Avatar (spoiler alerts)

Rating: 4/10 (20 October 2010)

Ah, the two and a half hour film that seems to have a huge following, and is often given respect for apparently being an original film and a completely artistic achievement from a director who specializes in the technical. For those of you who are expecting me to give this film a good review I suggest you leave now because that is not what is happening here. Instead of getting this artistic achievement form a talented director we are instead given a re-hash of better films like Dances With Wolves, with a healthy dose of Fern Gully and a few rip-offs from some not so very well known stories those being Call Me Joe in which a paralyzed character remote controls an alien avatar with his mind, and the Noon Universe with a story taking place on a planet called Pandora with an alien species called the Nave. Hmm this seems to be bordering on plagiarism doesn't it? But oh well no one will care. The story is your basic love the trees and hate the militaristic, colonizing and resource abusing nature of modern man fare. Complete with the disgruntled modern main character who goes in and meets members of this 'savage' species, meets a girl of this group, she shows him all the beauty of nature (something anyone on this planet wouldn't need explaining to see, seriously if this movie achieves anything it looks damn good) and of course he falls for her and joins in their cause.
Yes we've seen this before, it's not a bad story but it has been done better, the last notable version of this old tale is Edward Zwick's Last Samurai, a story in which Tom Cruise (of course a disgruntled modern man) joins forces with the samurai after staying with them as a prisoner. What worked about that story was the fact that it wasn't completely pretentious like Avatar, and there were multiple messages, there was of course the love nature bit, but also it wasn't exactly shinning the concept of modernization like this or Dances with Wolves, instead it focused more on honor, respect and not letting new flashy things make you forget who you really are underneath. All of this is missing in Avatar, and the further I got into the movie the more I felt Cameron's intentions with the films message weren't so honest. It seems instead he was trying to create a Star Wars for a new generation, something he seems to have succeeded in that respect everyone is buying into it, it's extremely over-hyped mostly because it's prettier than everything else out on the market.
But beyond all of that the 3-D vs.2-D experience is no different, okay so maybe an object flying towards the screen will be more noticeable, but that's about it, that's pretty much all the capabilities of 3-D, some things pop-up but it never gives the sense of immersion that say, a video game would. You still don't feel like a part of the film, now all we're doing is watching a really well animated moving pop-up book, with extremely bad dialogue 'they'll eat your eyes for jujubes' is my all time favorite shitty line of mainstream cinema history, yes other movies have worse dialogue it's just funny to see writing that horrible in a movie being taken so seriously and being praised like this one.
So what did I get out of Avatar, nothing it was a pretty movie, it had high-concept that could have been good but failed, and it's anti-commercialism story could have been better had someone with writing talent actually written the script, and of course there's the overtly cheesy dialogue, and character arcs. I find nothing wrong with using archetypal characters, after all and archetypal story as old as film itself isn't the same without the archetypes, the only problem is they come off as sort of unintentional parodies of what they are, we get the overtly pulp Colonel Miles, the overtly Native American quibbles of Neytiri, and the over the top heroics and acts of daring of Jake. Another problem with films like these though is they always throw in the white guy, it's not until he comes that the Na'vi actually start kicking major military ass, and of course he's some sort of prophetic savior because you know they couldn't do it without him. That was another major success of Last Samurai; we never get the feeling that Cruise's presence really makes any deep impact in the battle against Japan's change into Western culture. We get the feeling that the Samurai would face pretty much the same fate with or without him, instead he's just there, he's no extreme bad-ass who changes the course of events for the people he's decided to join, instead he just basically becomes another statistic, an extra man on the battlefield. He may survive the story but there is no major differentiating outcome, he pleads to the emperor of Japan and heads back to the little village he spent an entire winter in, to more than likely die from the wounds he received during the films climactic battle. We never get that here; we feel that the Na'vi was instead a completely incompetent species up until Jake arrives to help them out. Yeah they're still dangerous as hell outside of all the military gear, but that point is rendered moot when any excavation into that jungle consists of a few military vehicles and some pretty impenetrable big rig machinery.
As it stands, Avatar is an extremely pretty movie, void of soul or substance, and will be remembered as one of the first films to actually use 3-D well. Which is pretty much the sole reason it's so huge, as today's mainstream audiences buy into things that are pretty.