REVIEW: Avatar

It's been almost a decade since the biggest blockbuster in history came out, and I finally got around to seeing it.  I felt like the only person on the planet that hadn't seen it, with everyone rushing out to see the technical mastery of director James Cameron and how the movie incorporated 3D.  I also feel like the only person on the planet who thought Inception was 'meh.'  Sometimes, I have learned, I stand alone.

Cameron had a definite vision for this movie, and he has been pushing the boundaries of special effects and environment his entire career.  He doesn't seem to be able to give something less than 100%, and Avatar was his biggest masterpiece.  The visual world that he created was imaginative beyond compare.  The contrast of light and colours on the fictional planet of Pandora was glorious eye candy.  That being said, I didn't see this film in theatres.  I didn't see it in 3D.  I saw it on a laptop screen, and the CGI was obvious in some of the actions of the alien species, the Na'vi. That's minor, because when it came out it was without any contemporaries.  It was a massive hit, got nine Oscar nominations, three wins, and made $2.78 billion worldwide.  I cannot see it getting dethroned any time in the near future, so it's status as a mega-hit will remain.

But...

This is an example of insanely simplistic storytelling.  Yes, it blew minds and people ranted and raved, but the actual tale that's being told is incredibly generic, and the entire plot of the film (which means the film itself) had no reason to exist (I'll expand on this a bit later).  If you doubt me about the poor quality of its story, look at what happened when the film was no longer in theatres.  I don't know of anyone that owns a copy of Avatar.  I am never talking to friends of mine who are parents who excitedly tell me that they just showed their child Avatar for the first time.  Once the glamour of the film is pulled away, the ground breaking use of 3D, there isn't much left to excite people.  This is the biggest movie of modern cinema, and it didn't take long for it to stop being talked about.

This movie is easily the biggest 'white saviour' movie that has been told.  If that term is new to you, it refers to the fact that the problems of a different group of people are overcome by a white guy (seldom a female).  Not only is the main character, Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) able to prove his worth to the Na'vi, it is him who ultimately has the courage and determination to lead them to victory when they are unable to do it themselves.  Movies like this should have gone extinct a long time ago, and yet they still happen.

Normally by this point in a review I would have said at least something about the plot of the movie I am reviewing.  Notice how I haven't done that yet?  It's because the plot has no reason to exist, and that's not based off of my interpretation, it is based off of the script.  Humans have a program where they take highly educated people with PhDs and essentially get them to drive around Na'vi bodies, which they call avatars.  They use 50% DNA from the human and 50% DNA from a Na'vi to create a creature that has a biological connection to its operator.  The human then goes in a pod and is able to bring the Na'vi body to life and control everything it does.  Because this program needs highly educated people who have trained for years on Na'vi culture and language (as well as it taking five years for those people to get to the planet), I assumed that all of this effort was for humans to infiltrate the Na'vi.  Why else would they have such an elaborate program?

Well, my friends, this isn't the case.  We learn quickly that the Na'vi know that the people coming to them aren't native to the planet, as they refer to them as 'sky people.'  "Okay," I thought, "obviously the humans have gone through all of this work because the Na'vi will have their minds blown if they saw someone in human form approaching them."  Not the case at all.  At the end they are presented both the human driver and their avatar they don't even do a double take.  In fact, they are so comfortable with it that I assume they must have known the entire time.  The fact that the human has been controlling the avatar is laid in front of them, and it is clear they aren't surprised by this.  There is no actual reason presented in the film why it is they have to resort to using avatars when they could just meet with the Na'vi in person.

The movie's entire plot is useless.  It is about a far-fetched program that would be costly as heck, take almost a decade to train and re-locate someone to drive an avatar, and is is inefficient as feeding unleaded gasoline to a mule to get him to go faster.  We are never given any reason why this entire avatar initiative is required, and people could have been meeting with the Na'vi in jeans and a tank top the entire time.

Add on to this the lack of subtlety in the film, and we aren't really looking at something that should have been nominated for a best picture Oscar.  The humans want something that they can't have because the Na'vi are situated on it, and it is called, 'unobtainium.'  Seriously, that is what it's called.  It has the poetic sting of a Limerick scrawled on the bathroom stall at a run down truck stop.  The main villain is a hard core military man who is about as cartoony caricature as you can get.  Seeing him walk around with his chest puffed out made me smirk almost every time I saw him.

Luckily there are a few things that are present to try and save the film.  The world that is created is absolutely beautiful.  The experience, even when not seen in 3D, is incredibly immersive.  There was such imagination and artistry that were poured into the film that it almost makes up for its flaws.  The action is well directed and well paced, which isn't a surprise since it's James Cameron.  It's just too bad the plot literally makes it so that the plot doesn't need to exist, and actually shouldn't exist.

It can be said that Cameron also had a very simplistic story in Titanic, and that would be true.  However, with Titanic we were given leads that were likeable.  While the story may have also had a cartoony villain in Billy Zane's character, the core of the tale was nice enough that it wasn't insulting. James Cameron is undeniably one of the most talented directors ever from a technical standpoint.  He can create content that relocates the theatre audience and places them in brilliantly created environments.  Storytelling, though, is not his strong suit.  I believe that he has story ideas that would cause him to create the next two Avatar films that are going to come out, but I don't believe they are guaranteed to be good.

Rating - 2.5 out of 3 stars