Painting with All the Colors of the Wind

Rating: Null/10 (19 December 2009)

Avatar has received an absurd amount of hype as the movie that will change the film experience forever. And from a purely visual standpoint, the film lives up to it. As Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) and his blue buddies roam about the spectacularly crafted planet of Pandora, you feel as if you're running alongside them, and the "intense epic battle sequences" (as the PG-13 rating description calls them) are all of that and more. This is a movie that can only be seen in 3D, and it pushes the technology to heights it has never reached before.
It is unfortunate, then, that a movie with such visually-stunning potential falls so flat. The film is filled with melodramatic lines like "It started just as orders... but then I fell in love with the forest," and though the acting doesn't damage the movie, it certainly doesn't elevate it either. But the movie suffers most heavily from its plot, which is the most predictable one in a serious film in my memory. The few plot points that were not immediately clear from watching the television commercials became clear while watching the movie at least an hour before they actually occurred, and the entire film was oddly reminiscent of Disney's Pocohontas. Pocohontas, however, provides more depth; Avatar includes no moral questions or quandaries. The good guys and the bad guys emerge within the first twenty minutes of the film, and for the rest of the movie the good guys do nothing bad and the bad guys do nothing good. And that, ultimately, is Avatar's biggest failure, that though it is a film that presents cinematic beauty in every color imaginable, it has no shades of gray.