All Style But Little Substance

Rating: 5/10 (4 May 2019)

James Cameron's Avatar is probably one of the most overrated movies of the last decade. Avatar is the textbook definition of style over substance. The film is cool visuals and decent action and that is all. The film has no interesting characters, the villains are all comical stereotypes with no dimension at all, and it is predictable from beginning to end. The plot of this film has been done to death in tons of other films, so there are no surprises. This film does not deserve to be the highest grossing film ever. Plus the film is way too long. Many scenes could have been cut and it would have been the same movie.
The biggest problem is the plot, which is extremely predictable. From the first ten minutes I could guess how the film would play out and I was right. The plot is basically the plot of Dances with Wolves but with aliens instead of Native Americans. You have a soldier who is hired to drive the natives off the land. However, as the film goes on he befriends the natives and learns of their culture. Eventually he joins the natives and fights his own people. I would not be so upset if they just took a few elements from Dances with Wolves. However, Avatar is Dances with Wolves, just with aliens. There is almost no difference at all.
What's worse is that the characters are really lame. Sam Worthington's character is generic and not interesting at all. Sam Worthington does not do a horrible job performance wise, but half of the time he looks like he is ready for lunch. His character is the stereotypical good guy and the fish-out-of-water. He is also kind of an idiot. For example, that scene when he first is transferred into the avatar body and has legs is cringe-worthy and goes on for too long. He just behaves like a little kid that got his new toy. The supporting characters are boring as well. Many of them are just devices used to move the plot along like Michelle Rodriguez's character. Sigourney Weaver is in this too. She does fine but she cannot save the cast.
The villains are even worse. They are unbelievable stereotypical and one-dimensional. One of the villains played by Giovanni Ribisi is just the stereotypical rich guy who only cares about money. The other big villain played by Stephen Lang is the over-the-top one-dimensional general who wants to destroy the Navi civilization for no other reason than he is the bad guy of the movie. These seem more like Captain Planet villains than ones you would see in a supposedly adult film like this.
It is a shame because James Cameron used to know how to write good characters. He wrote Ripley, Newt, Hicks, and Hudson from Aliens. He also created iconic characters like Sarah Connor and John Connor from Terminator. Cameron could also write good villains like the T-1000 from Terminator 2 or Burk from Aliens. Now he seems to care more for the effects and the spectacle of a movie rather than the story and character. With both this and Titanic before Cameron has given us oversimplified characters that are mostly there for forced drama and/or to drive home a message that you see on countless after school specials. He had fifteen years to work on Avatar, so there is no excuse for a predictable story and bland characters like what we have here. He obviously cared more about making the effects look amazing (which they do) and the story and characters were just an afterthought.
There are good things about the film. The effects look amazing. Pandora is very colorful, unique, and pleasing to the eye. I have not seen it in 3D, but I heard that it was pretty good. The acting is fine except from Sam Worthington. It also has some decent action, particularly at the end with the final battle. The film has some entertaining parts like some parts at the beginning and the final fight. Many people who defend this movie say that it is more about the experience of being on Pandora.
Yes, it is a good experience in the theater, but that does not mean that the film is good. A film needs more than spectacle to be good. There are lots of films where I had a good experience watching the film in theaters, but as I thought about it more and watched it again at home I find that the film is not that good. X-Men Origins Wolverine is a film that quickly comes to mind. I did not even have that great of an experience watching it in the theater actually. It was fun to look at, but the story and characters were too bland for me, and I was just bored. I found this to be a very boring movie.
Overall, if you want to sit through two hours and forty minutes of eye candy then by all means see the film, although most people have seen the film by now. I personally, found Avatar to be an extremely long, predictable, simplistic, boring movie.