"Avatar"
(2009, James Cameron, USA)
Average Contributor Rating: .
based on four reviews, shown below in descending order.

And so, James Cameron is back. After making the box-office basically implode on itself with the mega-successful Titanic, he took over 10 years out to mess around with IMAX films, play around with technology and make the world wait for the film that was supposed to change everything. Avatar.

It won’t really change anything. The hype has suggested that this, finally, is the film to convince the nay-sayers over to the possibilities of 3D cinema, and studio’s are hoping that the harder-to-pirate form will take off with its success. Oddly enough, the 3D, though, isn’t any more spectacular than in any other IMAX film really, though thankfully there isn’t much pointing out at the screen. And while it didn’t give me a headache, it still suffers from that thing where, if something moves to fast on screen – or worse, the camera does – it takes your eyes far longer to process the information than the film can allow.

But, the format that might really take off because of Avatar might be Blu-Ray. Blu-Ray has been creeping up on DVD, but hasn’t really had its equivalent of The Matrix, which really established DVD in one fell swoop. Avatar might well be the film to do that for Blu-Ray. Its lush world designs, as well as the Na’vi themselves, all beg for High-Definition. Despite the fact that I was unimpressed with the actual 3D, the artistry that has gone into the Na’vi and their world, Pandora, is amazing. It genuinely feels like a real world creation – as real as, say, Hoth in the Empire Strikes Back – and you do have to keep reminding yourself that its CGI because it all feels so real. Similarly, the Na’vi, even when sharing the screen with Real World things like other people, feel tangible, and it’s easy to switch off and forget that they are created by computer. It really is quite something.

In general, though, you can’t just have a film that is entirely visuals, you need something to hang it on. Avatar’s plot is basically the tale of Pocahontas strapped with some modern day stuff about war-for-oil and ecology and some technological hoo-ha to frame the story. It’s not the strongest of plots, but it’s fine to watch. It’s long, but never really outstays its welcome. The dialogue is sometimes clunky, but more dispiriting is a completely needless voiceover which displays James Cameron’s lack of trust in the audience. We really do not need to be told character motivations, Jim, we can work it out for ourselves. The audience is always racing ahead of the plot – and indeed, in a film like this you know exactly what is going to happen long before it is revealed. But if you can switch that side of your brain off, it doesn’t really matter.

The set pieces are impressive, especially the final set piece, which calls to mind the Space Dogfights from Star Wars, but set in the forest. I keep calling to mind Star Wars, unconsciously, but it shares many of the same traits, much as Lord of the Rings did – very pretty to look at (at the time, certainly), a perhaps flimsy story, but ultimately a pretty enjoyable blockbuster experience. I don’t know if Avatar will have the life-changing affect that those films had, but I wouldn’t rule it out, if you were 12 years old and watching it now.

And so, James Cameron is back. And he’s bought a big, lumbering, flawed epic. And you know what? It’s fine. It#s not the masterpiece that so many reviews seem to be labelling it, but neither is it the disaster that some doom merchants have been saying. It’s just a big, pretty enjoyable blockbuster. Where he goes next will depend on how well received Avatar is, but it’s going to be interesting in any event. . RS.

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Is Avatar the game changer we were told it would be? No. Is it even the best film of the year? Again, the answer is no. In fact, on my list of films that I’ve seen this year, it ranks 18 out of 24. While it’s far from the year’s worst, I left the cinema distinctly unimpressed.

The main reason is that the story and characters are so uninvolving. I do not care one iota why either side do what they do, be it fight for their land or destroy the planet. And there isn’t only one message that is a subtle as a 10ft blue alien, but two. Both the environmental and anti-military themes are forced down your throat so vigorously, you nearly choke on them. It’s not that the messages themselves are wrong, it is the delivery. It is telling that most of the critics praising it are ignoring the story. The only character that is mildly interesting is Col. Quartich (Stephen Lang). *SPOILERS* It’s probably very reasonable for Qualrtich to react how he did after Jake’s betrayal - who was sent in as a spy but ends up turning on him, putting all the men in his command in danger. And all this was after he had fulfilled his promise to give Jake back his legs which is why he goes to Pandora again in the first place. *END OF SPOILERS*.

The actors did all they could, but the fact that their characters were as thin as the paper that the inferior script was written on stymied them, and as a result none of them stood out for me, aside from the aforementioned Lang. Sam Worthington isn’t quite as wooden as he was in Terminator: Salvation, but he’s not much better. I don’t think Hollywood’s attempt to make him the next massive action star is going to work, but we’ll see how Clash of the Titans goes.

There are some positive points, though. The final hour’s battle is very impressive and is the thing that knocks this up to two stars.  It is very impressive to look at and hits the right action beats, especially when Quartich is at the shack. And of course it is visually incredible, with the Hallelujah Mountains being the best thing I’ve seen on screen all year.

Pity it’s all style over substance, though. . PC.

