SF author Greg Egan reviews Avatar
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It's that fact alone that makes me take his review into consideration. If you haven't seen Princess Mononoke, I'd highly recommend it. Actually, I'd recommend all the Studio Ghibli films. My wife and I have the entire collection, and are in the middle of watching the last one we haven't watched yet, Porco Rosso (which is so far, fantastic). "These" are the kinds of animations I, personally, want to watch.
- Visually stunning, without the need for CG.
- Not overwhelming, ie: Not too spastic or overwhelming, commercial-esque, scene switching.
- No overly annoying characters.
- Original content.
You can find the entire Studio Ghibli series online at your favorite Bay of Pirates, but, I'd recommend you actually buy them all, as they are simply amazing. (My Neighbor Totoro is the kid friendliest, and the others aren't necessarily). My apologies if this wasn't specific to Avatar, but I'm just about to finish all of Studio Ghibli's works, and am simply amazed at these films. Fantastic.
Gonna watch it tonight: http://www.veoh.com/collection/phanviet/watch/v6364398zH9eBN...
As for Avatar -
My two biggest complaints:
1. It paints it as black and white, good vs. evil. This is such a common source of human misery and brainwashing that I thought we'd started to move past in cinema. Every leader worth anything tries to play the underdog card. Ask yourself about every cause you sincerely respect and believe in - do any of your leaders not paint it as you vs. the world? The New York Yankees are the only organization I can think of that don't try to play the underdog external evil enemies card. All the world religions do, all political parties do, all nations do, and so on.
2. My housemate had a great quote - he said, "They completed de-humanized the humans before doing all the violence to them." It's quite right - the evil military industrial capitalist marines have no family members, loved ones, passions, or good about them. They exist to be eaten by dinosaurs, shot by arrows, crushed, beaten, and shredded. There's no marine who signed on for a security job, got a little freaked out what's happening, and died due to the complex violent decisions of the leaders. Nope, all the marines are not even human or worth sympathizing with at all - destroy the expoiters, make violence on them, and they deserve all the hells we can visit upon them.
When you take "we're completely good and they're completely evil" and mix it with "our enemies aren't even human", you get a recipe for horrible atrocities. I watched a documentary of what the Imperial Japanese Army soldiers was thinking at Nanking. They regarded their cause as God's work, and their Chinese enemies as not human.
Never mind the specific politics. Do we really want our epic, landmark art to assert that there is in fact pure good, pure evil, and the people with different views than us are pure evil and aren't even human? I kept trying to think of if I had a kid, how I'd talk to him or her after watching that to understand that the "clear good and evil" thinking leads to very bad places.
I know, that isn't quite the Wars For Oil Suck, Love Your Purple Bambi Earth Goddesses Or You Will Be Brutally Slain thing he was going for, but still.
(Edited to add: Am I a bad person if I sympathized with the marine colonel most out of any character? "Oh blimey, traitors have just stolen a top-of-the-line helicopter gunship armed with missiles that could blow us all apart. Men, masks on! I'm about to blow the door, step unprotected into an environment filled with poisonous gas, and engage them singlehandedly. With a sidearm.")
But the political message which only really sinks in afterwards is "China should stop fucking about already and just invade Taiwan" and then you think, wow, someone really wanted to get that message across to Western moviegoers...
Personally, I'm a large fan of learning about all sorts of things, and history is one of the things I love the most. What got me interested in history was learning about Sengoku Japan -
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sengoku_period
Now, the Japanese people have some strong ideas about Sengoku, but they're mixed ideas with conflict and debate about who the "good guys" were. It's funny because I'd made my conclusions and opinions on a number of the leaders of the era, only to find out that many Japanese people have much greater or worse opinions on certain people. By learning from a true outsider's perspective, I feel like I got more of the legitimate story than the propaganda. Besides, there's no debate as to the merits of the caste system, or whether power is better consolidated under the Emperor who is God-on-Earth, or the Shogun, who is ostensibly the chief servant of the Emperor, Head of the Military, and Head of the Economy.
So, by getting into 1600's Japanese history and seeing how complicated and nuanced it was, it gave me a much greater and more interesting view of Western European and American history. What's interesting is that typically has "good guys" and "bad guys" and it's very clear who is who.
