An unoriginal but masterfully crafted story

Rating: 8/10 (29 December 2013)

Rewatching this on Blue-Ray, I discovered that Avatar feels as fresh and engaging now as it did upon its release. It's a genuinely brilliant and entertaining piece of filmmaking... even if its underlying premise is a bit cliché (which it is).
The cliché part is that Avatar is at its heart a stock White Savior narrative: a lost soul leaves the world of the white man to encounter the noble natives, discovers the value of life and the beauty of other cultures, and turns against his rapacious former comrades. I've seen actual arguments about whether Avatar was more indebted to Dances With Wolves or Ferngully, but it's the wrong question. They're all indebted to a White Savior narrative that's been part of film and literature for a long time.
Now, such narratives, by providing a viewpoint character they can relate and identify with, really *are* an important way to get mostly-white audiences to care about the plight of primitive cultures and the environment. But they're not the only way, and admittedly it would be nice to see film grow beyond this narrative template. Since that's not going to happen in Hollywood probably ever, though, it's more worthwhile to evaluate Avatar as an exemplar of its species. And on those grounds, Avatar delivers in every way.
Its greatest triumph, of course, is the planet Pandora -- a character unto itself, and not just metaphorically. Pandora is what is most memorable about Avatar: a vivid, minutely-detailed Garden of Eden that provides a stage for the inevitable battle between technology and nature that nature, for once, gets to win. Pandora's power derives of course -- and this is what made Avatar's arrival so timely -- from our own anxiety about the obviously deteriorating condition of our own world. It's a love letter to the kind of wild nature our civilization has almost annihilated. This makes it powerfully attractive, and awe-inspiring -- and also depressing at a certain level in that it's a mere digital construct -- and ensures the planet's beauty in and of itself becomes something to root for.
A special note of appreciation also goes out to the film's bad guys. Cameron gets a lot of flak for supposedly having made them into "stereotypes," but I think what really has that kind of detractor anxious is that the Colonel and Selfridge in the film are pretty much straight ports of present-day American military and corporate attitudes into an SF setting... and the picture they present is *unflattering.* Of course, that something is unflattering doesn't make it untrue, and Cameron and his actors have precisely the pulse of both kinds of character: the Colonel giving his "safety brief" about the hostile wilds of Pandora could be a 21st-century American officer briefing his troops about "the f***ing hajjis" or "f***ing Mooj;" Selfridge's sociopathic corporate berkishness is if anything *dialed down* from the venality, cluelessness and viciousness of real-life equivalents. Both characters are ably portrayed -- Ribisi's work as Selfridge is particularly standout.
The Na'Vi are of course SF variants on the "noble savage" trope, but they're convincingly realized -- down to a language that clearly showcases real and serious conlanging effort -- and beautifully designed and fill out their role perfectly. Zoe Saldana's performance as Neytiri comes through remarkably well through the digital effects. And the effects themselves are spectacular.
Everyone else performs capably, the action is dazzling and exciting, the final battle set piece is well worth the price of admission all on its own... it's still definitely worth seeing.