All effects, poor characters and a poor story

Rating: Null/10 (21 December 2009)

Watching Avatar I felt like I was trapped in a pastel landscape. All the colours in this movie are bright greens, blues and pinks. I wondered for a while why this was familiar but then it dawned on me that it's oceanic landscapes which James Cameron obviously has an affinity for, judging from his previous record.
The storyline is very basic here. Big bad imperialists come to a planet to rape it and steal a precious stone which is worth lots of money, the stone in this case is "hillariously" referred to as 'unobtainium'. The natives of course must all be crushed, conquered and moved away from the precious resource. It has shades of the 2003 Iraq War but the metaphor is developed poorly and it's never especially subtle. At one point an invasion on the native peoples is referred to as "shock and awe".
The idea of avatars, creatures created from human DNA but meant to look like the native aliens is interesting. The invaders download their brain into the avatar and then walk around among the natives. Humans are the invaders in this story, it's supposed to be a flip-side version of Aliens, but we still have those robotic machines people get into which mimic their movements. It's a James Cameron trope now.
James Cameron isn't an especially good writer. I think that much was obvious when he strayed from science-fiction with Titanic. Almost everything about that movie was good except for the acting and writing, which is a pretty major flaw in any movie. The writing isn't much better in Avatar, there are a lot of eye-rolling cornball lines. Clichés like "We're not in Kansas anymore" are quite prevalent here. None of the characters are as well manicured as the CGI and other effects. The only real stand-out performance here, even for an action movie, is Sigorney Weaver, and she mostly rehashes her performance from the Alien movies. Sam Worthington is adequate but he never really wowed me either with his performance of a disabled Marine who gets the chance to bounce around a forest with fairy tale creatures.
The effects are okay but the design is pretty hokey at times. I didn't care much for the pallet of colours that Cameron used here. There's a lot of magical and mythical creatures flying around, Cameron really wanted us to see this world he has created but then he forgot about all the characters. The only Na'vi character we really get to know is Jake Sully's girlfriend, Neytiri. The rest are pretty much dismissed and blend into the blue backgrounds except when they are required for the final attack on the humans.
The final confrontation is pretty bad as well. The major characters all end up in peril of course and James Horner's score reaches its irritating crescendo. The odds are obviously stacked against the native Na'vi but this is fiction, in James Cameron's world anything is possible.