For instance, take the American Civil War. Under the American Constitution, Federalism, Representative Democracy, and under classical international law, the Confederate Secession was legal, and the attempt to re-supply Fort Sumpter was illegal. The total war/slash and burn Union campaign was brutal. In the North, they also suspended habeas corpus, arrested people who spoke against the war (including Senators, yikes!), conscripted people against their will, and generally did some very bad shit.
The war is taught and sold as a civil rights thing - really, looking back on primary and secondary sources, it wasn't. Here's Lincoln's First Inaugural Address, right after the Confederacy started.
http://www.bartleby.com/124/pres31.html
Here's what he thinks about slavery at that point:
> It is found in nearly all the published speeches of him who now addresses you. I do but quote from one of those speeches when I declare that— I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so.
Here's Lincoln toeing the line on whether the Northern states should be mandated to return fugitive slaves:
> There is some difference of opinion whether this clause should be enforced by national or by State authority, but surely that difference is not a very material one. If the slave is to be surrendered, it can be of but little consequence to him or to others by which authority it is done. And should anyone in any case be content that his oath shall go unkept on a merely unsubstantial controversy as to how it shall be kept?
His whole speech, he goes on trying to mediate and defend slavery. Why the war then?
> I hold that in contemplation of universal law and of the Constitution the Union of these States is perpetual. Perpetuity is implied, if not expressed, in the fundamental law of all national governments. It is safe to assert that no government proper ever had a provision in its organic law for its own termination. Continue to execute all the express provisions of our National Constitution, and the Union will endure forever, it being impossible to destroy it except by some action not provided for in the instrument itself.
He then makes a really interesting and somewhat crazy argument that the Articles of Confederacy are still legally binding, and that's why the South can't secede, and trying to would be an act of war:
> In your hands, my dissatisfied fellow-countrymen, and not in mine, is the momentous issue of civil war. The Government will not assail you. You can have no conflict without being yourselves the aggressors. You have no oath registered in heaven to destroy the Government, while I shall have the most solemn one to "preserve, protect, and defend it."
And YET, despite that, I think Lincoln absolutely was doing the right thing. I believe the Union invasion of the Confederacy was illegal under any definition of legal at the time, the President authorized breaking all sorts of laws, and yet, it was the right thing to do. I'll bite that bullet - President Lincoln broke the law, did some vicious things, but it was still in retrospect the correct course of action. Most people won't bite that bullet - so they want to claim that there's clear good guys and bad guys. I'd encourage them to read Lincoln's First Inaugural Address, it's simply too wild and crazy not to read. It doesn't match what I read in my high school "U.S. History" textbook very well, but yet, that was legitimately what he said. Crazy stuff.
I like reading speeches from early leaders to get at their motivations. Later, when audio and video recordings are available, I watch them. All the WWII countries went on and on about their propaganda. Had the Axis won, right now, we'd be reading about the evil imperialist Allies who sought to enslave the noble Germanic people.
I've seen FDR's speeches, Churchill's speeches, and Hitler's speeches. Churchill was generally pretty honest - he was a military man, and spoke rather plainly. He was put in after his predecessor failed - Prime Minister Chamberlain was more of a politician and not much of a military man, so he stepped down and Churchill became PM. He spoke simple, plain, about fighting for England and winning and courage.
Roosevelt and Hitler, though, they whooped all sorts of emotions about how American/German way of life were under attack by brutal enemies. Both lied, frequently, about enemy plans. Here's a totally comic forged map that FDR presented as Nazi intelligence:
http://strangemaps.wordpress.com/2008/03/01/250-who-put-the-...
(The Nazis were a lot of bad things, but if you look at their war plans, they really didn't care so much about the West. They invaded Poland, violating the Treaty of Versailles really really badly, and then England and France declared war on Germany. Germany didn't care so much about Western Europe or North America - Hitler was desperately afraid of and hated the Soviets, and all their plans were designed around going East. That's why they launched Operation Barbarossa - the invasion into the USSR - even though they couldn't come to a cease fire with England beforehand)
Hmm, this comment is turning out to be quite long. I wanted to set a stage for the kind of speeches people give - Hitler's were always the evil, evil un-human oppressors of Germany. He talked about "the rape of the Germany people in 1918" and the hordes that wanted to destroy the German race. Really, the Nazis were very evil, but they weren't openly evil the way The Empire is in Star Wars - Nazi rallying speeches sounded a lot like Soviet rallying speeches sounded a lot like American rallying speeches. They hate us... seek to destroy out way of life... this is a fight to the death... but we're proud and strong and courageous and we'll win... give yourself over to the greater good and victory is assured... we're righteous and right is on our side...
