Avalon

I notice on the rating chart that the younger a person is, the higher this film gets rated. Well, I'm 53 years old and I'm giving it a 9 because it's brilliant. Maybe most "older" people simply aren't intellectually equipped to understand this film's blending of sci-fi, virtual reality, classical mythic archetypes, and terrific film work. Too bad. And I suppose the movie poses a challenge to most Americans with their aversion (provincial fear) of subtitles.

In any case, this is a Japanese production filmed and set in Poland, using Polish actors. And it is strangely wonderful in all respects: story, theme, characters, style, cinematography. It explores a virtual reality, William Gibson sort of story and theme. The protagonist is a young woman named Ash (Malgorzata Foremniak) who dons a headset and plays virtual reality games. And we, the viewers, go inside the games with her. What is real? What is virtual?

The director uses special film stock to get dream-like tones and visuals that will knock you out. In that respect, the images often remind me of early B&W American films. Lovely.

Avalon is a beautiful movie, but not for everyone. If you mainly like action or fast-paced movies you may be turned off by some of the slow scenes during the movie. Avalon has action though, and explosions galore. Some of the story is a little ridiculous and hard to follow, but that isn't necessarily a bad thing at all.

This is the only film I know of that was a co-production of both Japan and Poland. Directed by Mamoru Oshii, but filmed mostly in Poland and in the native Polish language.

While watching this movie you get a feeling of a very unique quality. It was filmed (or altered in post) to resemble an old Sepia toned film, but still with the high-resolution of today's film standard. This adds a very bleak and depressive visual style to much of the movie. That's a good thing, because this is not a happy movie in the least.

Avalon relies heavily on CGI throughout the movie, due to the "cyber game world" that the movie is largely dealing with. Much of the CGI effects are quite interesting to watch. You can often tell they are CGI effects, but it's obvious that it's a computer dominating world with players inside it.

Another effective element to the film was the excellent music score by Kenji Kawai. This has to be one of the most beautiful and engaging film scores I've heard in a long time. It ranges through many different forms, even to the operatic. Very layered and complex, yet easy on the ears. Recorded with the Warsaw Philharmonic Orchestra, tons of people played the various musical instruments in the recording of the score, according to the end credits. I would compare it in a sense to Christopher Young's otherworldly and haunting score for the first two Hellraiser films. It's a shame that the soundtrack to Avalon is currently only available as an expensive import CD.

Even if you dislike the film, you must watch it once just for the amazing music...it really is that good.

I think many of the complaints about this movie are by those that overlook one of the most obvious statements of the movie... that day to day life is boring & tedious, (walking hallways, taking lonely boring train rides, feeding your dog, watching an annoying person eat) all the while the visual world (read spiritual, artistic, visionary, higher level, etc.) is breath-taking. None of the characters of this world are privy to the visual poetry we are being exposed to as viewers... and that is part of the point, they are blind to it... yet it's a reminder that technological obsessiveness, or material obsessiveness, blinds everyone from simple visual beauty. The lighting alone in the movie was incredibly inventive, variations of sepia tones that went from red to green to blue during the course of the movie... overall the lighting and photography in the movie was amazing. You could take any given frame of this film and have a very beautiful photograph. There is a lot of CGI work in this movie that many nay-sayers called "low budget" and didn't even notice. Watch at the very end of the movie how the ghost's mouth wavers, almost like the Mona Lisa, from sad half-frown into a smirk, and this was done in post. I'm sure many people missed very subtle and beautiful touches like this on first viewing. If someone were to critique it for lack of complexity, I would agree... Blade Runner was not "deep" in the same way... but both, upon multiple viewings, remain almost timelessly poignant while being very reflective of when they were made, and I'm sure in 10 years this movie will seem as striking, as Blade Runner is to me now over 20 years since it's release. This will be one to watch over and over again every 6 months.

One caveat... the Miramax version is rubbish. The translations are horrible and stupid. Literally you lose half the meaning of the film. At one point Ashe is talking to the Gamemaster discussing Avalon (the mythic island) and discussing Odin and the helmet of forgetting... right as she puts the VR helmet on. In the Miramax version... the Gamemaster just says "be careful it's dangerous in there"... etc. Not even close, it's like they didn't bother even attempting a real translation, pathetic.

