Alien Meets FernGully Meets District 9...IN 3D!!!

Rating: 6/10 (31 January 2010)

I did not see this movie in 3D (horrors!). What difference would it have made anyway? I felt as though the evil Mickey Mouse Disney CEO from the "South Park" episode with the Jonas Brothers was constantly present on the Internet and TV, telling the "Avatar" promotional staff and message board writers that, regardless of the plot, we, the potential audience, should not forget that "it's in 3D...don't forget to mention it's in 3D!" Is film now just about technological spectacle that we should totally disregard whether the storyline is a bunch of garbage? Is this what cinema has come to...just enjoy the 3D, and give us the Oscar? How crass! At least the Ray Harryhausen movies didn't pretend to be anything more than entertainment. "Avatar" thinks it's something better than entertainment. It's a preachy allegory that rams its message down the audience's gullet, using stock characters that have been in vogue in sci-fi for the past forty years.
Even without 3D specs, I enjoyed the computer animation. Pandora (why this name? I'll get to the annoying allegory presented in "Avatar" later) is stunningly beautiful. The aliens DO express genuine human emotion, like grief and joy, very convincingly. Kudos to James Cameron for using the best state-of-the-art CGI techniques to make the Na'vi look realistic. The computer animation for the aliens most certainly DOES NOT look fake. So, King of the World, a tip of my regular specs (in lieu of the 3D ones) to you!
Now for the plot...here's where I'll have some fun and be evil by to peeing on the King's parade! The villains symbolize the evils of mega-corporations in our own world. Then again, this theme has been done to death in far better movies, such as "Alien" and its Cameron-directed sequel and "Robocop." The protagonist's union with the alien tribe, and his relationship to the evil conglomerate, is reminiscent of a film that came out earlier in 2009: "District 9." I'm not saying the King of the World and the "District 9" people had a pizza party together one day and swapped plots over cans of Bud Light; but, there is probably plenty of plot repetition in Hollywood because there is a dearth of creativity. Great minds, contrary to the platitude, do not think alike; mediocre minds do.
I did like that Cameron made the aliens primitive hunter-gatherers rather than high-tech space explorers. In a sense, the Na'wi, who literally live in the trees in a green forest moon, are Ewoks, expect not as cute and cuddly. Anyone who has seen "Return of the Jedi" will start to wonder whether Cameron visits Skywalker Ranch for some R and R with George Lucas, where both men extol their own wealth and genius. The Na'vi are, like the Indians in Westerns since the 1970s, "noble savages", with a pedestrian New Age spirit. They LITERALLY commune with nature and worship Mother Earth, whom they call Eywa. Paging "FernGully", Dr. Cameron? The fact that Pandora is alive is a thinly-veiled reference to the Gaia Hypothesis. This idea was presented without any preachiness in "South Park's" "Lice Capades" episode and George Carlin's monologue, "The Planet is Fine." I hate being preached to by a man who, ironically, consumes plenty of Gaia's resources by virtue of being wealthy (we're all guilty of raping Mother Earth, by the way, but "Avatar" simply wags its finger at us and doesn't offer any practical solutions).
In all, I must repeat... "DON'T FORGET IT'S IN 3D!!!"
P.S.: I rate this film as highly as I do because the actors do a hell of a job, in spite of their clichéd characters.