500 million bucks, now only if they could've squeezed in a scriptwriter into that budget

Rating: 6/10 (29 December 2009)

Terminator, Aliens, The Abyss, T2. The man named James Francis Cameron has etched his name into sci-fi genre (and as a film-maker par excellence) with almost as much intensity as Hitchcock did in the suspense/ thriller genre. We know that he makes technically brilliant and supremely entertaining movies.
I wonder why he blanked out on the most important aspect of movie making on this one - and no, I'm not talking about life-like CGI or agile animatronics or even 'human-emotion capture' computerized actors.
It's a simple story: it's 1500s in 2100s. It's the oft-told tale of Europeans coming to the new world and taking away the pristine goodness of it all. I won't fault the story, simple stories are good. We connect to those. Now, narrative - I'd have liked to think that Mr. Cameron thought that all of us weren't 8 year olds (no offense meant to the 8 year olds!).
We are required to suspend belief not just on the fact that a completely alien ecosystem evolved sentient beings who are strikingly similar in all aspects (physical, cultural, psychological) to humans, but also on human race's own progressive cultural evolution as well. The marines are caricatures from a bad Vietnam-Era movie, the corporate boss is from an equally bad 80s investment bank ('screw the science, I gotta make me some money baby') and we are still letting vets ride around in wheelchairs that are driven using the manual power of their hands.
The psyche of avatar-wielding protagonist is never explored fully. What makes him 'switch-over' to the other side (some emotional complexity please, it needn't be a Christopher Nolan a la 'The Dark Knight' but just a little more internal confusion might be more, well, human?). And Pandora is many things, it's beautiful, scary and enthralling - but there's one thing it's not: it's not alien. It's just an idealized recreation of how 'jungle people' would live dreamt up by a bunch of people who live in high-rise condos or sprawling houses.
At the end of it all, I'm left asking - why aliens? Why did this movie have to take place on the moon of a giant planet many light years away? This story could have been more than adequately told in umpteen number of 'conventional' settings: Incan Americas, India of early 16th century,West Africa of late 17th century. I have too much respect for the director to think that the answer is - because we could put a CGI super-tiger that looks like it could have a T-Rex for breakfast fighting an animatoric robot on a giant 3-D screen.
But from the looks of it, the answer is probably very close to that.