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Twelve years after James Cameron inexplicably broke box office records and melted the hearts of many a critic with his special effects extravaganza-by-way-of-potboiler romance Titanic, the man of the furry beard and gargantuan ego is back with a vengeance. However, this is a very different Cameron to the one who cut his teeth on violent sci-fi thrillers like Aliens and The Terminator. In his old age, the bearded one has become more sentimental and more interested in the beauty of love and computer-generated worlds than the beauty of well-choreographed violence. Of course, this in itself wouldn’t necessarily be a bad thing if Cameron’s increasing romanticism and ‘game-changing’ special effects meant he was actually making better films. Sadly, this isn’t the case – beneath all the eye-popping landscapes and pretty lighting, Avatar is a superficial, ham-fisted, badly-told space opera with minimal thrills and unpleasant characters.

After his brother is mugged and killed on Earth, paraplegic marine Jake Sully is jetted off to the hostile planet of Pandora (because it’s mysterious, dontcha know) to replace his dead brother in the Avatar programme there. The programme, run by a typically ignorant uber-capitalist mining company, sees humans jack into genetically-engineered versions of the planet’s main inhabitants, twelve-foot-tall blue cat-people called Na’Vi. Chosen by the mining company’s Blackwater-esque military division to act as a spy, Jake wheedles his way into Na’Vi society, but along the way he falls in love and learns the magic of their environmental mindsets yadayadayada you’ve heard all this before in other films. Avatar is, essentially, a re-imagining of the Pocahontas story through the eyes of a re-imagined Captain John Smith (hell, the initials are even the same). This does present a painful lack of creativity on Cameron’s part, and unfortunately, it’s not an isolated incident – from the action beats to the name of the mysterious (and yet rarely-alluded to) mineral macguffin, Unobtainium (because it’s hard to get at, dontcha know), almost everything about the film’s narrative is bereft of imagination and intrigue. In fact, it seems all of Cameron’s creativity is invested in the world of Pandora. Both fortunately and unfortunately, that investment shows – fortunately in that Pandora looks and feels like a living, breathing ecosystem and is a sight to behold, especially in 3D; and unfortunately in that Pandora’s magnificence only serves to highlight how woeful the rest of the film is in comparison.

The visuals are, in a word, exquisite. Cameron’s ground-breaking special effects make the world of Pandora and the flora and fauna that exists within it tangible and real, and the 3D augments this in the depth it adds to what’s on screen. However, while Cameron has made a world that looks photo-real, it doesn’t matter if the story being told within the world doesn’t feel real. While it progresses along at a fair clip, and some of the action sequences are good (the final set-piece may be too liberal with the slow-motion, but it is quite entertaining), Avatar falls at this hurdle, filled to the brim as it is with muddled messages, underwritten characters and clunky dialogue. The most egregious flaw is that the film’s blatant environmental message is undermined when it is revealed that, without the Unobtainium that only Pandora can provide, the human race will become extinct. Springing from this clumsily-handled ethical dilemma is Cameron’s insistence that the humans are in the wrong, and while that may be so in a number of areas, they seem relatively reasonable in their drive to attain the only mineral that will guarantee humankind’s survival. The default ‘villain’ status of the humans starts to feel false at this point, exacerbated by Cameron’s failure to definitively establish why humanity’s survival is less important than the Na’Vi’s staying at Hometree (because it’s  a tree that is their home, dontcha know). Hometree is just there, and it’s never that important until the film says it is for no reason. We’re provided with no reason for the Na’Vi to not relocate other than “we can’t because we live here right now”, and Cameron erroneously dedicates his time to making the humans cartoonish villains, rather than actually establishing a distinctive and irreparable threat to the existence of the Na’Vi posed by the human need for this Unobtainium. What’s more, Cameron seems to think it’s appropriate that the humans deserve to die for exploiting Earth’s natural resources, rather than have them learn any actual substantial message. There’s no depth to Cameron’s primary theme, and it seems to ultimately amount to “don’t mine stuff OR YOU WILL DIE”.

It doesn’t help matters that the cast is populated by inconsistently-drawn characters with two-dimensional, badly-handled arcs. The protagonist and supposed audience identification figure is, for all intents and purposes, a bastard – Jake Sully goes back on his word with alarming regularity, withholds key information from both parties, betrays both the Na’Vi and humanity several times over, leads hundreds of Na’Vi to their deaths in a predictable war with the humans that is only brought about because he can’t be bothered to do his job until it’s too late, and ultimately ‘joins’ the Na’Vi for a woman and the ability to walk. Jake’s love-interest, Ney’tiri, is the opposite of Jake – a powerful and intelligent woman – until he strolls into her life, at which point she succumbs to Jake’s contagious idiocy and becomes a bundle of barely-controlled hormones, only occasionally pulling herself together to kill someone. On the other side of the fence, the ‘evil’ Colonel Quaritch comes across as positively reasonable in most scenes; that is, until the film goes and makes him into a raving lunatic for plot purposes. Sadly, the actors either can’t or don’t do much to save this sorry state of affairs. Sam Worthington and Zoe Saldana are bland in the leads, and while Stephen Lang, Sigourney Weaver, Giovanni Ribisi and Dileep Rao struggle valiantly against the ties that bind them, they never succeed in breaking them.

