![]() 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. To him, the actress was entirely her character, and it's intriguing to see what became of that very unusual relationship on film. 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. 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. ![]() There is a lot to recommend this movie, including a richly-stylized world, exciting action, and excellent music. Miramax has not recalled or corrected the DVD, but an uncut anamorphic version with proper subtitles is available from UK company Blue Light. ![]() This results in innumerable inaccuracies in the script (almost all mention of the connections to the King Arthur myth are lost on any language of the Region 1 version), and the subtitles also show up during the sequences where the English version has narration, meaning that in the middle of a dialog-less scene, the subtitles will show up anyway. The added narration actually creates a very large problem with the 'Polish with English subtitles' option on the Region 1 DVD, since the 'traslantion' subtitles are actually dub-titles (they simply transcribed the Enlgish dub as the Polish dialog). As a result of the added narration, the enigmatic ending becomes easier to understand for North American viewers. North American (Region 1) DVD release in 2003 features additional narration by the lead character "Ash" in the English dubbed version - most notably after the pre-credits battle scene, and at the end of the film, the latter of which initially played out without any dialog.
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