Cameron's new film ultimately falls ironically flat despite 3D

Rating: 7/10 (19 December 2009)

Seeing all these positive votes is a surprise to me. I genuinely believe this movie profits from the relative newness of 3D cinema effects. People are wowed by the beautiful renderings of nature, the RDA equipment and the Na'vi liveliness; I had to convince myself that these were all CGI. We've come a long way since Jar Jar Binks.
I too was impressed then, from the moment opening scenes touched my eyes through the lens of truth (the goggles), with scenery and characters seemingly popping out of the screen. After a while though, your grip on reality pulls you back, much like how this occurs with our human lead Jake Sully time and time again. See, the showing lasts more than 2.5 hours and during that long long time on a planet far far away, this effect alone failed to grip this viewer. I'd say the first half of the film is good, not on par with Cameron's older releases, but it creates a base for trust that all is going to be well with this movie. Then after about 90 minutes, the story just gets boring, with spectacle over substance taking over. The thing is, for a movie that doesn't require any thinking, it's just too long and ultimately uninteresting.
The tribal Na'vi are so incredibly goody good and in touch with nature in their tribal hippie ways it's almost sickening, while the RDA side takes the cake in showing off humans as a bunch of heartless corporate military types that only like flamethrowers, Mechs, bulldozers and blowing up large Mana trees. The black and white (or is it digital) nature of the two "teams" therefore is insignificant. I felt myself neither siding with the RDA (the side branded the enemy by the script) because of their horrible nature, nor with the Na'vi simply because the whole semi-helpless but prevailing native/tribal/aboriginal premise made me feel slightly embarrassed, nauseous and fatigued. The two sides offer no help in keeping you immersed due to their lack of identifiable content; neither are like "real people". The 3D effects are left to do that, but in the end the flat characterisation made me "wake up" from the dream about an hour into the movie and never sucked me in again after that.
It's a shame, but Avatar, as a consequence of its cheesy cliché ridden script (just tick mental boxes of "influential" source material for fun if you get bored at some point) and heavily dualistic right/wrong nature finds no opportunity to surprise the audience with any real feeling of care for what's happening to any of the leads, and more importantly it fails to let the viewer make a conscious choice who to root for. This is not T2 where you felt bad when Arnie sunk in the "lavapit", or, if you're a girl, this is not T where you felt bad when Leonardo sunk in "icewaterpit" (an ironic similarity there). This movie and the persona's fates all left me rather emotionless, save for the impact of the grand vista's and mesmerising effects.
With the director and writer deciding everything and the plot being more than obvious in its flow, Avatar ended up being underwhelming as a story, however brilliant as a tech demo. I say again, we will probably look back on Avatar in later years as one of the pioneers to widely distribute 3D tech and it deserves that place, but long before that the story will be forgotten and that cannot be said for films like Titanic, Aliens and Terminator 2, that managed to push the boundaries of technology, while also providing a story and characters that are worth caring about and remembering. So, why still 7/10? Well, despite the bland characters the movie is entertaining enough if you persevere and whichever way you look at it, it's a technological landmark that merits a good score, if only for a little while. But next time, Cameron, it's gotta have more cow bell.