Avatar may well be a game-changer when it comes to visual effects. In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything as eye-poppingly gorgeous on a cinema screen as the Hallelujah Mountains or the Tree of Souls or the helicopter chameleons. However, it’s clear that Cameron didn’t spend anywhere near as much time working on the script, and so we’re left with horribly-handled themes, badly-written characters and an unengaging, cliché-heavy storyline. Thus, while Avatar may well be a game-changer when it comes to visual effects, there’s no chance that Avatar can become a game-changer in every aspect of modern film. And if it does become such, then I dread the future of cinema. . AG.

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And so, it’s here. “Avatar”, the film that – at least according to director James Cameron – is about to ‘change the game’, has finally hit our shores. And, somewhat surprisingly, it hasn’t been quite as critically reviled as one might expect. It currently holds an 83 per cent fresh rating on reviews aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, is the twenty fifth best film of all time according to IMDB, and has scored a series of Golden Globe nominations – including for Best Picture. I had a few reservations going in, but this critical acclaim kind of soothed that, but – unfortunately – “Avatar” is one of the most overhyped, pointless, and empty films to be released this year. And “New Moon”, “Transformers 2”, and “the Hangover” were released this year.

Let’s start off with the one, solitary positive; it looks amazing. And, shock horror, this has nothing to do with the 3D. Sure, for about twenty minutes the three dimensional trickery is impressive, but in the long run it turns into nothing more than a gimmick. I actually found myself watching some of the later scenes with the glasses off, and found the imagery much more vibrant and involving, until the ‘ooohs’ and ‘awwws’ of the audience around me persuaded me to don the glasses again. Past this, though, “Avatar” does indeed have some beautiful images; the Hallelujah Mountains have been acclaimed quite correctly. The Na’vi themselves are quite wonderfully structured, and the world which they inhabit actually feels like a natural habitat. Sometimes it’s wonderful to look at, but – like most aspects of the film – it seems ultimately empty and unrewarding. Put it this way; which image will live with you the longest, the swirl of colour in Avatar’s climax, or John Wayne standing outside of the Edwards household, quite literally (and metaphorically) unable to enter the family lifestyle? Both are visually beautiful, one actually has a point, and one cost about forty million dollars less.

And now onto the negatives, which are pretty much overwhelming. For a kick off, “Avatar” does not change the game. It makes me laugh to think that Lars von Trier – earlier this year at the Cannes film festival press conference following the screening of “Antichrist” – was so reviled and mocked for claiming that he was the best director in the world, whilst Cameron was somewhat believed when he said that “Avatar” would change cinema as we know it. Both are filled with each director’s trademark hyperbole, but whilst you could easily make a case for von Trier being correct, Cameron’s claims are unfounded and just plain wrong. Sure, a film can look revolutionary if you throw enough money at it, but “Avatar” is soulless and pointless regardless of the special effects and three-dimensional trickery. The quota of Hollywood films dedicated to spectacle may indeed feel the influence of Cameron’s film, but how will the cinema that matters – the type of cinema which von Trier produces – progress any further thanks to digital 3D or CGI on anything further than an elementary, obligatory level? I mean, would “Antichrist”’s finale be any more devastating if Charlotte Gainsbourg’s clitoris flew out at the audience?

The characters are another problem. Wafer thin and one dimensional, not one of them manages to defy caricature and actually become anything further than a tool in Cameron’s (rather lacklustre) story. None of them are worth identifying with, and as a result the film feels so unengaging, un-involving, and impersonal. Sam Worthington’s Jake Sullivan is the worst, with Worthington seeming to forget how to produce the charisma that he undoubtedly had in “Terminator: Salvations”, and instead deciding to pout, shout, and wisecrack his way through a dreadful performance, devoid of any discernable emotion. The support is unable to do much better, with only Sigourney Weaver coming out with any shred of credibility. All of the rest of them are either missing in action (Joel David Moore has basically nothing to do, whilst Wes Studi is embarrassingly underused) or painfully miscast (Giovanni Ribisi has immense likeability, so why cast him as a complete arse?).

The themes that almost seem obligatory for a Hollywood blockbuster nowadays are all here. Cameron seemingly wants us all to care about our surroundings, and – of course – this kind of message is undoubtedly important, if a little tiresome. The humans are put across as dumb hicks who punch plants for the sake of it, whilst the Na’vi are lovers of trees and all things nature, and are obviously supported for it. But, this preaching of pro-environment subtext begs the question as to why Cameron made his film 3D, where thousands of plastic spectacles will undoubtedly go missing from cinemas? The stupidity of the themes, and the lack of true thought behind them, doesn’t stop here. The cause for the war, which is ruthless capitalism in the face of beauty, is mainly brushed under the carpet in favour of action (which can flit between swift, assured sequences akin to “the Matrix” and intellectually offensive slow-mo and cheese akin to “Transformers”), and the anti-war sentiments are actually quite clumsy. At some points, Cameron seems to be telling us that all war is bad, whilst at others he sees it as a necessary evil, and never does he let any condemning of battle come in the way of making it look cool on screen.