Avatar

Avatar is finally here. The big budget busting latest creation for the big screen from director James Cameron. And once again the heralds sound and the heavens open and Cameron’s film earns more money than anyone has ever earned before. Of course it helps that seeing the film in 3D or IMAX will set you back $15 a ticket or more in most cities, but it is an impressive feat nonetheless.

Avatar is a beautiful looking film. Its use of 3D is subtle and entrancing and far less gimmicky than other 3D films. It is really used as a tool to enhance the overall feel of the film which is really how technology should be used, to enhance the reality of the film, not to overwhelm the audience with its cleverness. Now if only Cameron had included a real story. Perhaps it is asking too much for a film to have groundbreaking film technology, a solid story, and good acting but I expect a lot from the biggest movie of all time. My favorite joke about Avatar was the SNL reference to Avatar as “Dances With Smurfs”. I personally thought of it as a combination of Dances With Wolves and the ewok storyline from Return of the Jedi. Either way the story lacks any emotional depth and has only those twists and turns that can been seen approaching from a mile or two away.

Let’s just get the story out of the way so we can talk about how cool it looks. After all that seems to be how the film was made. Romance, check, as usual the hero falls for the chief’s daughter. Why doesn’t the hero ever fall for just some ordinary girl from the clan? Not as interesting I guess. Gung-ho military types who wipe out the landscape and the natives without any moral or emotional angst. Check. Scientists who actually know the slightest bit about the natives and thus want to keep them from being destroyed so they can continue to study them? Check. Though notably the story never ventures into what the scientists did to said natives to get dna to make the avatars. Too morally ambiguous I guess. Then there are the natives, here called the Na’vi, but interchangeable with native Americans or ewoks or what have you. Avatar spends so much of its time introducing the audience to the impressive looking world of Pandora and of creating an entirely new way to make films that they forgot to introduce anything new in the storytelling. Perhaps they decided that they would be best served by recycling every old film cliché they could find flavored with the adoration of nature which ties organized religions into knots. That is really it for the story. It heads to just the kind of big showdown between the groups that you would expect.

Sam Worthington has had a big year between Terminator: Salvation and carrying Avatar as the paraplegic Marine Jake Sully. But I still don’t think he comes across as a very strong leading man. Thus far his films have been so overwhelmed with technology that it doesn’t seem to matter that he displays no warmth or personality onscreen. He is in danger of being typecast in technological whiz bang blockbusters without emotional evolution unless he learns to develop some kind of on screen personality. The chisel jawed automaton thing can only take you so far, just ask Paul Walker.

The rest of the cast hit all of the same old tired notes as well. Sigourney Weaver is a long time Cameron collaborator and here she is justifiably pissed throughout the film as her Dr. Grace Augustine gets ridden over roughshod in the nefarious scheme to take Pandora away from its original inhabitants. The only thing I was disappointed in was her not taking out one of the exo-skeleton military devices to kick some butt ala Ripley in Aliens. Joel Moore makes a serviceable humorous sidekick. Zoe Saldana perhaps shoulders the widest responsibility and shows the greatest range of emotion as the Na’vi Neytiri.

Now Avatar looks great, really really great, especially in the nice big Real 3D in major cineplexes across the country. Avatar introduces the audience to Pandora; a world of fierce beauty with plants and animals in stark hues who think nothing of eating each other and maintaining the fragile ecosystem on which their world is based. I don’t know the reason so many plants developed phosphorescence on Pandora, but it certainly looks nice there on the big screen. One can almost forgive James Cameron the leisurely pace which the movie takes getting to its point just to admire the lush scenery. Pandora is an impressive looking planet, wild, with lots of things willing to kill the unsuspecting, and many impressive panoramas. The military technology is impressive too but even that feels like we have seen it before. The exoskeleton suits for example featured prominently in another Cameron/ Weaver collaboration, as mentioned above, though here they look more smooth and lethal.

The technology of the film is of course amazing but it causes some other issues. The first was that aside from Sigourney Weaver’s truly astonishing avatar it was sometimes difficult to tell the Na’vi apart. This was especially true in action scenes. At one point I was convinced we were watching Jake Sully’s avatar do some damage on a ship but when the Na’vi was killed I realized this was probably not our hero. The other is that I experienced, and to hear some anecdotal evidence I am not alone, a massive headache after watching the film in 3D. Something in the 3D technology and wearing the 3D glasses for a full 2 hours and 40 minutes plus previews causes some people, like myself, headaches and nausea. Of course 3D is really the way to see this movie so if you aren’t prone to get headaches or you are willing to put up with the discomfort this is really the way to go.

Overall Avatar was an enjoyable enough movie. Were it just another summer blockbuster I would be perfectly happy with its thin and obvious storyline and its penchant for overacting. I have pause however when it gets swept into the whole ‘greatest film of all time’ basket. Avatar is a beautiful film full of technological wizardry, if it included compelling characters and a quality story line it would be all one could ask for in a multi-million dollar 3D film.