Avatar

Hello again. It's been a long while since I've reviewed a video game or movie, and I figured it's about time I start doing it again.

Avatar

With a budget nearing 300 million, it seemed highly unlikely that James Cameron's Avatar would make a profit, but it did. It really did. Avatar is now the highest grossing film nationally and internationally. It just recently topped Titanic for the highest grossing film. Titanic, which was also directed by James Cameron, grossed 1.2 billion worldwide, while Avatar, being in theaters only eight weeks, has already accumulated over 1.7 billion. So what is it about Avatar that made it so much money. Was it the overdone advertising, such as Avatar Coke Zero, the Mcdonald’s gift cards, and the millions of commercials, or was it something else?

The first week Avatar was released it made about seventy million. Spiderman 3 made over 110 million it’s first weekend and made nowhere near the amount of money that Titanic made. If you think about it, a movie never makes more money the following week after opening weekend. But Avatar did. It made a lot more. There’s really one explanation to why it made more the following weeks: word of mouth. People really enjoyed the movie. And there’s good reason why. Avatar is visually the most spectacularly film ever made. The world of Pandora takes the film goer on a journey, and it’s no longer a movie. It’s an adventure, and you’re right there with the Na’vi (Natives of Pandora).

The main premise of the movie is about a handicapped U.S. military soldier trying to negotiate with the Na’vi to leave their territory so the military can drill up their land for a rare material named ununtanium. The plot is somewhat predictable, but the plot isn’t really what makes the movie good. The visuals make up for any holes in the plot. The whole world of Pandora is absolutely spectacular. The various animals, the vegetation, the floating mountains, are all so believable. In a logical sense, we understand that this is just cinema, and none of this is possible, but our creative self wants to believe it is real. We want to believe Pandora is real just as we want Star Wars and Lord of the Rings to be real. Avatar deserves all the attention it is getting, and if it doesn’t win the Oscar for best visual effects, I will be highly surprised. 90/100