best acting work of his long career. I started to think of all the other roles he has been in over the years, and it is a very long and distinguished list, but I don't remember him ever playing a part this convincingly. I really believed that he was Mandela. In fact, at the end of the film they display some actual photos of the rugby team that the film was based on. One photo shows Mandela in the Springbok uniform he wore for the championship game. I knew it was the real Mandela in the photo, but after watching Freeman play him, it just didn't look right.

My favorite part of the film was not the rugby game or the "feel good" parts of the movie (although the film does leave you with a great sense of elation), but the part where Freeman reads the William Henley poem that the title of the movie is taken from. I had never heard the poem before, and when Freeman reads it, it gave me chills. The last two lines, "I am the master of my fate. I am the captain of my soul" capture the essence of the man who spent so many years in a tiny prison cell and overcame incredible odds and adversity and finally triumphed.

Go see this movie if you get a chance, you will not be disappointed.

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So far I have refrained from using any rating system for my reviews, mainly because I find them to be pretty useless. However, I decided to make it a goal to get these reviews on a compilation site like Rotten Tomatoes, so in order to achieve that I guess they need some kind of quantitative value. Since I think there are many different criteria you can use to judge a movie, instead of one overall rating, I'm going to use three ratings. Here they are for Invictus:

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Acting: 5 out of 5 - Morgan Freeman gives a superb performance with good supporting jobs by Matt Damon and cast

Story: 5 out of 5 - Although the basic story of Mandela is widely known, most people don't know about the rugby team, and the story here is well constructed

Special Effects: 4 out of 5 - Not really a meaningful category for this movie, other than the rugby scenes. But I wanted to include this as one of my ratings categories since a lot of today's movies like Avatar are focused on this.