Overall Rating
  Awesome: 38.13%
Worth A Look: 15%
Average: 16.25%
Pretty Bad: 12.5%
Total Crap: 18.13%
7 reviews, 118 user ratings
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by William Goss
"Winning Hearts and Minds with Ham Hands and Popped Eyes"
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“If you set your goals ridiculously high and it’s a failure, you will fail above everyone else’s success.” –James Cameron, “The New Yorker,” October 26, 2009To say that James Cameron doesn’t create a whole new world with Avatar and then successfully transport his audience there is to be blind. Every dollar of the budget, however exorbitantly high it really is (we’ll never know for sure), is there on the screen, and the bar has been raised for both 3-D visuals and the incorporation of motion-capture technology in a convincing, thrilling context. Cameron paints with broad strokes as often he does bold ones, though; for every frame of modern-day spectacle, his screenplay is steeped in new-age sentiment, creaky dialogue and human characters more cartoonish than the ones he’s invented. His earlier films weren’t just about new worlds (or, in the case of Titanic, old ones), but about the new fears and strengths discovered by his protagonists. Ostensibly, so is this, albeit in ways far more heavy-handed than he’s ever demonstrated before. There’s no denying that Avatar is a tremendous theatrical experience, but it's made up of equal parts ambitious and brawny and clumsy and familiar, a success in terms of its helmer’s ridiculously high visual goals but a failure on par with everyone else’s in terms of story.
It’s 2154, and paraplegic war vet Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) has just lost his science-minded twin brother. The faceless corporation he worked for has also lost a sizeable investment, but since Jake’s genetics are identical and therefore critical to their operation, he’s lured with the promise of payola to the far-off world of Pandora in order to pick up where his brother never got to leave off.
Pandora’s a distant moon that looks like Earth, handily orbiting a planet bright enough to cast all of its exotic flora and fauna in a bright bluish hue at night and look normal enough during the day. The above-mentioned corporation (whose name I never caught, but was NOT Weyland-Yutani) is mining for unobtainium here (not Cameron’s phrase), with mercenaries led by Col. Quaritch (Stephen Lang) protecting their interests while scientists led by Dr. Augustine (Sigourney Weaver) try to make peace with the native population. They interact with the Na’vi by inhabiting clones, the eponymous avatars, which resemble the nine-foot-tall blue-skinned natives and allow them to approach and interact without fear of the human-toxic environment.
Of course, Jake couldn’t be happier about walking again and couldn’t be more inept at interacting with locals like Neytiri (Zoe Saldana), but because the ethereal spirit of the planet tips her off, she takes him in to learn their ways and inevitably come around to their side of things, as Quaritch and Augustine each await his deep-cover reports in order to advance their fundamentally opposing agendas.
Those who were quick to compare Avatar to Dances with Wolves or Ferngully: The Last Rainforest or even Pocahontas before seeing it for themselves weren’t wrong, and while I doubt that Cameron has seen any of those movies, let alone ripped them off wholesale, the story of Jake getting in touch with the natives and their land before turning on his own aggressive army plays out every bit as expected. If Jake wants his legs back, he somehow will. If Jake wants to fly, he’ll manage it. If there’s a creature we’re told that few people can tame, Jake will ride it, and one of those will happen to be Neytiri, daughter of the chief and someone else’s fiancée from the get-go.
And if Jake were played by any actor with more charisma and a steadier accent than Sam Worthington, we wouldn’t mind his bull-headed moments and would root on his victories, however foreseeable. The Aussie displayed some dramatic chops in the little-seen Somersault, but between this and his turn in Terminator Salvation earlier this year, it’s difficult to see the leading man potential that Hollywood has so eagerly invested in (posters for next spring’s Clash of the Titans remake already boast his photogenic mug).
Admittedly, it’s not as if Cameron and McG gave him the best lines to work with; in the 22nd century, people still quote The Wizard of Oz and throw “bitch” after everything in an effort to sound gruff. Lang, beefed up on his strict scenery diet, growls about how “Pandora will shit you out”; Weaver, reunited with her Aliens director, talks about how things are interesting “biologically”; and a helpful soldier (Michelle Rodriguez) in the mold of that film's Vasquez predictably throws in the towel by saying “I didn’t sign up for this.” And Saldana brings as much emotion as she can to the effects which surround her but is stuck with a rote role that requires her to be suspicious of Jake, and then frustrated, then swooning, and so on. Although she’s every bit as assertive as Cameron’s earlier female leads, Ellen Ripley and Sarah Connor, it’s not her story but Jake’s, and so she’s defined by clichés more than characterization.
On a larger scale, the story draws obvious parallels between the Vietnam War (natives fighting in a jungle that their enemy doesn’t know and with tactics their enemy wouldn’t expect) and our current conflict in Iraq (the corporate leech played by Giovanni Ribisi speaks of ingratitude towards the roads and schools they’ve built on Pandora, and is fed up with trying to win “their hearts and minds”; Quaritch speaks of “fighting terror with terror” after committing an act of “shock and awe” equivalent to a Na’vi 9/11). The soldiers, though employed as mercenaries and not as American troops, are soon after retaliated upon by Jake and friends, who drops his jarhead pride just in time to have no qualms about taking out his fellow Marines. He’s also taken to task for betraying his species, though we get no early indication what the stakes are for humanity itself back on Earth until the very end (it’s as if Cameron was in a rush to get to his precious Pandora, although he commendably establishes the concept behind the plot in under fifteen minutes; trailers have been struggling to encapsulate it and thus sell the film in under three).
However cross-eyed the politics, Cameron does remind us just how clear-eyed he can be with action sequences. With the enhanced depth perception that a 3-D presentation lends, the early chase scenes, mid-movie flights and climactic battles couldn’t be more viscerally thrilling, not to mention basically comprehensible at a time when choppy cuts and shaky camerawork dominate most other blockbusters. Even when things get downright ridiculous at the end (in the future, why make knives that big and not have them simply be retractable blades?), at least one can make out exactly what’s going on.
Cameron may have drawn me into his world, but not so much into his characters, the key quality which has helped the clear-headed thrills and sometimes bone-headed lines in Aliens, The Abyss, Terminator 2, Titanic and True Lies endure beyond the big screen. How will Avatar play at home, for those kids who aren’t yet around for something this uniquely immersive? Will it still thrill? Will it ever move?When 2154 rolls around, you let me know.
link directly to this review at https://www.efilmcritic.com/review.php?movie=18294&reviewer=409
originally posted: 12/20/09 13:21:26
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USA
18-Dec-2009 (PG-13)
DVD: 16-Nov-2010
UK
N/A
Australia
18-Dec-2009
DVD: 20-Apr-2010
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