Predictable story and stock characters do not hamper this unique cinematic experience

Rating: 8/10 (26 December 2009)

With this film, Cameron has truly pushed the envelope in terms of computer-generated imagery, in ways that special effect companies could only dream of when the first motion-captured computer-generated character, Gollum, hit our screens back in 2002. Avatar features a 40%-60% divide in which a majority of scenes in the film take place in entirely CG-created environments, and I have to say that, objectively, it is absolutely impossible to tell the difference. Whereas so many movies are still struggling with convincing, realistic CGI – computer-generated creatures, animals or other imagery are always painfully obvious to me – it is absolutely stunning to see a film in which the CG-generated imagery is so photo-realistic, laypeople could easily mistake the 12-foot-tall blue aliens featured at the center of the film as really good make-up jobs. The effects team behind the movie has managed to include an unprecedented amount of detail into the CG-created environment and characters that every frame of the film has something fascinating to notice, be it the wrinkles and imperfections in the Na'vi skin to background movements in the deepest reaches of the CG jungle. And the fact that Cameron blocks these scenes just as he would in live-action, utilizing the same camera movements and a surprising amount of "handheld" photography, makes the effects work even more impressive and convincing. The greatest achievement of the film, though, is definitely the motion capture work. Throughout film history I have only ever encountered two entirely CG-created characters that convinced me so much with their emotions and evoked such a strong emotive connection that I had completely forgotten they were computer-generated: Gollum in the Lord of the Rings trilogy, and the aliens from this year's District 9, specifically Christopher Johnson, Wikus' sidekick. But with Avatar, Cameron has managed to create an entire population of CG-created characters that, with the help of the latest motion capture technology, move, behave and most importantly, convey emotions and facial expressions in an almost eerily realistic way, leagues ahead of the expressionless faces in other motion-capture films. If anything will be said about this film down the line, it will be that it was no less than a groundbreaking technical achievement.
What's so great about Avatar, though, is that it isn't just a technical achievement. Anyone could find a way to showcase the latest special effects technology without investing in anything else besides the technology. But Cameron is a storyteller, and he sets out to use these new, groundbreaking techniques to bring the mass audience something they have never seen before. Cameron is no stranger to pushing the envelope in this way: The Abyss, Terminator 2: Judgement Day and Titanic were all groundbreaking films that pushed computer-generated imagery to higher and higher levels; but what made all those films work was the fact that they showed us things we had never seen before. The scale of the Titanic. The mechanics of the Terminators. The expansive underwater world. In Avatar, Cameron and his design crew set out to create a world we have never seen before. I have read a few articles criticizing the art design on the film, from the creatures who are all pretty much weirder counterparts of Earthbound fauna, to the ecosystem which is basically just a larger-scale Earth jungle. While all of this may be true, I still think that the world is so rich, from the Na'vi culture to the look and feel of the alien plants and creatures, to the fascinating secret the planet and the Na'Vi keep which is revealed to be a strikingly clever and interesting concept, that it is absolutely impossible to dismiss it as anything less than breathtaking. And the envelope-pushing special effects and 3-D photography only help to immerse the audience into every detail of this new and incredible world Cameron and crew have created.
All this admiration is not to say that the film is not without its flaws. Cameron is very open about the fact that he makes movies catered for mass-audience consumption. What he won't mention and what is also probably his biggest flaw is that he totally underestimates said audience, and writes a script using an over-simplified version of a very familiar premise, stock characters, cheesy dialogue and shameless kitsch thinking that these are the only ways to sell a story to the general public. I think that the box office success of films such as The Dark Knight prove that the mass audience is hungry for meaty, intelligent, deep blockbusters, but Cameron is a romantic and a classicist at heart, and he goes with what's familiar and what he knows will work. The plot of the film, after all, is really just another version of the Dances with Wolves/Pocahontas story but set on an alien world and in the future – ignorant white man is sent out to spy on indigenous culture by infiltrating their numbers, only to fall in love with the values they represent and lead them into battle against his previous comrades. Every plot development is entirely predictable; every element introduced in the first act is so conveniently brought back in the third to help the protagonists. Cameron can't resist including a romantic sub-plot, inspirational speeches, or cheesy and totally kitschy exchanges. He also can't resist making his antagonists so inhumanly evil that they become nothing more than exaggerated caricatures of evil. But I can't deny that I wasn't nonetheless swept away in the epic adventure, and the films visuals are just so rich and so new and so unique and beautiful and mesmerizing and inspiring, and its technical achievements so weighty and grand and important, and the set pieces so effectively put together, so thrilling and sweeping and action-packed, and the performances and motion capture work so pitch-perfect (except for Sam Worthington, who for some reason still just annoys me), that it's impossible not to treat this film like the groundbreaking cinematic event that it is.