'The Future' feels very familiar...

Rating: 8/10 (22 January 2010)

Twelve years after Titanic made him the self-proclaimed "king of the world", director James Cameron, with typical boldness, has declared his intention to not only attempt to reinvent the science fiction genre, but herald in a new era of technologically fuelled cinema. Having already rocked genre foundations with the Terminator series and currently armed with new technology poised to capture and render three dimensional computer generated imagery like never before, thus immersing the viewer into a fully realized cinematic environment, it appeared Cameron was prepared to make good on his ambitions. However, it is the film's staggering (and largely self-generated) hype, building a reputation of the film being "the new Jazz Singer", a film to radically change what the medium meant and how it worked, which, while obviously serving well to sell tickets (poignantly suggesting the ability of an otherwise less remarkable film to 'talk up' its own success) proves detrimental to the film. Avatar, while boasting undeniably flooring visuals, remains at heart a fun, solidly made yet slightly campy adventure tale, but nowhere near the singlehanded cinematic revolution it was declared to be.
It is ironic that the film's groundbreaking 3D proved its largest selling point, as nearly everything else about the film comes across as so strikingly 2D. The plot, stripped of its futuristic space trappings, proves a rather blatant re-tread of Kevin Costner's Dances With Wolves, a narrative already and since nearly done to death, making the 'anti-capitalist, embracing individual and collective spirit' ideology promoted feel more of a requisite narrative checkmark rather than a heartfelt message (the intriguing thematic link of humans requiring 'avatars', or inhabiting fictional, constructed external bodies to 'realize their full potential' is equally left frustratingly unexplored). It also comes across as odd that a film twelve years in production would not have time for even a brief script revision, as most of Avatar's dialogue is unmistakably banal even for an action film, and any character development is reduced to throwaway lines of exposition, making it a struggle to take to any protagonist. Similarly, likely for the sense of further cultivating the feel of an 'important, epic immersion into another world', the film's ponderous running time is simply too long to feasibly stretch out such a shallow story, giving the narrative the feel of forcibly dragging, particularly when the plot being dragged out is so howlingly predictable as is.
But, the instant rebuttal arises, such concerns should ultimately be besides the point for a film whose interest is founded on its revolutionary visual spectacle. This is partially true, yet it is certainly worth arriving in the film prepared for the aforementioned complaints to mine the maximum enjoyment from the film. Nonetheless, for a film self-sold as the first step in a new age of cinema, the fact that such basic storytelling concerns can manage to distract from the sense of breathless immersion feels sub-standard and hardly groundbreaking if the allegedly unprecedented awe factor is marred by the same old complaints. The key, it would seem to an actual revolution in the medium of cinema, is a sense of roundedness – balancing the realism of the spectacle and sense of fun and excitement with sophistication, profundity and a uniform standard of quality. No matter how aesthetically groundbreaking, for a film to truly harbour a new epoch of the medium in such a cinema-conscious age, advancement on multiple levels, including narrative, would seem necessary.
That being said, Avatar's CGI and 3D visual effects remain unquestionably remarkable, all the moreso through the attention to minuscule details (tiny plant filaments drifting in the wind) as the massive, sprawling extraterrestrial battles. Yet again, for a film boasting so much, one cannot help but feel slightly let down (especially with benchmarks such as the Lord of the Rings films setting a comparable standard) that the envelope was not pushed slightly more, as, once the resonant thrill of being thrust into the alien world of Pandora dies down, details such as the alien Na'vi starting to appear cartoon-like when contrasted with live performers rather than being seamlessly integrated and the fact that all the admittably impressive alien creature designs still feel excessively anthropomorphized or all have six legs, making the fantastic 'otherness' of the world disappointingly recede. James Horner's distractingly formulaic musical score jarringly clanging away in the background hardly helps.
Similarly, all of Cameron's actors fall prey to the particular clunky style of performance which feels more forgivable in a film intended to be more outright fun than aiming for a 'serious epic' feel. Sam Worthington brings an affable earthiness and cocky humour to his paraplegic marine turned Na'vi saviour, but ultimately lacks the charisma to properly propel a film of such scope. Zoe Saldana tries her hardest, but ultimately is incapable of doing too much with a tiresomely clichéd 'native love interest' role. Sigourney Weaver has fun chewing the scenery at first and finally infusing the film with some honest emotion as a prickly scientist studying the Na'vi, but the normally reliable Stephen Lang and Giovanni Ribisi both wallow in campiness as pantomimes of villainy (vicious military man and petulant businessman respectively). Michelle Rodriguez delivers the most consistently satisfying performance as a cheeky military pilot, but her role is disappointingly clipped each time it generates the prospects of getting truly interesting.
In the end, as aesthetically eye-popping as Avatar is, the healthiest viewing attitude is to treat it as an unassuming adventure romp rather than as the 'important cinematic epic' Cameron would have it be regarded as. Perhaps this is ultimately fitting, as, in terms of the history of the medium, film was initially created and mass marketed as a form of entertainment, and on this front Cameron's film is fully and enthusiastically prepared to deliver. An upheaval to the medium of cinema? No. A very fun and largely quality (if thoroughly flawed) slice of mainstream adventure worth seeing? Definitely.
-8/10