By Douglas Pratt Pratt@moviecitynews.com
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The first but certainly not the last time James Cameron’s monster blockbuster spectacle of 2009, Avatar, will be released on home video, 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment has issued the film on DVD and Blu-ray. The BD comes with both a BD platter and the DVD platter. There are no special features whatsoever, except for alternate languages and subtitling. The picture is letterboxed with an aspect ratio of about 1.78:1 and an accommodation for enhanced 16:9 playback. In the history of his blockbuster films, Cameron has always been flexible with his image framing, and the picture fills a widescreen television with meticulous delights from one corner to the other. The image is so sharp that the differences between the DVD and the BD are negligible, although you feel the smaller details more intensely on the latter, and the action is vaguely smoother. As for the sound, the BD’s 5.1 DTS track has a great deal more punch and definition than the DVD’s 5.1 Dolby Digital, but there again, the movie’s audio has been worked over so elaborately that even the DVD is a totally thrilling and involving experience. The DVD has alternate French and Spanish tracks in standard stereo and optional English and Spanish subtitles. The alternate language tracks on the BD are in 5.1 Dolby and a Portuguese track has been added to the others, with additional Portuguese subtitling (there is no French subtitling on either platter).
If for no other reason than its boxoffice returns, the film represents a milestone in the integration of animation and live action, which is where movies have been heading from their very beginning (see George Méliès’ A Trip to the Moon, which, incidentally, should be added, perhaps at the top, to the long list of movies that Cameron can be said to have drawn from or imitated for his narrative). Not every shot is perfectly blended. The skins on some of the creatures don’t look real enough, and every once in a while a shot will feel subliminally but jarringly artificial. The overall impact of the work, however, is that it feels closer to the reality of Ben-Hur than to The Ten Commandments. Depicting a human who aids non-human characters in the defense of their verdant planet against scorched-earth ecological rape by other humans, the film runs 162 minutes, which may cut down on the repeat viewings a tiny bit, but not enough to degrade the juggernaut of the movie’s popularity for a long time to come, particularly if subsequent home video releases offer up additional footage or a presentation of the film in its artistically innovative 3D format. The characters are grownups, and very few of them are endearing. Indeed, for the climax, the viewer is rooting for the non-humans to slaughter as many humans as they possibly can. Given this valid but still unsettling inside-out moral orientation and a limit to the movie’s humor, the one aspect of the film that is undeniably responsible for its success is its vision. In the past, a single artist or a single writer would beguile the world with an individual imagination, but when movies were invented and became a popular artform, they also became a collaborative art, where dozens of different imaginations contributed to a single work. There is, in the visions of the world created in Avatar, an overwhelming sense of the interconnectiveness of the human imagination, and just as all of the beings within that world are part of a greater, functional whole, so is Avatar itself a starchild mass of what the future holds for human entertainment.
Douglas Pratt’s DVD-Laser Disc Newsletter is published monthly.
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