Pocahontas in Space

Rating: 6/10 (17 January 2010)

This movie is very entertaining, with stunning visuals. Technology magazines will surely give you the inside details on James Cameron's innovative camera techniques. Real-time motion capture and rendering of the virtual world in the view port of the camera certainly sound like groundbreaking techniques. They probably allowed the camera operator to do all kinds of nifty things that would otherwise be very difficult.
It is a testament to the quality of the visuals that I was never distracted by something which seemed out of place, or something which moved incorrectly. Often, a movie which relies heavily on CGI will have a few rough spots in which something looks or moves in contrast to the laws of physics. I had no such distractions in Avatar. The visual immersion is seamless, and that is impressive.
Unfortunately, the rest of my review is somewhat negative. The movie is a long string of very impressive visual effects, coupled to a story that beats you over the head with ham-fisted leftist morality lessons. I even agree with those lessons, but the sheer un-subtleness with which they are thrown at the viewer is genuinely distracting. Several times in the movie I was jolted from my 'suspension of disbelief' by the irrational behavior of the military and corporate characters.
The ridiculous term 'unobtanium' should have stayed in The Core, a movie which matched the term in absurdity. And 'flux vortex' is a not any kind of explanation for why mountains are floating. If I saw floating mountains, I'd be a lot more interested in them than any of the movie's characters seemed to be. Do the mountains float due to paramagnetism? Nope. They float because it makes for an exceptionally dangerous rite-of-passage scene.
Then there are the Na'vi, which are a lousy alien concept. They are basically identical to humans, but they're bigger and have blue skin, cat-like noses and tails, and USB ports in their hair. Apart from these trivial differences, they are just a mash-up of native American and African tribal societies, and behave exactly like humans. I realize that human audience will have a hard time relating to aliens which are truly alien, but the Na'vi are so close to human that they are functionally identical. And that's rather poor for a sci-fi movie.
Avatar is basically Pocahontas, re-done as sci-fi. It's not the real Pocahontas, either. It's the Disney-fied Pocahontas, complete with the fictional romance between John Smith and Pocahontas. The only departure is where Jake Sully joins the lovable natives and helps them drive out the invaders. If I had never seen the Disney movie, or taken an American history course, I could have ignored this, as I'm sure many 13-year-olds will be able to do. However, it is not the case, so I cannot ignore it. I think it really detracts from what could have been a much better movie.
RATING: 6 out of 10