I have a theory: the reason the subtitles in Avatar are so unbelievably bad is that the special effects are actually no good, but the subtitles cleverly distract us so much we never realize that everything looks like papier mâché.
If nothing else, James Cameron has demonstrated that with today’s technology you can make any live action movie you damn well please for $200,000,000. I look forward to Consider Phlebas on HBO.
I think the criticisms I’ve read of Avatar (e.g. that it’s morally simplistic, that the aliens are “noble savages”, that virtually all the characters are one-dimensional) are superficially correct but actually bogus. Cameron is trying to make a $200,000,000 movie that earns a profit — if it’s a flop he may not get to do it again (alright he’d have to screw up a second time) — and he needs to introduce a genuinely original SF setting, establish audience expectations and prejudices, and then completely change them not once, but twice. You’re not going to do that with subtlety.
I can think of dozens of things that would make Avatar “better” — but every single one of them would blow it out to six hours or more. And I’m sure Cameron thought of all of them and then cut them all out.
Here are my criticisms of Avatar: the typography is terrible — both the word “AVATAR” in the credits and — more annoyingly — the subtitles. And what is it with the faux Celine Dion song? If you stop watching the movie before the credits roll count yourself lucky. Oh yeah, I didn’t care for the view of Pandora from space or the initial shuttle landing (the contrails were just a bit too perfect), and I think the alien fauna’s skins were sometimes a bit too plastic-looking. (And how come everything on the planet seems to have four eyes — two often vestigial — and six legs except for the The Na’vi?) Seriously, these are tiny, tiny nits — every other SF movie has far greater flaws and almost every one is far less ambitious.
2001 is — aside from being boring — almost flawless, but it makes no sense and has 10 minutes of nonsense at the end. Every Star Wars movie is morally simplistic, has one-dimensional characters, and stuff that makes “noble savages” look like Dostoyevsky — and Lucas never attempts a tiny fraction of what Cameron is doing here.
I’ll need to watch it again (in 3D!) to be sure, but I think it’s the best SF movie ever made. I wish Ridley Scott would give up sword and sandal movies and make Forever War or Metropolis.