Review: Avatar
More shine than substance in James Cameron’s new $400m sci-fi epic.
Posted by: Matthew Halverson on Dec 17, 2009 at 09:00AM
7 Comments
Dances With Smurfs. That’s what the cynics labeled Avatar when its promotional assault launched last fall. Based on a two-minute trailer and a barrage of 30-second TV spots, fanboys concluded that James Cameron’s new two-and-a-half-hour sci-fi epic populated by 10-foot-tall blue aliens with tails was nothing but a 3D CGI remake of Kevin Costner’s 1990 flick.
But this is James Cameron, the guy behind Aliens and Terminator, the self-professed king of the world who captained Titanic to Oscar glory. Surely his first picture in 12 years, a $400 million magnum opus, would be anchored by a more compelling narrative than “guy realizes he was fighting for the wrong team all along,” right?
Yeah, not so much. Cameron’s predictable morality tale is only saved by eye-popping visuals, and really, that’s what everyone came to see anyway.
The story starts in the year 2154, when paraplegic Marine Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) enters the Avatar program on the distant moon Pandora. By downloading his brain to a cloned version of the native Na’vi species, he can walk among the primitive hunter-gatherers and explain that his people need to strip-mine the pristine planet. But after falling in love with warrior princess Neytiri (Zoe Saldana)—you guessed it—he has a change of heart.
He might not have defected so easily if Cameron, who also wrote the script, hadn’t drawn such a clear line between the good, the bad, and the ugly; with the exception of tough-talking, big-hearted scientist Dr. Grace Augustine (Sigourney Weaver) Sully’s human counterparts are greedy, violent eco-terrorists. The Na’vi, on the other hand, are a hard-to-hate, blue-hued update on the squirm-inducing “noble savage” archetype.
For the hardcore action-adventure crowd, the stunningly photorealistic landscape of Pandora will be reason enough to sit through lines like, “The wealth of this world isn’t in the ground; it’s all around us.” But for everyone else, ask yourself this: Can you suspend disbelief long enough to accept that the Na’vi commune with the animals of their world through their ponytails?
Avatar opens worldwide Friday, December 18.
Good review. Told me exactly what I needed to know—which is that this movie is everything I feared.
Well, if it isn’t the elusive Ljungbergian. Welcome back, old friend.
I’m shocked — SHOCKED — that most critics are giving it a free pass. The story’s only mildly more coherent than Transformers’, but apparently because it’s Jim Cameron and not Michael Bay, all is forgiven. Sorry, but the sight of a couple hundred 10-foot-tall cat people swaying and chanting under a magical tree is no less lame than a 10-story robot monster with wrecking balls for testicles.
I’m not shocked by the critics. Times are tough and nobody wants to give that film smack—yet—until they see whether or not it tanks. The papers are probably all courting Cameron’s favor. I don’t know if I can handle over two hours of giant cat people. Although, of course, I will see it.
While you make a valid point, I personally enjoyed the movie a lot. Yeah, the plot has been done, but the modernization and changes that came with this film teamed up with the environmentalist(yeah, you caught me) aspect of it I thought made it worth it. The graphics were what really caught me, and I think that the plot was eh… solid enough(?) to not entirely diminish the film. I loved it.
Best movie EVER! – Go see it! I’ve seen it twice so far and I plan on seeing it again.
The nature of mythology is repetition. Just because a story is “old” or “rehashed” or “cliche” or “simplistic” does not make it less of a powerful message. Cultures all over the world have told and retold stories for reasons beyond providing new information or engaging the listeners in innovative and sophisticated plots. Those exciting new stories are important, too, but they are not the only basis for judging a story told. Cameron has done an excellent job of telling an old story in a beautiful and exciting way.
In answer to the critics question: yes, I could suspend belief long enough to enjoy a movie with a good storyline and great cinematography.