Great Visuals, Thin Plot

Rating: 5/10 (17 May 2010)

-- WARNING: CONTAINS SPOILERS -- There is no doubt, the visuals and special effects for "Avatar" are stunning. It is a wonderful movie to look at, and James Cameron deserves credit for helping to advance the use of CGI in movies to the high level that they are at today. That being said, the plot and characters are tissue thin and predictable. In the first 15 minutes, you know that Jake and Neytiri will fall in love and end up together. You know that the Na'vi will somehow defeat the humans and defend their world. You know that Colonel Quaritch will be dead by the end of the film. You're even reasonably sure that Dr. Augustine will die (cause after all, in a movie like this, one of the main characters has to die, to add emotion to the film). As with far too many of James Cameron's movies, there is no room for any complexity in the characters. The Na'vi and their human allies are unquestionably good and pure, while the soldiers and the corporate stooges are uniformly evil, with a cartoonish super-villain quality.
As an aside, there's one other place where I have a major problem with this film. This is a universe where man is very technologically advanced, and has mastered interstellar travel. So, of course, when fighting a war on a distant world, the humans use...helicopters? They couldn't even dig up a couple of old F-16's to use? All that technology, the ability to travel between solar systems, and the best flying vehicles for use is a slightly better version of the Huey's the US military used in Vietnam? Obviously, this was done so that the Na'vi would have something slow to shoot at during the final climatic battle scene (kind of hard to make it seem realistic that bows and arrows, or even those flying dragon creatures, could bring down an airplane doing Mach 2), but it feels contrived, as if Cameron thought "I have to make sure the humans don't use anything too advanced, or I won't give the Na'vi any chance to win". It's lazy story telling at it's best.