Good movie, but James Cameron's worst.

Rating: 7/10 (18 December 2009)

This was a lousy decade for sci-fi films and I think the 00s have claimed James Cameron, the one person I was counting on to bring back the glory days of the 80s and 90s. What happened to all the Aliens, the Terminators, the RoboCops, the Abysses, the Predators, the Total Recalls, the Jurassic Parks, even The Running Mans? Muscular sci-fi action movies that wowed us with fantastic concepts and visuals while commenting on poignant truths with wit and lack of pretense?
For all those triumphs, James Cameron is my personal film-making hero. Which makes the following all the harder to say: AVATAR is Cameron's weakest film to date. Which isn't to say that it's bad... but it's bad for a James Cameron movie.
First, the story is unoriginal. It's "Pocahontas", plain and simple. The Na'vi, despite being blue and 10 feet tall, are your typical chanting, dancing, Mohawk-sporting, bow-shooting, bead-wearing, body-paint-covered, "Earth-is-our-mother" whooping Indians.
Just pop in a DVD of the 1995 Disney cartoon and count the similarities: Intrepid male soldier who sets off to a new world in search of danger & adventure to test himself? Check. Equally adventurous daughter of the natives' Chief that secretly spies the white soldier exploring her land, befriends him and teaches him the ways of the tribe? Check. The stiff Chief-to-be appointed suitor that the native princess shuns in favor of the white guy? Check. The ensuing fight between the two and arranged execution of the white guy? Check. The white visitors' authority who only cares about money and guns, calling the natives "savages" and launching a final confrontation under false pretenses? Check. The native princess leading the white guy to a sacred tree to ask for advice? Check. The way she then defends the white soldier from her own people as they are about to kill him? Check. Christ, I'm surprised Neytiri didn't break out into song about teaching Jake how to paint with "the colors of the wind".
From what I read, Cameron first wrote this story in 1995, the year the Pocahontas movie came out. Coincidence? Either way, I've seen it all before.
Second, why were the characters so under-developed? Jake and Neytiri's romance feels, at points, shoehorned to forward the plot. Their first meeting: "Why didn't you let me die?" "Because you have a strong heart." Come on, Jim, I know you can do better than that. The point at which they confess their love essentially boils down to "I choose you" "I choose you too" with none of the crafted buildup that led to Jack & Rose's first kiss on the Titanic.
Trudy Chacon. What is her motivation? Why is she helping our heroes? Why is she the ONLY pilot who suddenly (and awkwardly) says "f*** it" and turns away from blasting the Na'vi tree? Does she have friends, insecurities, family? She's just a chick there to quip lines and kick ass.
The bad guys are painfully one-dimensional. Quatrich is a maniac without an ounce of humanity. Think Lieutenant Coffey from "The Abyss", except without the gradual slide into madness from the anger and paranoia. Coffey cried tears before setting off the nuke and that's when you realize the guy is gone... you almost feel sorry for the man before he implodes in his crippled craft. By contrast, Quatrich is a G.I. Joe that likes to blow stuff up for the fun of it. Selfridge is equally limp: just a cardboard cutout of some tie-wearing yuppie who only cares about the bottom line. Do these guys have friends? Ideals? Outside lives? Nope, they're just there as straw men in this transparent social commentary.
Which brings me to: "War on Terror", "pre-emptive strike", "shock and awe". These are words thrown out by the baddies at the finale without anyone so much as blushing, just in case there was any doubt what half the movie's commentary is about. I'm about as anti-Bush and anti-IraqWar as you can get, and these bald-faced references made me cringe. Gone is any masterful subtlety that allows the audience to piece together their own conclusions -- let's simply hammer it into their heads instead. Even Dubya himself was less simplistic than the caricatures portrayed in this movie and this kind of straw-man commentary actually works contrary to the aims of the artist because it paints a picture of someone too evil, too simple, and too unidentifiable to be compared to any kind of actual person, thus letting the real villain off the hook.
I know Cameron is a better writer than this, which is what surprised and frustrated me most of all. So what happened in those 12 years? Maybe the epic battle scenes of the new "Star Wars" and "Lord of the Rings" movies gave him the foolish idea that anyone possibly empathizes with hundreds of faceless pawns getting shot and killed in massive battle scenes while our hero soldier and his beloved warrior princess emerge alive and victorious. Maybe he felt that "District 9", "Iron Man" and "Transformers" didn't amply satisfy our lust for cool CGI battle-bots sequences. Maybe his extended absence has let lesser visionaries like Peter Jackson and Michael Bay set the course for epic adventure cinema and he was merely following suit.
The movie is visually stunning and another landmark achievement in effects. But the same can be said for Star Wars Episodes I - III and I don't see anyone hailing those movies as masterpieces. All in all, with AVATAR, Cameron has again become a pioneer of visual effects... but the complete opposite is true in terms of writing. He has fallen to regurgitating the tired sci-fiction/fantasy plots and concepts of this lackluster decade, forgot how to craft an organic plot and love story, and neglected to hide the marionette strings in his bold social commentary puppet show.
You're still my hero, Jim. I look forward to "Battle Angel" with, for the first time, cautioned optimism.