An expensive b-movie

Rating: 5/10 (26 December 2009)

Avatar is a five-out-of-ten-star film. Not bad, but not excellent by any means.
Avatar fails for several reasons: 1) It's a Vietnam film (albeit with a SF bent), many many years too late. The Vietnam film started with "Apocalypse Now" and finished with "Full Metal Jacket", and the canon includes everything in between. There was no reason to rehash it and nothing has been achieved by doing so. Cameron adds nothing to the Vietnam genre, nor the SF world.
2) Despite the nice (but only "nice") backstory that exists for the Na'Vi and the white Americans (who represent all human beings, of course), the story itself is dull, predictable and not worth the time it takes to tell (some /ten-star/ reviews on IMDb even knowledge this - nuts!) In fact, story-wise it's a very expensive b-movie. The characters are unsympathetic (white knucklehead soldier has coming of age experience with foreign land/culture/woman; James Cameron forces another woman (or the same woman, for the second time) into a man's costume/role/story arc), and there are few surprises or story developments to reward our patience. The casting is also very woolly - Worthington, like his character, is expendible, Weaver chews scenery and channels too much Ripley, Rodriguez is rubbish /again/, and Lang is almost cartoonish (although, in many ways his performance sits the most comfortably).
3) The Na'Vi are irritatingly orientalist. They are a quite unsubtle blend of the United States' lack of understanding of Asian and African cultures. While Sam Worthington's blundering has a certain quality of self-reflexiveness, ultimately, the Na'vi culture is a collection of "preconceived archetypes which envision all 'Eastern' societies as fundamentally similar to one another, and fundamentally dissimilar to 'Western' societies." 4) The digital looks crappy, even (especially?) in 3D. The neon green/blue palette does for cinema what it does for cars - makes it look falsely flash and after a while it reveals its shallowness. Also, the Na'Vi feel false, wooden, despite their 3D Mo-Cap yadda-yadda technology. Sorry, but Jim Henson's stuff still feels exponentially more real than this simply because the things captured by the camera WERE REAL! I would compare Avatar to the Hammer film "One Million Years BC": essentially a good b-movie with effects that are impressive but definitely "of their time", making the film itself a curio of the same.
I predict that this will be James Cameron's greatest flop, dollar-for-dollar, soundbite-for-soundbite. Don't get carried away by the King Of The World's hype.