스크랩 영화 Avatar 감상기

[이 건일]

요즘 한국에서도 이 영화를 상영 하고 있는 걸로 알고 이 글을 올립니다.

저는 이 영화를 3D로 보았는데 옛날 입체영화적 보다 더 발전 되어

아주 현실감이 많아 좋더군요.

감독 J.Cameron 은 NY Times Movie Reviewer Manohla Dargis 에 의 하면 

최신 컴퓨터 그래픽 기술을 적용하여 기술적으로는 아주 발전된 기법을

이용하여 영화를 만들었지만, 본질적으로는 아주 고전주의에

속하는 영화 작가라고 말하고 있습니다.

줄거리는 마치 미국 개척사에 나오는 Pocahontas (c.1595 – March 21, 1617) ;

 (현재 Virginia 주에 살았던 인디언 공주, 영국인 이주자 John Rolfe 와 결혼 했습니다.)

이야기와 흡사 합니다.
외부로 부터 침입한 자와 사랑에 빠지는 공주 와 결국은 원주민에

동화되는 외부 침입자가,
합심하여 외부의 적을 물리 친다는 이야기 말입니다.

자원 고갈과 오염으로 멸망해가는 지구에서 큰 Corporation 에서 파견한 자들

(Share Holder들의 눈치를 보아야 하며 Bottom Line은 Profit 이라고 강조 하는 자들)

이 신비의 물질인 unobtainium (가질수 없는 물질; 얼마나 아이로닉한 이름입니까?

감독의 비꼬움이 느껴 집니다.) 을 캐어 내기 위해 주인공도 포함된

용병들을 앞세워서
원주민인 나비( Na’vi )족들의 생활 터전을 파괴 합니다.
아주 악질인 trigger happy 용병 지휘자가 처음에 부하들에게

'You are not in Kansas anymore!' 라고 외치는 것은 감독이

'Wizard of Oz' 에 보내는 인사라고 하였습니다.
 
이 나비 족들은 동물을 죽여도 '내가 살기 위하여 할수 없이

너를 죽이지만 참 미안 하고 고맙다.' 라고 기도 하는
Eco-friendly 하며, 자연에 순응하여 살면서 자연의 혜택을

고마워 할줄 아는 종족입니다.
실제 어메리칸 인디언 (요즈음은 Native American 이라 고 불러야

Politically correct.) 들이 그렇게 생활 했다고 합니다.

이야기 자체는 금방 알아챌수 있는 소재였지만 여기에 쓰인

Computer Graphic Technic 은 아주 첨단이었고
아름 다운 화면은 사람들 주의력을 2시간 이상

붙잡아 놓기에 충분 하였습니다.
꼭 극장에 가서 큰 스크린(3D)으로 보아야만 되는

몇 않되는 그런 영화들중의 하나 라고 생각 합니다.

(다음은 인터넷에서 퍼온글)

<인도의 신화> 의 '아바타'. 인도의 인구수보다 더 많다는 인도의 신(神).
그 신들은 주신이 있으면서도 필요에 따라 여러가지 모습으로 하강한다.
이렇게 신이 인간이나 동물의 형상으로 하강하는 것을 '화신(化身) 혹은
'아바타(Avatar)'라 한다. 이를테면 힌두교의 3대 神中의

하나인 비슈누 神 (Visnu : 커다란 금시조 · 金翅鳥를 타고 다니며

악을 제거하고

정의의 회복을 유지하는 신으로, 평화의 신)의

 화신은 10개 (The ten avatars of Vishnu)인데,

 마츠야(Matsya, 물고기), 쿠르마(거북이), 바라하(멧돼지),

느리싱하(반인반사자),바마나(난장이), 파라슈라마(용사),

라마(푸른색 피부를 가진 물의 신), 크리슈나(Krishna),

 붓다(Buddha, 석가, BC.563~483), 칼키 등이다.

 인도 그림이나 조각을 볼 때 수없이 많이 등장하는 각양각색의 동물
이나 신들이 모두 '아바타'다. 오늘날 인터넷上에서

아바타는 게임, 채팅, 메일을 쓸 때, 사용자의 캐릭터를 대신하는

그래픽 아이콘을 지칭 하는 의미로 쓰이게 되었다.

이 '아바타' 영화가 나오기 전부터 '아바타'란
단어는 이미 인터넷상에서 보통명사처럼 쓰여지고 있었다.