> Glad to see I wasn't the only one who felt like he was watching a Nazi propaganda movie - with the Na'vi as the pure, beautiful, harmonious Aryans, and the humans as the evil rapacious mongrel race.
So yeah, that turned out to be a long comment. But it's not so much a Nazi propaganda movie - just a standard propaganda movie, like any political group in history would use. The enemy is evil, has no heart or soul, nothing human about them, and they'll completely destroy us for completely faulty reasons if we don't completely destroy them first. Standard us-vs-them total genocidal war propaganda. Though, it is a little disconcerting to see in a mainstream film in the year 2009.
For the most part, I agree heartily with your statements. On the topic of the Civil War, I'd disagree slightly - I'm not sure I agree that the price paid was worth it, but I appreciate that you've weighed the actual evidence and concluded otherwise. Most people just accept what they read in their high school textbook, or cling to "The South will rise again" fantasies.
The reason I drew a comparison to Nazi movies, rather than generic propaganda films, is the racial nature of the conflict in Avatar. The fundamental Big Lie of Nazism was that Aryans were superior to, and being oppressed by, the lesser races. The Big Lie of Soviet Communism, on the other hand, was about the oppression of one class of people by another, and the inevitability of a classless society. It has a human universalism that Nazism lacks.
To make my point in another way, the movie could just as easily (speaking as someone who is not James Cameron) have featured two warring factions of Na'vi - traditionalist and technological - in which case I probably wouldn't have drawn the Nazi movie comparison.
And now, I'm off to learn more about the Sengoku period :-)
I interpreted Avatar as a man vs nature story... with the humans against nature, and the Omaticaya on nature's (Pandora's) side. And nature won, for once.
When the marines destroyed Hometree, I was thinking of the Hetch-Hetchee Valley.
-no popular culture references delivered by a wise cracking animal.
-somehow they end up being both more emotional and less melodramatic than the usual us cartoons; and
-they often have very serious themes even though they are for children. They often talk about war, death, love, etc. and manage to be perfectly fine children's movies.
If you haven't seen the film and want to see the film and don't want to know every detail before-hand, don't read this thread. It (the thread) has taught me to avoid HN when there's a new film around.
Most likely this comment will sink to the bottom and not serve its purpose of protecting the casual browser (person, not application), but for as long as it stays at or near the top, it may save a few people.
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And I'll give you a few more lines so that it'll cover larger screens (i've got 1200 pixels to make up for).
However, if people want to keep the spoiler protector in place, but not give me the karma for it, feel free to upmod the spoiler protector and downmod this comment to balance it.
I think a single group of radio buttons to control both sides would have made more sense.
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None of his output is light reading, but (IMHO) it's extremely substantive, as opposed to the physically substantial 1,000 page doorstops and franchise vehicles...I doubt I'd enjoy a novelization of Avatar, for example. I'm into that movie for the magic carpet ride rather than the dialog or character development.
http://gregegan.customer.netspace.net.au/DIASPORA/01/Orphano...
Who cares about the plot? It's beautiful. Amazingly, wonderfully, brilliantly beautiful.
So they use a non-risky script, with nothing objectionable in it.
Once the technology matures you can use a better script. The price of better is that sometimes it's worse, that's why it's a risk. If it was a sure thing everyone would do it, but it's not easy to create something great. You can try, and sometimes you'll make it, and other times you'll flop.
Which is too much of a risk for a new technology - better to have something good enough, with little risk.
Remember: Everyone thinks what they are doing is great. But if you are wrong, and it's a flagship product you are doomed. For example http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heavens_Gate_(film)
How did we get to the point where "Humans are evil, kill them all!" is a non-risky script with nothing objectionable in it?
Joe Valdez at This Distracted Globe has a good review: http://thisdistractedglobe.com/2009/01/01/heavens-gate/ TL;DR version: quit perfecting and ship it!
"Sometime in the next twenty years or so, the technology that enabled Avatar will become cheap enough to risk employing alongside a moderately intelligent script." - it's right there in the review.
It's frustrating when this happens:
Author: A, yet also B. You may think that C, but I'd argue that D makes that untenable.
