Nice effects create mesmerizing world

Rating: 8/10 (10 May 2010)

James Cameron is an interesting director, increasingly M.I.A. but seemingly invulnerable to the risk of the huge productions he tackles on the rare occasions when he does return to work. Back in the days of "True Lies" and "Titanic", everybody expected his next "most expensive movie ever" to be the Heaven's Gate of FX film. But by now most of us have given up that expectation as it seems he has an incredible knack for picking the kind of stories that work well with FX and tie together action and sentiment. Really the only time he's failed was with "The Abyss," a movie that you had to admire but which was hard to enjoy. I kind of expected "Avatar" to be a more elaborate version of "Abyss", but it's quite a lot more cohesive (if simple) and compelling than any of his action films in quite a number of years.
So let that be the first caveat, and the first qualifier -- this is an action movie. Those who expected it to be high drama and/or to challenge the formulas of film storytelling, will have to look elsewhere (hint: Terry Gilliam has a new one out on DVD this month too). While the film does have an interesting sci-fi premise -- basically it's a reverse of his original "Terminator" film, in which machines were designed to look like humans to infiltrate their refugee camps, while in this one humans are the baddies and they use "avatars" in native form to infiltrate alien camps -- it doesn't really go anywhere with it. Basically the story is more of a melodrama than anything else, about an invading human being persuaded to the side of the native Na'vi viewpoint and helping to beat the attacking hordes of humans.
It doesn't really matter, because I found myself watching this in 3D in the theater basically not wanting to miss a second of it. It's just all so fascinating to look at, even if you're never entirely 100% inside the world of the movie. Or at least I wasn't. Constantly we're just so awestruck by the fantasy world that we start to think about the effects, which kind of takes you out of the movie, but then you don't want to stop watching to see what will happen next (in the effects, not the story), so it's very engrossing cinema regardless of where the interest is coming from.