Customer Reviews

Avalon

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

I saw this movie ages ago and loved it. Searching for years, I could never find it until now. Avalon is a milkshake of orgasmic proportions. Great story, visually sharp and creatively realistic. Slow parts balanced with smoky, well textured locations(they are slow on purpose to show dying humanity at a crawl).

If you liked The Matrix, Blade Runner and other Noir Sci-Fi, Check out AVALON

It is the dismal looking future and one thing that is forbidden but to intriguing to resist is the virtual reality game of "Avalon" it may prove to be fatal. Ash (Malgorzata Foremniak) an independent player was once a member of a team. Some one chickened out and called a reset. Now the one whom we assume is the culprit must get to the "A" level to free the old team leader Murphy (Jerzy Gudejko) from a vegetative existence.

Naturally nothing is what it seems in this perilous adventure. And reality is what we chose it to be.

Beautiful Music by the Warsaw Philharmonic.
Bishop is played by Dariusz Biskupski. 'Biskup' is Polish for bishop.

I got my hands on this DVD after catching the first five minutes of the movie being projected on a warehouse wall with a backdrop of thumping industrial techno. The opening scenes were rather impressive - an illegal, potentially lethal video game in which people get online, strap on military hardware and set about killing each other. Although I'm not a fan of online gaming (I'm crap at first person shooters), I thought it looked and sounded like a cool premise. So I went home and found a copy.

The first five minutes, again, were fantastic. A moderately fast-paced battle scene with awesome tech and lots of things blowing up. Fun. But then 'reality' struck.

I've long been annoyed by the sort of pseudo-symbolism that Japanese movie makers seem to like drowning their creations in. Usually it's pretentious and annoying, but it does serve to cover up the incredibly shallow plots of most Japanese animes and movies. For instance, want to have giant robots that exist for no real reason fighting monsters that continuously show up for no real reason in a post-apocalyptic world that has no reason to exist? Add a faux-Biblical subtext and you have Evangelion (which I thought was otherwise very cool).

Avalon is different. Instead of taking a shallow, unworkable pretext and slaps in a half carried-through set of (cool and ominous sounding) mythical symbolisms from another culture to add some depth, Avalon takes a monumentally workable and interesting idea and adds a crappy mythological overtone to completely deprive the movie of depth.

So many things could have been covered - why the world was so miserable, why the game killed some people and under what conditions, how laws banning the game were supposedly enforced, how the clans interacted in the game, and even how the unbelievably cool idea of preserving Dungeons and Dragons style character classes in a modern warfare game would work. These are all completely ignored in favour 90-something minutes of sepia-toned still scenes emphasising how dreary the world and city is, and cryptic but ultimately pointless references to some aspects of Arthurian legend.

The protagonists are wooden, stereotypical and unlikeable. Character development is nil. The battle scenes are few and far between, and the first one is the only good one. For the most part, even the most powerful machines lack weight and aren't particularly threatening, and even if they were, it is hard to bring yourself to care about what happens to any of the characters anyway. To top it off, the soundtrack (or lack thereof) is minimalist to the point of non-existence.

The movie ends, leaving a bad taste in your mouth. That bad taste is the taste of having had an hour and a half of your life taken away from you by a horribly pretentious Japanese gentleman. My girlfriend was put to sleep by the slow pace and dreary setting of this movie, and even after I returned the DVD to the store the next day she didn't trust me to chose another movie for weeks.

Avalon is truly awful. While some people seem to like it for some sort of artistic value, I found it to be pretentious and ultimately devoid of value. It takes some great ideas and ignores them entirely. Any movie which wanted to subsequently explore those ideas which Avalon discarded would be decried as a rip off and probably sued. That's probably the worst thing about Avalon. Do not watch it.

Here we go again. MIRAMAX basterdizes another movie. MIRAMAX tends to buy the rights to these great movies & then changes them. I've seen the original AVALON so I can comment on what's been changed. First, the original washed out color of the film is replaced with an deep orange. This really ruins some of the original scenes.At least some colors in the original movie came out. MIRAMAX has ruined the directors vision. If you have this DVD see the extras on the cinamatography & SFX. At least there you'll see the original color that was intended by director Mamoru Oshii.The 2nd thing that's been added is the additoinal dialogue. The main chracter explains the game after her 1st victory. This has been added by MIRAMAX. And lastly at the end or character explains it all or tries to.All this was added to the movie. The directors intention is to make you guess & ponder this wonderful story. But MIRAMAX has decided for you. About the only thing I'll give them credit is the great English dub. I also enjoyed the extras. I have to give this 3 stars. If you can write a protest letter to MIRAMAX. It's so sad how a american Distributor can tamper & ruin a directors vision. I'd recommend getting a foreign version of this movie if you can.

