20130812: Action Review--Avalon

(hulu+) Avalon

1. This is a substantial update to the mini-review from 20130629.
2. The movie is largely live action.  For the game sequences, live action with effects.  It is 106 minutes in length, released in 2001, from Mamoru Oshii, who directed the animated series Ghost in the Shell and Patlabor 2.
3. IMDB:  6.5/10 from 9,486 users.
4. Rotten Tomatoes: 'No score yet...' and 70% approval from 8,598 audience members.
5. Shot in Poland with Polish actors and Polish sets: streetcars, flats, bistros, large church, abandoned buildings and world war 2 weapons for the game sequences, and so on.
6. 'Avalon' is a VRMMORPG (virtual reality, massively multi-player, online role-playing game) gone wrong.  This sounds like a number of other films.  On the anime side, the .hack//sign and its many sequels, as well as GITS.  On the live action side, Tron and the Matrix series come to mind.
7. In retrospect, GITS seems positively open, clear, and transparent compared to this work.
8. Dissipation, pointlessness, inaction, game-induced permanent illnesses, lack of direction, out-of-focus closeups of low-tech food preparation, such as potatoe-cabbage-rice stew.  People with eastern European accents checking out old books written in Japanese.  Who could ask for more?  I could.  Was there a point to all of this?
9. The female protagonist, Ash, is one of the top players in this somewhat illegal game.  She attempts to find out why the game is having bad consequences for real-life players.  She follows this through with dogged determination and finds a conclusion of sorts in real life.
10. The ending was just absurd.  At 80 minutes in, we switched from the sepia-river-of-mud visual style to full light, good focus, and beautiful scenery.  Around 90 minutes in, Ash is at a large church where a lavish musical production is going on.  The final, climactic confrontation occurs on these grounds.  Ash debates what reality is with the ultimate nemesis.  The dialog is as stupid as the rest of the film.  The welcome, and long overdue, visual beauty does not improve that.
11. One star of five.  20130927: two blackholes for cinematography and screenplay.
12. As a side note, one of the thoughtful audience reviews I read claimed that the Miramax version (in English) was a disaster in terms of meaning.  The semantic content of the English version was clearly at odds (and much smaller) than the Polish version.  That would explain the lack of sense of the version I saw.

Art/cinematography: 2/10 Poor depth of field, many features obscured by shadows, dismal, murky, out of focus, lots of sepia shots and visual flattening.  Hulu+ claimed it was streaming in HD, but I saw no evidence of that in the visual quality.  This was ugly beyond belief.  The last twenty five or so minutes were nice to look at, but hardly made up for the first 80.

Sound: 4/10 The music was a bit too florid and symphonic for my tastes, but OK in terms of quality.  The dubbing into English was uneven but often badly done: the sound was hollow and lower in volume than the music.  In contrast, the many sounds of terribly sloppy eating were crisp and higher in volume than the spoken word.  For that matter, much of the foley (typewriters, footsteps, game sounds) is louder than speech.

Acting: 4/10 Light on motivation.  Let's blame the screenplay for that.

Screenplay:  1/10 The film was not engaging, mostly because the twists and turns of the plot always seemed one step closer to nothing.  I came away thinking I knew less about the movie after watching it than I did before I started watching.