Commenter: He said A, but clearly C. Another commenter: Hmm, C you say? But what about D? Another commenter: y'all are too swept up in your As and Cs and Ds, have you even stopped to consider B?
I do. (Sorry for being ...uh .... different).
yes it looks cool. Some of us expectt more in a movie. Sorry about that.
I personally found the warmed over "Stupid White Man penetrates exotic closed society and rises to be leader of it, seducing the native woman" plot tiresome, repetitive and tedious, especially with the clunkiest dialogue I've heard in a decade, and insufficiently compensated for by the technology/visuals. I found the "noble savages" idea and infantile hippy politics and preaching tiresome too.
For some of us lesser mortals good graphics/special effects is just one element of a good Scifi/fantasy movie, and then not the most important aspect.
(from the review) " what it really felt like to me was a fourth movie in the Shrek franchise, pipping the yet-to-be-released Shrek Forever After to extrapolate that series' twin curves of rising technical achievement and plumetting wit to their logical endpoint: a near-immaculate feat of visualisation, accompanied by a staggeringly awful plot in which clunky genre conventions triumph completely over plausibility and originality. Avatar even boasts its very own love story where societal expectations and superficial barriers of size and pastelicity are overcome by generous helpings of pixie dust."
This expresses my feelings perfectly, but I wouldn't be so polite. I think Avatar is a terrible movie with gorgeous visuals and nothing else.
Aliens != Red Indians in fancy dress. The movie insults my intelligence on multiple levels. Yes I know, Caveat Emptor and all that, but I guess it must be because I am one of "these people"?
I'm sure you can find some overwrought deconstruction of modern human sexuality retold as 4 movements of the lives of people in positions of authority but no power, politicians of the modern era in a mock nuclear stand-down, a 30 minute continuous scene of a single flower, in water, as people pass by blurred in the bokeh of an extreme depth of field and the audio recorded so poorly you can't actually hear what anybody is saying, and a clinically shot orgy with a clown stepping in at minute 11 to juggle, seemingly unaware of his own environs -- driven by the effort to juggle so many balls.
In the end, the clown drops the balls and close to credits.
The credits of course will flow up and will be in a mix of Italian and French. Each scene of course representing impotence, sexual drive, narcissism as a sexual trait, and lust and the struggle to balance a polygamous relationship with three waitress and a gay hairdresser at the same time (as the director was experiencing while he shot this film). The credits of course flow up in Italian and French as a both symbols of ejaculation and of salad dressing.
Enjoy the search! http://www.netflix.com/
Can't make a movie? Get less drama in your life. Situation movie solved.
It wasn't improved any when they added another 1/2 to it.
What you've done is use the timeworn rhetorical device of taking someone's point of view and try to (rhetorically vs logically) invalidate it by positing an absurd opposite.
I think Avatar sucks except for the visuals. Bad plot, bad dialogue bad acting. None of this implies preferring "pedantic art flicks" as an alternative (this is your cute rhetoric at work - the unwarranted exaggeration of my stance).
Nice try though. ;-)
>I personally found the warmed over "Stupid White Man penetrates exotic closed society and rises to be leader of it, seducing the native woman" plot tiresome, repetitive and tedious
Sure the characters ranged from a bit 2-d (the Col.) to well fleshed out (Neytiri (watch it again if you don't believe me)) and the acting ranged from "will probably win an award it was so good" Saldana to "thanks for showing up and picking up your paycheck" Weaver. But that's nothing different than you'll find in almost every movie -- the principles are fleshed out and the supporting cast is flat.
Why can't we have more 'smart' movies like Erin Brockovich/Schindler's List/Fight Club/District 9/Oldboy/etc. (archetypes of David vs. Goliath, Greed and Bullies) or The Incredibly True Story of Two Teenagers In Love/Léon/American Beauty/Mississippi Masala/South Pacific/Moulin Rouge/West Side Story etc. (Forbidden Love) or Lawrence of Arabia/Dune/Hunt for Red October/etc. (Lovable Turncoat)... you ask? And I'd counter that all of those are as archetype driven as any other well known flick (archetype stories provided in parens).
You see where I'm going with this. Even if you don't agree with all my movie choices as being "good" or "smart" you'll at least have to agree that most movies that are at least reasonably well known are pretty much based on a dissection or aggregation of common archetypes. How many times has Romeo and Juliet been retold almost verbatim? And by and large the audience enjoys these things and says "oh the plot was so good" when really, they are just a rehash of old story ideas. We even group movies into archetype driven categories "love story", "ghost story", "suspense", etc.
