Ah Avatar, silver screen megaflick of epic proportions. So digitally delightful that 'epic' is made redundant. Compare the CGI splendour in this with, for example, Titanic - where a CGI man walking across a CGI ship looked like he was ice-skating. Marvel at it's marvelousness, wonder at it's wonder, be awestruck at it's awesomeness. It is funny though that for all this CGI brilliance, the best the best brains in Hollywood can come up with in terms of 'out-of-this-world' creatures are simply smorgasbords of our own beloved animals.
Imagined discussion at the office of Avatar on Monday morning sometime in the past few years:
Chad (head of creature development): Okay, what we want people to realise is that these creatures are not what we're used to - they're totally different. We're looking for ideas people. Discuss.
Brad: Right Chad, I've been thinking about this for three years and it's been my entire job on the film and here's what I'm thinking. Do you know the way humans are about 6 foot tall with eyes, ears, noses etc.?
Chad: Go on.
Brad: Well how about our new creatures are slightly taller with big eyes, pointy ears and flat noses? And get this, their 'skin' is blue.
Chad: Chad, you're a genius. Get this man an Oscar®.
Brad: I don't like to blow my own trumpet Chad but I think I may have changed cinema forever.
Chad: Agreed.
And that's not to mention the discussions that gave us the horses in Avatar - "Let's give them an additional, superfluous pair of front legs, kind of like the spare wheels that forty foot trucks carry everywhere." "So if one pair of legs gets broke, they have another?" "Precisely."
Or what about the floating mountains? "Right so I'm thinking that every cinema-goer that will see Avatar will only have had the experience of mountains that stay pretty much rooted to the spot. Let's make ours float." "Do they do anything different to earth mountains?" "They float." "Anything else?" "No."
But here's the problem - all they're doing is taking already created things and sticking them together (sometimes shoddily) with CGI blu-tac™. They're not actually creating anything...what I want to see is a film where there are creatures that are genuine creatures - creatures that don't have eyes to process light but instead have slebals. And instead of skin, they have sretoocs. And instead of exo-skeletons or the other types of skeletons, they have something entirely different altogether. In fact, they don't need skeletons at all because they're bodies are in an environment where gravity is perfectly tuned to keep them coherent. Anyway, perhaps I'm stating the obvious so let's move on.
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Funny that when one is filling ones toilet cistern with bottled water to flush it, you realise that the average cistern uses 9 litres of water every time it's flushed. That's 4 two litre bottles of Tesco's finest and then another half bottle. Isn't that mad? Every time! And to fill the average basin for doing the washing up, about 5 or 6 litres is needed...and that usually only does half the washing up before it's manky.
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In all our developing, we think we are the bees knees. Yet show me something you have created in the truest sense (as opposed to sticking other things together). Or show me how to live without using loads of water - the most basic necessity since time began. And we think we're great? "Phooey," I say. We are good but only because the raw materials we're working with are amazing. We are good but only because the basic necessities of life literally keep raining down upon us.
