Avalon

There are a lot of ways that you can go reverse Wizard of Oz, but color saturation has to be the rarest.

Uneven pacing, ambitious but cheap looking yellow-ish monochromatic cinematography, very basic story. Oshii tries to make a more artistic version of "eXistenZ", but small budget doesn't help him at all. Maybe it would have worked better as anime.

The atmosphere is neat and there are some enjoyable scenes (particularly toward the end), but Avalon just lacks substance. It has the feel (and illusory length) of Tarkovsky's Stalker with none of the philosophical weight, and so fails to be the effective mood piece it clearly wants to be. This is what it comes down to: it's not unique enough, it's far more shallow than it would have you believe, and no 100-minute movie should be this boring.

Some really cool imagery and ideas that were hurt a little bit by a low budget. If you don't mind the occasional cheesy effect (and a whole lot of bloom) and enjoy offbeat sci-fi then this one is worth a watch.

The photography is very sepia-yellow, which is not all that attractive, and the production values are distractingly low-budget. It seems like Mamoru Oshii really over-extended himself. It's also quite boring. Not sure what James Cameron saw in this one.

James Cameron, you have horrible taste.

Live action film directed by the guy who made the Ghost in the Shell animes. It's about a dystopian future where everyone is addicted to playing this dangerous Virtual Reality war simulation. Some awesome visual effects, but slow in places (kinda like a lot of anime). The dark/monochrome visuals and the creepy score combine to create an excellently oppressive atmosphere. Filmed in Poland with Polish actors and dialog.

Pretentious, dreary drivel.

The third act is kinda cool, but it looks like dogshit for most of its length.

...needs to be remade. Good idea, poor execution.

A messy story suited for Counterstrike fans. Uneven effects, mediocre acting. Involvement of author of 'Ghost In The Shell' apparently didn't help.

Nifty idea and a good first third, then terribly unevenly paced and boring in the middle. Then it gets good again at the end! It's like two-thirds of an excellent movie!

I honestly cannot see why this is enjoyable. The pacing is terrible, absolutely terrible. I don't mind a film moving slowly when what it's focusing on is important but this film drags by either beating you with information or simply doing long takes on completely unnecessary things. It felt like the worst that anime has to offer and the director has actually made some good anime. I don't know what happened here but this was literally 60 minutes worth of plot extended by 40 unnecessary minutes.

Star Rating: ★★★

Top badass moment? Wow, that was way, way too clever for me, but here's what I did learn. Avalon is basically just Fortnite. If you’re a woman you can only play it if you do so in your underwear. All games end when you blow up the fancy helicopter by shooting at it lots. In the future, all video games will have crap colour, all operating systems and keyboards will sound like those on the Nostromo, and all music will be inspired by the works of Nighwish. No cats, chainsaws or decapitations.

Interesting concept, but ultimately a bore.

Visually amazing. I strongly suspect I'll be living on the meal she cooks up in the next week or so

Overly-stylistic movie set in a virtual reality world where our hero is the chosen one? Original it ain't. I'm sure they spent ages getting the look of this movie just right, but I could probably do the same by setting my camera to sepia mode and smearing vaseline on the lens. The story has some potential, but it's told in such a ponderously slow way that it's hard to stay interested. Every shot in the movie seems to last 3x longer than it needs to. Emminently missable.

Very interesting concept that falls short half way into the movie.

I dont know. I have seen this movie fort three times and I must say "I love it"

After promising noir cyberpunk-style opening, movie quickly becomes a series of boring lengthy scenes with terrible dialogue and even worse acting. Foremniak fits perfectly though.

Sort of like .Hack, as it mixes the drudgery of the real world with that of the glorified fake world of the Avalon game with some neat visual effects and plenty of pacing. There's also the fact that .Hack and Avalon are based on a similar European myth, and they both involve players chasing after a young girl's "ghost" in-game and falling into comas in the real world. But besides that, completely different.

In short, Avalon is a wonderfully deep philosophical cyberpunk flick that fully explores whether reality truly matters. In essence, does it really matter if the fantasies we have running in our heads don't really match the "reality" of the outside world? Or more to the point, is anyone really experiencing the reality of the outside world, or are we all just in our own personal Avalon?

I think this movie is amazing; for being both the most interesting and most sleep-inducing movies I've seen. Interesting because of the visuals, because of the strange story, and because it's a sort-of-black-and-white movie with colour made by Japanese directors with Polish actors. Sleep-inducing because it's slow-moving, and hard to follow. The sort where you want to stay awake to keep watching, but your mind gives up staying awake.

Japanese director Mamoru Oshii has created a real peace of art.... what i didn't like. Its just so confusing and wargames are not for me.

Very solid sci-fi that foresaw social trends decades into the future. Resonates even more strongly today (in 2022) than when it was originally released.

Does a great job at capturing a deadening and dreary feel through the cinematography, but not so great a job at understanding why people play video games, which is what the movie is purportedly about. A lot of circular dialogue and familiar twists. I want this film to be a lot better than it is, because there are glimmers of genius, but they never really coalesce.