So yes, I was being "cute" with my notional art-house flick. But if you want to find something not driven by archetypes, where the artists consciously try to avoid those things, you have to go there, or to France or Italy perhaps. Here, http://www.imdb.com/chart/top this is the top 250 movies on IMDB not by dollars but by rating. How many of these are "smart" movies meaning "not a rehash of archetypes"? Very few if any.
It's pretty simple really, if you don't want your intelligence to be insulted (meaning you don't want an archetype driven story), you end up with a movie about a vapid cowgirl/model with giant thumbs or a movie director that can't focus on making movies because he's too busy with all his mistresses (which is actually just a retelling of the "guy with too many girlfriends archetype"). And given that non-archetype driven movies are typically poorly rated and attended by the open public, either you are particularly "smart" or those movies tend to suck.
which all has nothing to do with what I said. You are reacting to your own opinions what you think is the sharp division of movies into either a collection of dumb stereotypes on one extreme (where Avatar fits) or "art movies" on the other..
Since this discussion looks increasingly pointless, I will end this thread here. Thank You for your time.
I took
>I personally found the warmed over "Stupid White Man penetrates exotic closed society and rises to be leader of it, seducing the native woman" plot tiresome, repetitive and tedious.
to mean, in the general sense "I personally found the warmed over archetype and cliche driven plot to be tiresome, repetitive and tedious."
But now I see by your infantile "I'm right, you're wrong, end of discussion fingers in ears Nya nya nya nya I can't hear you" childishness (to wit)
>Since this discussion looks increasingly pointless, I will end this thread here. Thank You for your time.
That I should have just linked you to Amazon's Disney Princess store instead of Netflix; and related "Snow White and the 7 Dwarfs" and "Little Mermaid" to you instead of "8 1/2" and "Even Cowgirls Get the Blues" as that would have been much more at your level.
There is a wonderfully realistic, fully immersive, 3D environment right outside my office window right now, but I don't care.
Want to know why?
Because the plot is boring. I get out of my chair, walk to my car, go to the gas-station, and then go home to play with my dog and go to bed.
The end.
People go to movies because it is better than reality. Perhaps those who never leave their couch are wowed by images that look exactly like reality, but Avatar's visual effects wowed me only in a "well, it looks like they finally did it properly!" sense. No offense to anyone who worked on this film, it is a staggering technical achievement, but it doesn't really do anything that reality doesn't.
/this might be due to my being a bit bitter that I can't see the 3D version due to my non-stereoscopic vision :(.
Apparently you live on Pandora,
where you can look at the office window right now and see the alien planet with floating mountains, giant six legged carnivores, pack hunters, bio-luminescent forests, two kinds (count them 2) of flying dragons and 12 foot tall blue skinned people with tails and braids with autonomous nerve endings at the end that can mentally bond with all of the above (sans the flying mountains).
I think Cameron lost it. The story was a nothing, and there were a few lines in there so bad, you don't even often see their equal on terrible sitcom TV. They were cheesy video game cut scene bad, only the godhead visual prevented me from wincing.
I'd still recommend for folks to see this movie, it is incredible, but what a shame...
(This is not supposed to be a complete explanation of what led Avatar to lack in original plot and verisimilitude).
Personally, though, I still think it's quite a good film. Some aspects of the love story grate a little (in particular Leonardo DiCaprio's always-perfect character) as does the characterization of all first class passengers as snooty jerks and all third class passengers as idealized salt of the Earth (come to think of it, that's pretty much the same problem as Avatar) but as soon as the ship starts sinking it becomes a fairly gripping story. Hardly the greatest film in history, but perfectly watchable and rewatchable even if you're not a 17-year-old girl.
http://boxofficemojo.com/alltime/adjusted.htm
Gone with the Wind #1, Star Wars #2, The Sound of Music #3. Titanic #6.
It was a perfect balance in my opinion for what it is. A beautiful film that is opening the doors for fresh and new science fiction (which has been lacking).
Critically analyzing this is like critically analyzing a 12 year old's day dreams.
That's about it. It's a thrilling and wild ride, a great place to be for a bit north of 2 hours, and that's it. It's a spectacle with a plot no deeper than Star Wars. But also no less fun that Star Wars.