이 영화의 끌림점은, 2시간 40분 영화속에 펼쳐진 아름다운 세상과

뛰어난 상상력 때문이다. 그리고 무엇보다도 영화 속에 녹아 있는 신화 때문이다.
'아바타' 속에는 그리스 신화에서부터 인도의 신화, 그리고 장자의 꿈까지
다양한 신화의 세계가 종횡무진으로 엮어져 있다. 영화속에 복선처럼

깔려있는 신화의 세계를 살펴보면 감독 제임스 카메론(James Cameron)이

관객에게 보여주고자 했던 세계가 이해될 수 있을 것이다.

영화의 줄거리는 간단하다. 가까운 미래에 지구는 에너지 고갈 문제를

해결하기 위해 머나먼 행성 판도라(Pandora) 에서 대체 자원을 채굴하기 시작한다.

하지만 판도라의 독성을 지닌 대기(大氣)로 인해 자원 획득에 어려움을

겪게 된 인류는 판도라의 토착민 ‘나비(Na’vi)’ 族의 외형에,

인간의 의식을 주입, 원격 조종이 가능한 새로운 생명체 ‘아바타(avatar)’를

탄생시키는 프로그램을 개발한다.

한편, 하반신이 마비된 전직 해병대원 ‘제이크 설리(샘 워딩튼,Sam Wor
thington)’는 ‘아바타 프로그램’에 참가할 것을 제안 받아 판도라로 향한다.
그 곳에서 자신의 ‘아바타’를 통해 자유롭게 걸을 수 있게 된 ‘제이크’는
자원 채굴을 막으려는 ‘나비(Na’vi)’의 무리에 침투하라는 임무부여 받는다.

임무 수행 중 ‘나비(Na’vi)’의 여전사 ‘네이티리(조 샐다나,Zoe Saldana)’를

만난 ‘제이크’는 그녀와 함께 다채로운 모험을 경험하면서 ‘네이티리’를
사랑하게 되고, 그들과 하나가 되어간다. 하지만 머지 않아

전 우주의 운명을 결정 짓는 대규모 전투가 시작되면서

‘제이크’는 최후의 시험대에 오르게 되는데….

('아바타' homepage 에서...)

다음은 New York Times 영화평입니다.
좀 길더라도 참조 하십시오.

December 18, 2009

A New Eden, Both Cosmic and Cinematic 

By MANOHLA DARGIS

Published: December 18, 2009

With “Avatar” James Cameron has turned one man’s dream of the movies into a trippy joy ride about the end of life — our moviegoing life included — as we know it. Several decades in the dreaming and more than four years in the actual making, the movie is a song to the natural world that was largely produced with software, an Emersonian exploration of the invisible world of the spirit filled with Cameronian rock ’em, sock ’em pulpy action. Created to conquer hearts, minds, history books and box-office records, the movie — one of the most expensive in history, the jungle drums thump — is glorious and goofy and blissfully deranged.

The story behind the story, including a production budget estimated to top $230 million, and Mr. Cameron’s future-shock ambitions for the medium have already begun to settle into myth (a process partly driven by the publicity, certainly). Every filmmaker is something of a visionary, just by virtue of the medium. But Mr. Cameron, who directed the megamelodrama “Titanic” and, more notably, several of the most influential science-fiction films of the past few decades (“The Terminator,” “Aliens” and “The Abyss”), is a filmmaker whose ambitions transcend a single movie or mere stories to embrace cinema as an art, as a social experience and a shamanistic ritual, one still capable of producing the big WOW.

The scale of his new movie, which brings you into a meticulous and brilliantly colored alien world for a fast 2 hours 46 minutes, factors into that wow. Its scope is evident in an early scene on a spaceship (the year is 2154), where the passengers, including a paraplegic ex-Marine, Jake (Sam Worthington, a gruffly sensitive heartthrob), are being roused from a yearslong sleep before landing on a distant inhabited moon, Pandora. Jake is woken by an attendant floating in zero gravity, one of many such aides. As Jake himself glides through the bright cavernous space, you know you’re not in Kansas anymore, as someone soon quips (a nod to “The Wizard of Oz,” Mr. Cameron’s favorite film). You also know you’re not in the gloom of “The Matrix.”

