Fun, exciting CGI-fest; turn your brain off and enjoy the ride

Rating: 7/10 (8 September 2010)

I missed James Cameron's Avatar during its initial theatrical run, but managed to catch it in IMAX 3D on the last night of the extended edition's re-release. I wasn't all that excited to see it, to be perfectly honest, but I really wanted to experience it on the big screen and in 3D instead of watching it on TV.
Pretty much everything I had heard about this movie was right on the money. It's more or less a futuristic remake of Dances With Wolves, with a little Starship Troopers, Pocahontas and James Cameron's own Aliens thrown in. In fact, Avatar is, in a way, Aliens in reverse, with the Marines the bad guys and the aliens the good guys. There's even a scene in which the evil Colonel, strapped into a huge robotic suit, fights a giant alien monster. The scene is lifted right from the finale of Aliens.
However, despite the derivative plot, cardboard characters and cliché-riddled screenplay, Avatar is extremely entertaining and exciting. It is undeniably a visually stunning movie. Seeing it in the theater reminded me of the first time I saw Star Wars, Dune and the aforementioned Starship Troopers. The movie is a visual smörgåsbord.
Cameron is an extremely talented and nuanced director and he never lets the frame become overloaded with stuff. No matter how much is happening on the screen at any given moment, he manages to choreograph and direct it all so that it never becomes disorienting. Unlike Michael Bay and Peter Jackson, Cameron seems to prefer his audience to actually SEE what is happening, instead of throwing a bunch of shaky camera movements, rapid editing and flying debris in the audience's face.
The performances are all quite good. The actors play their roles with just enough over-the-top energy that it suits the massiveness of the movie, without becoming campy or trite. Cameron's screenplay is functional at best. He gets us from one point to another quickly and efficiently without ever stumbling in any significant way, but the dialog and characters are not particularly compelling. Even the subplot regarding Sam Worthington's brother being killed is glossed over without Worthington's character so much as batting an eye at the death of his sibling. The plot point is there for no reason other than to explain why Worthington has the ability to control his avatar, and once that has been established, it is more or less forgotten except for one or two throwaway lines of dialog. That pretty much sums up Cameron's attitude toward most of the motivational aspects of the script: explain it quickly and let's move on to the next action sequence.
The effects are quite good, and while the Na'vi are obviously CGI-created, they have enough soul to convince us that they are living, breathing beings. Personally, I found the intricate facial movements of the Na'vi to be kind of creepy at first, enough to be mildly distracting. It took a while to get used to, but I finally did.
I have not yet seen Avatar on TV. With less scope to carry the movie along, it will be interesting to see how well it holds up more on its visual style, story and characters than its sheer hugeness.
I'm not a big Cameron fan. I still think his best movie is the original Terminator. Aliens is a close second, but I think the rest of his movies are bloated and uneven. I don't think he's made an all-out bad movie (though The Abyss comes close), but he often gets lost in the spectacle and neglects the story and characters. Avatar is in the middle for me. It isn't great, but it's pretty good and Cameron manages to deliver a huge explosion of eye-candy without ever losing control of it. That is no small feat.