This movie is 10 times better than the matrix. The story and philosophy of this movie is excellent. Highly recomended.

I will not go into the details of the plot since they have been covered by others. I will just say that as weird as this movie "noir" was, I actually liked it. What tilted the scale in its' favor was featuring Ash's Bassett Hound. My favorite type dog, that old hound made the movie for me! At first I thought the dog was either kidnapped or dead, but when Ash goes to the "real" world, you see the dog flopping his chops out the window of a car going by. Too cool! My biggest criticism is that whoever did the subtitles needs a few grammar lessons. Ouch! But overall, if you are looking for a weird trip, and do not expect to see a Matrix clone (which it is not), and do not mind reading through sometimes rapidly changing subtitles, it is a good movie. And that dog is icing on the cake!

I am shocked to see the review which says that Oshiisan has copied the concept of Avalon from Matrix .The whole concept of plugging in, right down to the plug points on the neck of the characters, has been ripped off in Matrix from Oshiisans Ghost in the shell,he does not have to steal what is his,second please, Trinity is a human clone of major Kusanagi of Ghost right down to the way she fights, and the lobby shootout is clearly inspired by the
shootout in the last shootout in Ghost "bits of concrete flying everywhere" etc, and even the poses when characters land after making a leap are copied from ghost "on one knee".Avalon is for people who like Japanese Anime which over the years has inspired the likes of Matrix.And this is something the Wachowski's themselves admit.And a good movie can be in any language for one to appreciate ,I couldnt care if it was russian or polish.I think
people should refrain from tearing down something which they dont know much about.

The five star rating is really only for people who don't just sit down and "watch" a movie. If your like most people, who need every thing spelled out for them word for word, who needs to see someone getting shot to death from every possible angle, who needs to see body parts better left covered, and who needs a quick shot of entertainment that doesen't even require brain stimulation, then this movie isn't for you. If you do not fall under this catagorization, then enjoy, it's a five star for sure!

What I mean by "a person who doesen't just 'watch' a movie" is someone who isn't done rolling the concept around in their head the moment the ending credits start. If a movie doesen't stick with you, and doesen't make you think, then whats the point? While your sitting there doing nothing you may as well be at least using your brain. If you just want to sit down and zone out when you watch movies, then fine, don't watch this film. I hope I never turn into one of you.

It is unfortunate that we've been so jaded by the Hollywood version of what a film should be that we would pass up the nuances that can make an otherwise mediocre film into a great film, albeit if mainly for its cinematographic value. Some appear to have judged Avalon, and the efforts of its director (Oshii), within this context--even presuming that the film is nothing more than a bad Matrix wannabe. This is not the case, in my view.

I much prefer to be enticed by subtle details and given an opportunity to become immersed in mood than bombarded with a lot of special effects and high-flying acrobatics. This is what I found to be so refreshing about this movie.

As for providing explanations to everything, well, I don't know that that is always needed in a film in order for it to be entertaining. So is it that I find it interesting that our Western mindset cannot deal with finding deeper meanings, through our own interpretations, in most anything that we encounter. It's as if we expect to pause our brains and be entertained through mere visual stimulation. Of course, I know that this is not really what others have described. Still, this is the type of movie that I believe deserves better than what I've read in these reviews. It's funny that I say all this and it was precisely the visuals that made the film so endearing. There's nothing passe about achieving a high level of beauty in a film, and we are fortunate to have "some" directors still mindful of this growingly archaic attention to detail.

Everyone who insists on comparing any new science fiction only to the Matrix series will lose out on the meaning and value writers other than the Wachowskies have to offer.

Avalon is a completely different take on a similar theme, anomie. It has less to do with artificial intelligence and more to do with the dreams and hopes of youth. How detached the youth of today feel from the modern world and the false ethics of the ruling class is a subtle undertone in this exploration of what is "real" and what control we have over our own lives.

"Why does our hero only feel alive when she is in Avalon?" is the question we are asking ourselves when we are viewing this thoughtful film. Why do we only feel alive when we vicariously experience the seductive lives of our science fiction heroes...