Totally different levels and types of craft, as many seem to forget.
BTW, the current 2Advanced website was a fluke. Their previous site (which won tons of awards and business) had been around for 5+ years. Eric Jordan, their founder and lead designer was doing a series of matte paintings just for fun. Someone on the team said they'd make great artwork for the website and thus v4.
This is an accurate, but unfair, criticism. Humans tend to be most comfortable reading and watching stories about other humans, or barring that, human like creatures. (Think talking animals or Star Trek "aliens.") I seriously doubt a Hollywood film could effectively draw a large enough audience to cover development costs if the aliens were too far abstract or alien for viewers to identify with or try and read body language from. (I think this partly is why hard sci-fi is so rare. People might mistakenly think the film's horror if the aliens were more like Pierson's Puppeteers or other non-humanoid creature.)
So it seems humans can at least identify with cuddly bears.
This technology however, once it becomes more widespread and cheaper, will enable future movies to be made so cheaply that it'll become profitable to chase the more targeted audience. You can't make a smart movie for 300 million dollars, you'll lose your ass; there just aren't that many smart people out there that would appreciate it.
But when you can eliminate the actors, and their salaries, and just CG everything and hire a bunch of voice actors, and get that 300 million movie down to 1-10 million, then you can target highly selective audiences with something aimed directly at them profitably.
Take for example Man From Earth http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_from_Earth shot for 200k, exactly the opposite of Avatar, virtually no budget and a fantastic plot. A movie I loved but couldn't get most people to sit through if I tried, they just wouldn't appreciate the plot and would complain about how cheap it looked.
I loved Avatar by the way, but not for the plot, it was exactly as weak as I expect all blockbuster plots to be, but it was fucking beautiful visually and technically stunning.
To some extent, it's always been this way. Look at Shakespeare: most of his plays are set in foreign countries which would have been terribly exotic to his audience, or are concerned with battles, magic, or murder - it's all pretty sensationalist stuff.
With this sort of big-budget production story complexity takes a back seat to putting the audience 'into' the experience. Gattaca is a fine sci-fi movie that turns on a clever script and strong acting performances, but it wasn't exactly a box-office sensation. But it was pretty cheap to make. with something like Avatar you want a story that everyone can follow easily rather than one that risks alienating any segment of the audience. Epic stories generally try to minimize ambiguity and complexity: the payoff is emotional rather than intellectual.
Simple works. Complex doesn't.
As foreign box office has grown to a higher and higher percentage, this has become more and more true. Avatar did over 2/3rd of it's global box office opening weekend outside of the US and Canada (the "domestic" market).
Cameron did his job.
The problem with Avatar's script is not so much its simplicity, but its preachiness. A story set in a simplified world of good and evil isn't so annoying (cf Star Wars) unless it's supposed to be making some kind of political commentary on our own world.
Likewise in terms of evolution theory, I wonder how/why would loads of animals evolve with a common digital port. Not saying it is impossible, but then the history of that would be seriously interesting (I suppose the whole world would have to be an artificial creation by an ancient high tech race or something).
Instead, this movie dumbs down the common public by reinforcing naive stereotypes.
What amuses me in that context is that for example, the real native Americans did not even have horses before the settlers arrived. This just shows to me how extremely shallow the research for Avatar was. Of course natives have to ride horses and scream passionately and engage in stupid fights and rituals.
It bothers me because as it happens, I consider artificial life to be one of the most exciting things. There would have been so many opportunities here.
It was clear by the end the whole planet wasn't jungle; there was nothing to imply the horse-like creatures evolved in the jungle.
I suppose the whole world would have to be an artificial creation by an ancient high tech race or something
Shhh! No spoilers about the sequels!
As for the high tech race: ironically, the world was kind of created by such a high tech race - Cameron and his team :-)
I would highly recommend reading it.
Occasionally bothersome plot aside, I found it to be the most immersive movie I've seen in years, and I think it's largely due to the excellent 3D.
I also found that the 2D seemed to have more color depth than the 3D, but that might just have been my eyes trying to adjust to the 3D glasses.
Yes the plot was fairly simple, but more importantly I don't think it had any gigantic gaping holes. I'd rather have a straight forward plot that I can understand than one so full of twists I can't comprehend any of it.
I loved it. I'll be seeing it several more times in the theater.