Reviews for An Echo in the Bone and Avatar

An Echo in the Bone, the latest in the Outlander series by Diana Gabaldon, is my favorite in the series since the first book. It was nonstop action from start to finish. She has a lot of characters all over the place (and all over time) but she does a great job at keeping all of them engaged in the story, which somehow remains quite cohesive.

In previous books she didn't leave us with cliffhanger endings, but she certainly did in this one! Most of the story lines left us dangling; some because of the arc of the plot, and some because things happen that you never would have thought would ever happen. I'm not dangling on that cliff, I went way over and I'm in a free fall while I wait for the next (possibly last?) installment in this series.

Avatar. *sigh* I liked it, but I didn't love it like everyone else seems to. The animation was spectacular. I especially liked the little floating puffy things that looked like jellyfish. I wish they would have put as much effort into the script as they did in the animation. The plot was trite and completely predictable. It was a half-assed Dances With Wolves wannabe that lacked any subtlety.

My main issue with the plot was that I know it didn't have to be that bad; someone was just lazy to care about it. I would like to point to Up and Wall-E as examples of how high tech movies ought to be. The animation in these two were spectacular, of course. But beyond that, they had me captivated in a riveting story with characters I really care about. In my mind I was trying to justify Avatar's plot by telling myself that they were aiming for a broad audience that encompassed kids (unlike Dances With Wolves which was clearly for adults only). But that argument just doesn't hold. Up and Wall-E were aimed directly at children but bewitched and enchanted people of all ages.

So I know it can be done: there can be a successful marriage between CGI technology and meaningful scripts. It's just up to the producers to care enough about making a quality movie and not just a flashy one.