This is a stunningly visual film which takes many of the best elements of the minor sub-genre of 1980s and 1990s sci-fi involving virtual reality, and blends them into an interesting story exploring social withdrawal, addiction, the nature of reality, and the value of life. The film does have a bit of new wave pretentiousness to it - using cliché hacker-names for the players of Avalon, etc, but no more so than many of its competitors (and a bit less than The Matrix). If this sort of thing doesn't appeal to you - and especially if you're the type who wants a film to simply entertain and tell you a simple story, don't bother to read any further.

The film uses a story-telling technique common in good literature but unfortunately under-used in film - that of intentional ambiguity. The best example of this is the main character - well played by Malgorzata Foremniak. You simply don't know what to make of "Ash". Though I found it easy to relate to this character, and I think I understand her, I am not sure most viewers will. In my opinion, Ash is best interpreted as a person with an iron-clad grip on reality, who nevertheless maintains a distance from the people around her, and prefers to keep her relationships "in-game". This is not at all an uncommon personality type, especially among women and mature males in the real worlds of virtual reality and on-line gaming.

The film focuses on Ash's ambitions to become the best player of Avalon - an ultra-real and sometimes deadly virtual reality game - in the world. Avalon is illegal and run on LANs which are set up in what looks like futuristic crack houses. To become recognized as the best, Ash has to complete a level which tends to put anybody who enters it into a catatonic state. She comes to believe that an old team mate of hers - Murphy - inhabits that zone, and wants to rescue him. But of course the designers of the game have other plans, and maybe Murphy himself does as well. Foremniak does a great job of playing this ambiguous yet sympathetic character. Ash, the carefully developed script, the excellent soundtrack, and the superb and beautiful visual effects, all keep you guessing until the very end. I never knew what to expect from this film, and I was very pleased by the way it developed its own concepts of logic and justice - remaining centered on Ash throughout.

Avalon was interesting enough for a second and perhaps a third viewing. I will update my review (if needed) after my next round with it. For now, I will only give it a very high recommendation to anybody who has read this far. After all, if you've read this far in the review, you're probably interested enough in the film to see it.

There is a lot to recommend this movie, including a richly-stylized world, exciting action, and excellent music. I will admit that I was first interested in this movie because I knew of the director Mamoru Oshii from the anime "Ghost in the Shell", so I wasn't surprised to find that the movie felt much like a very stylized high-quality anime movie. Indeed, I wasn't surprised that the Japanese director revealed (in an interview included with the DVD I watched) that his relationship with the Polish actress playing the main character Ash was much like his relationship with a character from one of his anime projects, since he could no more communicate personally with Malgorzata Foremniak than he could with one of his anime characters. To him, the actress was entirely her character, and it's intriguing to see what became of that very unusual relationship on film.

I'm always wary of getting carried away with a first reaction to a film, so I should admit that this film isn't perfect. I found myself wanting to know more about the background of the main character, and her family, and how she came to become the person we see in the film; certainly, Malgorzata Foremniak does a very good job of playing a character whose fantasy life (the life of her online RPG character) is more real than her 'real' life, but the lack of background detail makes her character Ash very much like a two-dimensional anime character, and that can be considered a weakness. Also, this movie bears an obvious similarity to "The Matrix" (which predated it), so most viewers will inevitably compare this movie to "The Matrix" and find it perhaps wanting in that it doesn't lay out the background of the virtual world of the Avalon RPG as clearly as "The Matrix" lays out the background of its world.

These factors notwithstanding, I still enjoyed "Avalon" and I recommend it to anyone with more than a passing interest in virtual reality stories, anime, or highly-stylized science fiction in general. In the aforementioned interview, the director mentions that his films tend to deal with a borderline between fantasy and reality, and it's quite apparent that Ash's 'real world' is somehow both grittier, and less real, than the world of the Avalon RPG which she's so obsessed with. The action sequences in the film (featuring real-world equipment from the Polish army, such as tanks and attack helicopters) are exciting in their own right, but the special effects of the film (such as explosions reduced to 2-D images and bystanders who disintegrate when shot) make it clear what is supposedly real and what is supposedly virtual. Also, the contrast between fantasy and reality is much more vivid here than in the Matrix movies - and that's especially apparent toward the end of the movie where the viewer is left to wonder just what (if anything) is ultimately real, and what is simply imagined. Also, I must say that the music of this film is extraordinary, including choral music that is downright eerie, but also beautiful at the same time. A world both real and unreal is conjured very effectively in this movie, and therefore I would recommend it to any fans of this sub-genre of science fiction in particular, and fans of highly-stylized film-making in general.