Absolutely zero substance

Rating: 4/10 (21 December 2009)

I simply cannot believe how over-zealous the users of this site are. Actually i can. It was exactly the same for There Will be Blood and every other hyped film there has been recently. Some of the adjectives used to describe Avatar beggar belief: 'The Best Movie of All Time' 'A Masterpiece' 'Mesmorising, Spellbinding, Extraordinary!'. I really do wish i could agree. I was looking forward to this as much as most and i'm a huge fan of Cameron's previous work.
Avatar, however, is a massive disappointment, and i'm convinced once the hype surrounding the technology and CGI dies down people will realise that. It really is a reflection of the times that people can be so suckered in by fancy visuals and things blowing up. Please, for a moment, look at the merits of this film, CGI aside, and you'll see that they are pretty much on par with a hundred previous sci-fi b-movies/TV-series. The story is completely derivative, the action unrealistic, the dialogue.....oh God, don't get me started. James Cameron has obviously been spending far too much time with George Lucas. The dialogue is atrocious and painfully clichéd. There is no convincing character development at all. I can barely remember any of their names let alone have any sort of affinity with them. Sam Worthington is a waste of space. I don't know what this Hollywood fixation is with him, but he was terrible in Terminator Salvation and he is terrible in this. The cartoon, morally-vacant human 'baddies' are an insult to intelligence and unbelievable at every turn. The entire plot is 100% predictable. Of course we knew the humans weren't go to win. Of course not. Not with their space-travelling, cryo-genetic-using, high-tech weaponary-toting mentality. They didn't understand the forest, man. Please. This is almost as laughable as Return of the Jedi. And the lame efforts to instill some sort of sentimentality and moral message through the use of poorly-written pseudo-spiritual crap just made me cringe. I wasn't even that impressed with the character design. Cameron has basically taken Native American Indians and Antipodean Aborigines and turned them blue. They have similar attire, ride 'horses', shoot arrows etc etc. It was just all too familiar.
Avatar may well be a technological breakthrough, and i look forward to others who take the technology on and remember to actually pair it with an original and compelling story, but for now though, this film is a bulging case of style over substance if ever there has been one.
I miss Aliens. Now that was a convincing movie.
4/10