Though it’s easy to pigeonhole Mr. Cameron as a gear head who’s more interested in cool tools (which here include 3-D), he is, with “Avatar,” also making a credible attempt to create a paradigm shift in science-fiction cinema. Since it was first released in 1999, “The Matrix,” which owes a large debt to Mr. Cameron’s own science-fiction films as well as the literary subgenre of cyberpunk, has hung heavily over both SF and action filmmaking. Most films that crib from “The Matrix” tend to borrow only its slo-mo death waltzes and leather fetishism, keeping its nihilism while ditching the intellectual inquiries. Although “Avatar” delivers a late kick to the gut that might be seen as nihilistic (and how!), it is strangely utopian.

It doesn’t take Jake long to feel the good vibes. Like Neo, the savior-hero of the “Matrix” series played by Keanu Reeves, Jake is himself an avatar because he’s both a special being and an embodiment of an idea, namely that of the hero’s journey. What initially makes Jake unusual is that he has been tapped to inhabit a part-alien, part-human body that he controls, like a puppeteer, from its head to its prehensile tail. Like the rest of the human visitors who’ve made camp on Pandora, he has signed on with a corporation that’s intent on extracting a valuable if mysterious substance from the moon called unobtainium, a great whatsit that is an emblem of humanity’s greed and folly. With his avatar, Jake will look just like one of the natives, the Na’vi, a new identity that gives the movie its plot turns and politics.

The first part of Jake’s voyage — for this is, above all, a boy’s rocking adventure, if one populated by the usual tough Cameron chicks — takes him from a wheelchair into a 10-foot, blue-skinned Na’vi body. At once familiar and pleasingly exotic, the humanoid Na’vi come with supermodel dimensions (slender hips, a miniature-apple rear); long articulated digits, the better to grip with; and the slanted eyes and twitchy ears of a cat. (The gently curved stripes that line their blue skin, the color of twilight, bring to mind the markings on mackerel tabby cats.) For Jake his avatar, which he hooks into through sensors while lying in a remote pod in a semiconscious state, is at first a giddy novelty and then a means to liberation.

Plugging into the avatar gives Jake an instant high, allowing him to run, leap and sift dirt through his toes, and freeing him from the constraints of his body. Although physically emancipated, he remains bound, contractually and existentially, to the base camp, where he works for the corporation’s top scientist, Dr. Grace Augustine (Sigourney Weaver, amused and amusing), even while taking orders from its head of security, Col. Miles Quaritch (Stephen Lang), a military man turned warrior for hire. A cartoon of masculinity, Quaritch strides around barking orders like some intransigent representation of American military might (or a bossy movie director). It’s a favorite Cameron type, and Mr. Lang, who until this year had long been grievously underemployed, tears into the role like a starved man gorging on steak.

Mr. Cameron lays out the fundamentals of the narrative efficiently, grabbing you at once with one eye-popping detail after another and on occasion almost losing you with some of the comically broad dialogue. He’s a masterly storyteller if a rather less nimble prose writer. (He has sole script credit: this is personal filmmaking on an industrial scale.) Some of the clunkier lines (“Yeah, who’s bad,” Jake taunts a rhinolike creature he encounters) seem to have been written to placate those members of the Michael Bay demographic who might find themselves squirming at the story’s touchier, feelier elements, its ardent environmentalism and sincere love story, all of which kick in once Jake meets Neytiri, a female Na’vi (Zoë Saldana, seen only in slinky Na’vi form).

Mr. Cameron has said that he started thinking about the alien universe that became Pandora and its galactic environs in “Avatar” back in the 1970s. He wrote a treatment in 1996, but the technologies he needed to turn his ideas into images didn’t exist until recently. New digital technologies gave him the necessary tools, including performance capture, which translates an actor’s physical movements into a computer-generated image (CGI). Until now, by far the most plausible character created in this manner has been slithery Gollum from Peter Jackson’s “Lord of the Rings” cycle. The exotic creatures in “Avatar,” which include an astonishment of undulating, flying, twitching and galloping organisms, don’t just crawl through the underbrush; they thunder and shriek, yip and hiss, pointy teeth gleaming.

The most important of these are the Na’vi, and while their movements can bring to mind old-fashioned stop-motion animation, their faces are a triumph of tech innovation, with tremors and twitches that make them immediately appealing and empathetic. By the time Neytiri ushers Jake into her world of wonders — a lush dreamscape filled with kaleidoscopic and bioluminescent flora and fauna, with pink jellyfishlike creatures that hang in the air and pleated orange flowers that snap shut like parasols — you are deep in the Na’vi-land. It’s a world that looks as if it had been created by someone who’s watched a lot of Jacques Cousteau television or, like Mr. Cameron, done a lot of diving. It’s also familiar because, like John Smith in “The New World,” Terrence Malick’s retelling of the Pocahontas story, Jake has discovered Eden.

