Nature Trail to Hell

I still haven't seen the film, although I intend to sooner or later, hopefully while it's still on the big screen. I can (and expect to) enjoy a souped-up B-movie of a blockbuster as much as anyone, and I do appreciate the big visual and sound experience, even though I remain deeply suspicious of the merits of 3-D technology itself. And I believe the many reviewers when they say that Cameron over-invested heavily in his own writing genius, which will no doubt shame him all the way to the bank. For groundbreaking legacy, it would have been nice to hire some screenwriters and all, but for something like this we don't expect much more than reaching for the fastest cliché-ridden quasi-heroic epic that the nearest body can put to paper. And to his partial credit, it took James Cameron a longer resume than George Lucas to get to this point.

(Actually the problem with Star Wars is that Lucas did outsource for one of his flicks, and it turned out to be the good one.)

No, what it's going to take for Avatar to finally irritate me, is when they start believing their own bullshit, and we may already be in the event horizon of that. Star Wars was bad enough, and in that mold, we're about ready for four too many Making Of Avatar features, and worse, endless documentaries about the deep philosophical implications of the bargain-bin script, probably invoking three pounds of Carl Jung and ten pounds of Joseph Campbell, maybe a dash of whoever likes to say that science fiction is really about today, dude, to describe how the story is not some cheap-ass derivative piece of crap, but something timeless.

Avatar has also set the media abuzz with how 3-D television, introduced this year, is going to Change Everything. I am sure that they can do better than the awful, headache-inducing cardboard glasses that they (used to?) distribute in the theaters. Wikipedia says that more advanced versions use glasses with polarizers, or which have shutters synched to a rapidly flickering screen. The latter has got to be better way to go about it, and could justify dedicated hardware to manage that control link. And the refresh rate on the screen would have to be twice as fast as usual, which may even be why they were pushing 120 Hz last year, come to think of it.

But now you've introduced ergonomic variables (Not everyone's eyes are the same distance apart; not everyone is sitting in the same position relative to the screen; people may wish, at times, to briefly divert their attention to something else) that are sure to make many users highly uncomfortable. And let's be honest, stereoscopic vision just isn't all that. Don't believe me? Try closing one eye, and tell me how much less real everything fails to seem. I mean, the big mover for 3-D television is ESPN, and if you actually watch live sports, you'll notice that they tend to be, you know, far away, and coming right at you doesn't change the perspective much at all. I mean, except for horror or sci-fi flicks with big cluttered screens and objects you want to believe are near the lens... Christ, the worst thing about 3-D TVs, if they're adopted, will be what they direct the content to.