I asked my friend William Watson recently if James Cameron’s Avatar was worth checking out. I didn’t see it when it was new and still haven’t seen it now. I more or less know the plot, and I wouldn’t be seeing it on a big screen as opposed to my home TV set, so the spectacle aspects wouldn’t necessarily be there. I can’t say I feel much impulse to see it, but I do have Disney+ and it’s on there.

Watson’s advice was that it wasn’t necessary, but I did see Cameron’s earlier special effects showcase The Abyss was on HBO. I am not sure I’d seen that one from start to finish, so that seemed like a decent substitute.

Honestly, I’m not sure I ever saw this whole movie before. I’d seen parts of it. I more or less know the plot. I didn’t have any reason not to have seen it as I didn’t hate what I’d seen. I just honestly never felt compelled to have a seat and watch the whole thing before. I just couldn’t seem to muster enough interest in the movie itself.

And it’s not like it’s a bad movie or anything. The special effects, like water that assumes the human face of lead actress Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio, was impressive for 1989 and is still fairly impressive in 2020. And while my biggest gripe with Cameron’s work is often his script work is cliched and not subtle–one of the many reason I haven’t seen Titanic or the aforementioned Avatar yet–his script here is well-paced and fine. Maybe it helps that, despite the still cliched nature of a lot of what is happening here, is lead actor Ed Harris, the closest thing the movie has to a big name star, can say the lines and make them sound natural. So can Mastrantini, Cameron mainstay Michael Biehn, and the rest of the cast. Maybe the dialogue was just a little better, or maybe the way these actors approach the work was just different enough to make the work more convincing.

It helps, perhaps, that for all this movie is about an encounter with ultimately friendly aliens on the bottom of the ocean, we don’t even really see them until about an hour into the movie. They’re important to the plot, but we don’t really see them, focusing instead on the human crew of the rig, particularly estranged married couple Bud (Harris) and Lindsey (Mastrantonio) dealing with an addled SEAL (Biehn) who isn’t taking well to the depths. And that’s before the nukes come out.

So, after finally (probably) seeing the movie from start to finish, what did it do for me? Admittedly, not much. The movie was still very familiar, even if I cannot recall watching the whole thing from start to finish before. As good as the acting was, the characters still aren’t overly distinct or memorable. Harris’s Bud, known as Virgil only to Lindsey, could be any heroic blue collar movie character. These characters are still thinly-sketched cliches, made interesting only in as much as the cast can make them so. They largely do, but I ended the movie thinking it may not have been so much that I hadn’t seen the movie from start to finish before so much as I did and didn’t really remember doing so.

Somehow, I think Avatar would have the same effect on me.

So, I’m grading this based on the quality of the movie, even if I am not sure how memorable it ultimately is.

Grade: B


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