An Eden in three dimensions, that is. In keeping with his maximalist tendencies, Mr. Cameron has shot “Avatar” in 3-D (because many theaters are not equipped to show 3-D, the movie will also be shown in the usual 2), an experiment that serves his material beautifully. This isn’t the 3-D of the 1950s or even contemporary films, those flicks that try to give you a virtual poke in the eye with flying spears. Rather Mr. Cameron uses 3-D to amplify the immersive experience of spectacle cinema. Instead of bringing you into the movie with the customary tricks, with a widescreen or even Imax image filled with sweeping landscapes and big action, he uses 3-D seemingly to close the space between the audience and the screen. He brings the movie to you.

After a few minutes the novelty of people and objects hovering above the row in front of you wears off, and you tend not to notice the 3-D, which speaks to the subtlety of its use and potential future applications. Mr. Cameron might like to play with high-tech gadgets, but he’s an old-fashioned filmmaker at heart, and he wants us to get as lost in his fictional paradise as Jake eventually does. On the face of it there might seem something absurd about a movie that asks you to thrill to a natural world made almost entirely out of zeroes and ones (and that feeds you an anticorporate line in a corporately financed entertainment). But one of the pleasures of the movies is that they transport us, as Neytiri does with Jake, into imaginary realms, into Eden and over the rainbow to Oz.

If the story of a paradise found and potentially lost feels resonant, it’s because “Avatar” is as much about our Earth as the universe that Mr. Cameron has invented. But the movie’s truer meaning is in the audacity of its filmmaking.

Few films return us to the lost world of our first cinematic experiences, to that magical moment when movies really were bigger than life (instead of iPhone size), if only because we were children. Movies rarely carry us away, few even try. They entertain and instruct and sometimes enlighten. Some attempt to overwhelm us, but their efforts are usually a matter of volume. What’s often missing is awe, something Mr. Cameron has, after an absence from Hollywood, returned to the screen with a vengeance. He hasn’t changed cinema, but with blue people and pink blooms he has confirmed its wonder.

“Avatar” is rated PG-13 (Parents strongly cautioned). Gun and explosive violence, death and despair.

AVATAR

Opens on Friday nationwide.

Written and directed by James Cameron; director of photography, Mauro Fiore; edited by Mr. Cameron, John Refoua and Stephen Rivkin; music by James Horner; visual effects supervisor, Joe Letteri; production designers, Rick Carter and Robert Stromberg; produced by Mr. Cameron and Jon Landau; released by 20th Century Fox. Running time: 2 hours 46 minutes.

WITH: Sam Worthington (Jake Sully), Zoë Saldana (Neytiri), Sigourney Weaver (Dr. Grace Augustine), Stephen Lang (Col. Miles Quaritch), Michelle Rodriguez (Trudy Chacon), Giovanni Ribisi (Carter Selfridge), Joel David Moore (Norm), C C H Pounder (Mo’at), Wes Studi (Eytukan) and Laz Alonso (Tsu’Tey).

WETA/20th Century Fox

Zoë Saldana and Sam Worthington in James Cameron’s “Avatar,” which pushes the 3-D envelope.

[운영자]

저도 CGV에서 이 영화를 봤는데 처음엔 제목만 봐서 아이들 보는 영환줄 알았죠. 어른들이 봐도 놀랠, 옛날 같았으면 꿈도 못 꿀 컴퓨터 그래픽 기술과 상상력의 결정판 이더군요. 타이타닉 영화를 만든 카메론 감독은 뭔가 다르더군요. 두 시간이 넘는 상영시간이 지루한 줄 모르고 봤습니다.

[민경조]

영화에 대한 열정이 아직도 식지않고 뜨거운 걸 보면 그 옛날 우미관을 비롯해서 많은 재상영관을 찾던 기억이 새롭습니다. 음약, 영화 등에 열정을 갖고 사시는 이건일 동문 참 대단합니다. 종종 좋은 내용 많이 소개해 주시기 바랍니다.

[이 건일]

아직도 영화를 좋아 하지요. 극장에는 아주 가끔 밖에 못가고 주로 집에서 DVD 로 봅니다.