$237, 000, 000.$237 million dollars.
Two hundred and thirty seven million dollars.
It doesn't matter how you say it, it's an awful lot of money to make a movie.
James Cameron's magnum opus, Avatar, is the current uber movie doing the rounds this Christmas, and, if Mr C himself is to be believed, it will change movie making for ever.
So . . . what's it like?
Well, what I can tell you is that this weekend I've also watched Sam Rockwell in Moon, and I probably enjoyed that as much as Avatar, and it only cost $5 million to make.
Don't get me wrong, Avatar isn't a bad movie. Far from it, it's an excellent movie. The problem for me is that James Cameron claims that he wrote the story for the film after waking one morning from a dream, a dream that quite clearly featured Kevin Costner from Dances With Wolves or Christian Slater from Fern Gully, as the plots of those two movies is broadly identical to that of Avatar.
The film itself is only 40% live action, the other 60% being CGI and it's here that all that cash has been spent. The CGI portions of this movie are utterly convincing, especially planet Pandora's flora and fauna. In fact I think the only way that the plants, creatures and landscape of this planet could have been any more believable is if there had been a running commentary by Sir David Attenborough. It's that good.
But not perfect.
One or two scenes still look a bit comic book-ish, and the 3D is mercifully subtle and restrained, but overall Avatar is a really good movie, not a great one. A great film needs a great story.
So has it changed movies forever?
The answer for me is no, unless you happen to be a film director with $300 million dollars of someone else's cash in your back pocket.
