Star Wars meets Dinotopia meets the Abyss

Rating: 10/10 (27 December 2009)

Like the original 1977 "Star Wars," this film at last raises the bar in terms of crafting a breathtakingly beautiful and mesmerizing alien world and its creatures. I predict there will be several copycat films that try to cash in on the Avatar "look," and the film certainly will have a cult following. Though the movie is over two hours long, it presents such a rich tapestry and lively pace it flows by quickly.
The film is so visually overwhelming that the storyline became secondary to me. No other sci-fi film in memory has so convincingly woven together and entire alien biosphere and pre-technological civilization. When I saw the blue "Smurfs-on- steroid" aliens in the trailers, I was afraid this would be a sappy tale. It is anything but.
Many elements from Cameron's earlier films are obvious. Sigourney Weaver looks and acts like she just shipped out after her adventure in the movie "Aliens." The bioluminescent creatures of the moon Pandora are reminiscent of the aliens in "The Abyss." The fighter ships come straight from "Terminator." Cameron also heavily borrows designs from the "Dinotopia" fantasy book series.
What I do find tiring is the heavy-handed environmentalism message that seems a prerequisite for otherworld fantasy films today. There is even a veiled allusion to the Bible's Tree of Life. Apparently the moon Pandora is a living Garden of Eden. That is, until those greedy, warlike, and arrogant humans come along.
This is where the story gets weak and horribly contrived. The moon has some magnetic superconducting element not found anywhere else in the galaxy. And, the natives of Pandora just happen to be living on top of it. Talk about location, location, location.
Never mind that the universe is collectively made of exactly the same bricks and mortar found in the periodic table of the elements. Or, that transporting an exotic element to Earth across interstellar space would be ridiculously expensive. It would be vastly cheaper to synthesize it on Earth.
The film draws obvious parallels to the decimation of Native Americans by the New World colonists. The military bad guy's are straight out of Cameron's "The Abyss." Apparently humans are so evil they not only would strip mine a planet but also decimate its inhabitants.
In reality our scientists would always have the upper hand in such a discovery simply because Pandorans don't vote for Congressmen. A moon like this would be just an astrobiology curiosity. It's totally implausible that any private corporation would have the resources to mount an interstellar gold rush.
These story shortcomings aside, "Avatar" is still a powerfully engaging and memorable film. It's a long-awaited break from much less imaginative and utterly moronic story lines in most contemporary sci-fi films, such as "District 9" and "2012."