【电影发狂】《阿凡达》：一流史诗，二流台词（影评）
2009-12-14 14:38阅读：
英文媒体朋友，/film的编辑陈大卫看过《阿凡达》后写了一篇影评。这不是第一篇《阿凡达》的影评，也不是最后一篇。这篇影评也算不上观点出奇，妙笔生花，但它代表了卡梅隆影迷最质朴的声音。精力有限，无法逐字翻译，我们这厢把他的大概意思翻译出来，让大家对《阿凡达》有个初步了解。
大卫在开篇时回顾了自己少年时代在影院观赏《终结者2》时的激动感觉。他始终对“我会回来”那句台词记忆犹新。《阿凡达》开场后，他觉得潘朵拉星的景物浑然一体，真实可信。他亦对卡梅隆创造的3D世界赞叹不已。
但大卫觉得《阿凡达》里最大的败笔是影片剧本。他觉得台词有很多夸张和词语匮乏之处。另外，由于影片节奏太快，卡梅隆没给人物性格塑造上留太多时间。一些角色的银幕形象也有些生硬。大卫觉得这可能跟影片大多戏份是在绿幕前拍摄的有关。
尽管如此，大卫对两个半钟头的观影过程感到非常享受，认为全片毫无冷场。他认为全片最过瘾的桥段在影片最后。他称之为“观看小说大结局时的惊叹！”他认为他重拾了儿时观看电影的兴奋感。(Mr.
Olympia/编译，转载请注明出处)
影评全文如下：
I can still remember the first time I saw
James
Cameron’s 
Terminator
2. I was in elementary school and had tagged along
with some of my older relatives to a Los Angeles theater. The
atmosphere was electric at the sold-out showing, and that was even
before the first reel started rolling. What we, as an audience,
bore witness to that day was the fact that Cameron was able to
deliver something that we’d never seen before, a special effects
extravaganza depicting a benevolent cyborg battling against a man
made of liquid metal. When Arnold delivered his “I’ll Be Back”
line, the audience erupted into cheers. It was one of the most
memorable moviegoing experiences of my life.
We here at /Film have been writing and thinking about
Avatar
constantly for months and months, and by this point the hype
(partially created by sites like ours) is pretty enormous. Industry
observers, and to some degree Cameron himself, have claimed that
Avatar will not only transform cinema but
also the process of how movies are made. The plot details of the
film have been covered elsewhere, so I won’t go into them here. My
question going into the film was not whether or not Cameron could
live up to the impossibly high expectations, but simply whether
Cameron could temporarily restore that sense of childlike wonder I
once felt at watching his movies years ago.
Let me just start by saying that
Avatar is
a hugely exciting sci-fi/adventure/thriller/romance/drama/war film
that is well-worth your time. It’s a complicated enterprise to
build a world, but with his nearly unlimited resources for this
film, Cameron seems to have done just that for the planet of
Pandora. From the flora and fauna all the way to the language of
the Navi, the attention to detail is impressive. More importantly,
the look of the world feels unified and believable. It is a
remarkable creation and a stunning testament to Cameron’s ability
to fully realize his creative impulses.
Two of the film’s most-touted elements are its use of performance
capture and the 3-D feature. I actually think it’s to their credit
to say that I didn’t really notice either of them after the first
few minutes. The fusion of CGI-creatures and real-life actors is
relatively seamless and you end up just completely buying the world
that Cameron has put you into. The 3-D helped make the experience
more immersive, but I was more impressed at the camera work in this
film; the way Cameron was able to use technology to change his
workflow has resulted in cinematography that feels right at home in
your typical action film. It’s subtle, but it goes a long way
towards convincing you that Pandora actually exists in this
universe.
Undoubtedly the weakest part of Avatar is the script, which I can’t
describe as anything other than terrible. Supposedly written by
Cameron years ago before the technology existed to bring it to
fruition, the dialogue is frequently stilted and occasionally
delivered poorly. I felt this dearth of quality more frequently
during the scenes with the humans, perhaps since they were in a
language I could recognize.
Virtually every single significant character moment feels
maddeningly rushed. Turning points in the storyline never really
feel like they are given their due, and with the possible exception
of Jake Sully (
Sam Worthington),
none of the characters get enough screen time for you to learn
their motivations or develop a significant emotional attachment.
Thus, whether a character was making a critical decision or meeting
his/her untimely demise, I was often left strangely emotionless. I
wanted to be invested, but there just wasn’t enough there for me to
connect to.
Despite this, almost everyone does a decent job with what they’ve
been given. Standouts include
Stephen
Lang, who plays Colonel Miles Quaritch with a bitter
intensity.
Zoe Saldana is great as
Neytiri; Saldana’s character experiences the full range of human
emotion here, from disdain to love, defeat to triumph. And somehow,
underneath all of that CGI blue, she manages to be, dare I say it,
sexy? Her relationship with Jake is the one I found the most
convincing and compelling, but even then, it hit the standard beats
a little too quickly and I felt it needed a little bit more room to
breathe.
That being said, what the script lacks in depth, it makes up for in
pacing. I never, for one moment, felt bored during the film’s
entire 2.5+ hour runtime. Just when you are starting to get a tiny
bit restless, Cameron has an thrilling set piece or a gorgeous
visual waiting for you around the corner. In fact, I actually
wished the film was longer to allow us to spend more time with
these people in this amazing world.
The film’s biggest accomplishment is its finale, and here, Cameron
completely delivers. While the scenes of war hinted at in the
trailers are indeed spectacular, it’s the very last confrontation
in the film that I found to be both novel in concept and masterful
in execution.
In the end, I found what I was looking for in
Avatar, a sense of wonderment at the novel, and a feeling
that what I was seeing is the beginning of something exciting in
the world of cinema. There were sequences of such intensity that
they literally got my heart pumping furiously, and scenes and
moments of such beauty in this film that my inner child squealed
with glee at seeing them on screen. If you’re looking for an
amazing time at the movie theater, there’s more than enough here to
thrill you, move you, entertain you, and even provoke you.
Avatar is the reason why people
occasionally use the word “epic” to describe movies. Cameron has
always been skilled at setting up a clear dichotomy between good
and evil, and that ability is on display here, encapsulated in the
epic battle between the natives and the invaders of Pandora. I just
wish that we’d gotten to know everyone a little bit more before
they all headed off to war.
*******************************
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