Let me say straight off the bat that I'm a big James Cameron fan. Not only do I love
The Terminator and
Aliens but I'm also a sucked for
True Lies and had a year-long obsession with
Titanic when it was first released, one that hasn't dimmed as considerably as it perhaps should have done. So I was looking forward to
Avatar with bated breath.
The story, effectively a Dances with Wolves/Pocahontas-type story wherein disabled army recruit Jake Sulley (Sam Worthington) is tasked with improving relations between Earth and a race of aliens called the Na'Vi. With the help of an initially-curmudgeonly-but-not-for-long Dr. Grace Augustine (Sigourney Weaver), Jake's mind is transferred into an avatar to aid his integration into the alien race. Of course, Jakes begins to have second thoughts about his objective (to persuade the Na'Vi to move so that Earth can extract a valuable mineral - Unobtanium - from underneath them) as soon as pretty Neytiri (Zoe Saldana) bats her big blue eyelashes at him. Lessons about the importance of environmental awareness and true love across all boundaries ensue.
On a purely visual level, Avatar is spectacular. The claims that this film will change the face of cinema aren't wrong. The 3D effects are eye-poppingly impressive, never more so than in the stunning climax which demonstrates an incredible flair and attention to detail that you just can't find in your typical Michael Bay hack job. Also impressive is the level of care that has gone into rendering the Na'Vi's facial expressions, which is certainly realistic enough to make it feel like you're watching a performance rather than a CG-rendering.
The story is trite but so are most of Cameron's films. But what made Aliens, The Terminator and T2 stand out was the director's myth-making ability, to create an immersive, interesting world around a military horror film in the first instance, and a chase narrative in the second. Even the Upstairs Downstairs love story in Titanic was told with such confidence and bombast that resistance proved futile in being swept away by the self-consciously "epic" nature of the love story at its centre. Unfortunately, this director isn't much in evidence here. The Na'Vi are a jumbled mess of Hollywood's ideas of "ethnicity" and the audience is asked, at various points, to identify them with Native American, Aboriginal, Middle Eastern and New Age culture. These broad strokes are crippling, meaning that the Na'Vi never really seem to have a coherent belief system and comparisons to the similar but far superior Princess Mononoke don't do Cameron any favours.
To Avatar's credit, it never drags over its three hour run and works as high-octane entertainment, but after a twelve-year wait it's a disappointment to Cameron fans and, one suspects, that once cinema has caught up with the special effects on display here, the film itself will fade fast in the memory.
