A visual spectacle and a storytelling debacle

Rating: 5/10 (14 January 2010)

VFX supervisor James Cameron does it again, delivering awesome, revolutionary, unbelievably believable visuals. Oh wait, he was the director? And the screenwriter??
Many of the performances in Avatar were terrible, and I don't blame the actors. I don't blame the technology either; the performances from our lead Na'vi couple actually felt solid and moving. It was the live-action segments which were left behind, with cardboard delivery that seemed to match the depth of the dialogue. In comparison, Michael Bay is a cinema verite auteur.
Every single line Michelle Rodriguez utters is a headache-inducing cliché, and Sigourney Weaver has the diction of a table reading. Lang actually does a good job of immersing himself and being true to his cartoonish character. Evidently they're all capable of better performances, it's simply a director's carelessness.
As for the script, the ultimate question is: really? 300 million dollars and nobody could amass the time, effort and talent to add some depth, food for thought, or just plug in the plot holes? Avatar explores - make it "should have explored" - a fundamental question: what makes a species prevail? The concept of an interconnect nature was also promising, but there was no attempt to explore anything, from these big ideas to the small details.
How could Sully not tell the Na'vi anything about the invasion until the last minute, even though it was the whole purpose of his mission? How can they remote-control brains from miles away flawlessly but simpler things are prohibitively expensive? How do things burn in an oxygen-starved environment? There answers may be there, the problem was that they were deemed insignificant and unworthy to include in the movie. Moral dilemmas? A Marine killing dozens of Americans? Eh, who cares.
Avatar delivered the "new movie experience" it promised. It completely disappointed by neglecting and foregoing everything film-making used to be - a good story brought to life by actors.