Avatar - the non-gushy review

Rating: 7/10 (1 March 2010)

Okay, since it's pretty much impossible at this point to assume that someone reading this HASN'T seen it (I'm assuming the combined time of all its showings is by now equal to the amount of time cinema has existed), there is not going to be any plot stuff of Avatar here - you know what happens. I'm simply going to say this: You NEED to see this film. This 7/10 is not indicative of how badly you need to see this in order to have any experience of modern movie-making. It's not a great film, but it's a VITAL film. This is one of those cases where quality is irrelevant because the quantity of this movie makes it worth it. Highest-budget movie ever? Check. Highest-grossing movie ever? Check. Will it win Best Picture? Probably, and I hope it does just so, for once, a sci-fi movie gets it (although the other sci fi movie of the year, District 9, is also a Best Picture Nominee, and was quite a bit better). This is the biggest blockbuster movie since The Dark Knight, and like that, you should see it just to know what everyone else is talking about. This is an important film.
But is it a good film?
Let's get this out of the way first; anyone who says they weren't impressed by the visuals is lying. This film is gorgeous. Pandora is the most perfectly realised world science fiction has ever created. Its blending of real landscapes with an alien twist keep it engaging and almost believable. The wildlife are beautifully rendered to the point where you wish things this amazing existed. The biologist part of my brain is actually being overridden by the loving-to-look-at-cool-things part, and that's saying something. This is 2 1/2 hours of visual wonder, and yes, it's worth going for that.
The story is a different matter. Fifty years ago it would have been perfunctory, now it's just clichéd, predictable and utterly stale. Everyone's already said that it's just like Dances with Wolves, Ferngully and Pocahontus, but that doesn't change the fact that IT IS. The main guy goes into the tribe, becomes one of them, falls in love with an initially hostile local, goes native, and fights against his former side. Of course, he's super-special in every concievable way purely on the basis that he's the main character and that's just what they do. Every time you hear something get set up that you can't believe they'd do because it's "just too clichéd", brace yourself because they're going to do it, and they're going to do it with no sense of self-awareness, and in a way this works, because the sincerity and passion of it pulls you through the parts of this film you've already seen in a half-dozen other movies, but you know what I would have liked? The groundbreaking visuals and production values to have been part of a groundbreaking movie, and this is not that.
The characters are likable, if bland, but they're all so pre-trodden it's annoying. Yes, Michelle Rodriguez plays a tomboy army chick with a heart who ends up dying heroically, just like she does in everything she's ever been in. Yes, the general is an alpha-male tool whose reason is overridden by testosterone in everything he does. Yes, the scientists are the good guys and the jocks are the bad guys - in fact this jocks vs. geeks thing is probably indicative of James Cameron's time in high- school, but any film in which the army are portrayed as jingoistic macho douchebags wading into their own private war movie clasping their giant, steel, rapid-firing replacement erections is fine with me.
I could have sworn that after The Last Samurai became officially the Last Good Movie That Will Get Away With This Storyline Ever (tm), Hollywood had accepted that white guy guilt over imperialist genocides in the past can't be helped by having a white guy go in with the natives and eventually save those silly primitive tribes who couldn't have done it without him, but apparently some anvil-sized moral themes just need to be dropped with all the nuance that entails, and Avatar is nothing if not anviliscious. This is a movie which so desperately wants to talk about environmentalism, racism, imperialism and the idiocy of blind patriotism that it's bursting at the seams, and yes, you're going to get some on you. You will be bludgeoned with a scene featuring a replay of the Trail of Tears by a weeping James Cameron screaming "ARE YOU FEELING GUILTY YET, WORLD?" and you have to admire his determination, because yes, these are all causes that need to be supported, but here they spend their time filling the spot where something profound is supposed to go. There are infomercials that do this better.
What they don't do is everything that isn't narrative or dialogue, which is all stuff this movie does better than almost any feature film in history. This film is a feast for the senses, and like any feast, the slightly overdone running time at least makes sure everyone gets their fill. This is a movie you go to to see sights you've never seen before, and all the stuff I've picked apart in the last three paragraphs is all just expecting it to be held to the standards of proper cinema, like the Academy is by giving it the Best Picture Nomination that is rightfully a more balanced movie's. Avatar is something else; it's the best parts of Michael Bay-style visual insanity and non-Michael Bay-style film-making competence. Go for the visuals, stay for the one high-budget action movie that doesn't just jack off a military fetish, leave having seen a movie you won't be discussing, but you will be taking about.