Despite Avatar's wizardy, you've seen this all before

Rating: 4/10 (7 January 2010)

As a visual spectacle Avatar is unmatched but as a film everyone in the world has seen this couple of times before.
The movie is simply a sub par film pushed into billion dollar territory (and inevitable "classic" calls) by 3-d glasses and a $250 million dollar budget. But it's still worth your $10.
Pandora - the homeworld of the Na'vi - is an incredible feat of technical wizardy. Seeing the film in 3-D, the foliage and the creatures of this world look almost as if there from some fantastic dream about flying. Scenes such as when Sully (Andrew Worthington) and Neyriti (Zoe Saldana) race flying creatures down the sheer face of a cliff feel as if they're happening more on the inside of your head than on a screen. They are real and alive. Still as the Phantom Menace showed, technical wizardy does not mean a memorable story. Sully is a brat at the beginning and then far too earnest at the end. The Na'vi are far too forgiving, the battles too predictable. Colonel Stephen Lang (Sorry, Colonel Miles Quatrich) is a 3-D villain with 2-D motivation and the only interesting character is Sigourney Weaver's Gracie who plays both a mother to Sully (There are some genuinely touching scenes between her and Worthington) and friend to Na'vi. In fact, it seems that Gracie is the only character throughout the film whose desire remains altruistic. Sully -our intrepidly predictable hero- manages to obtain leadership of the Na'vi through conquering a dragon or something, but his redemption feels tacked on. Neyriti manages to stay interesting as Sully's love interest - I almost wish she'd just start talking about Na'vi hunting techniques instead of exchanging in some awfully written banter with Sully. If you watched 'Titanic' or (as South Park pointed out) 'Dances with the Wolves' and Jeremy Iron's 'The Mission' than you know Avatar. It's about understanding native ways of life, of understanding our roots as members of a 'network of energy' (Avatar comes oh-so-close to calling this the Force) and trying really, really, hard not to destroy it all with futuristic gunships and robots. I'll be honest we -as a movie going public- need this message now and again but this has been done much, much better. Notably by the aforementioned 'The Mission.' But where these films simply showed and not preached, Avatar preaches and it preaches hard. The only problem is that we're all in the choir, James.