Over-hyped, but still mildly entertaining.

Rating: 6/10 (29 January 2010)

After his previous, ground-breaking feature 'Titanic' (1997) director James Cameron has returned to playing things safe and by the rules.
'Avatar' is a nice pastime, though it will not amaze you. Its premise is very familiar, and it takes the audience nowhere new, but still to places they like. It also seems to enjoy monkeying about with huge issues, concepts and themes, such as genocide and religion, though there is nothing depicted here that we haven't seen done before, and done better.
Even its visuals – which are supposed to be the film's crowning glory – are immensely overrated, and however splendid they may be, they have been outdone time and again by the greats (Tim Burton, Terry Gilliam, Robert Zemeckis, Baz Lhurmann, Steven Spielberg, Jim Henson...). After all, when has CGI ever stood a chance against puppetry and stop-motion animation? A dimension is added by the stunning 3D, but a dimension is taken away by the paper-thin, unsustainable plot.
Nevertheless, it still manages to be entertaining and frequently rather affecting, but it's excruciatingly slow-moving for an action film and surprisingly ordinary for the highest-grossing film in cinema history.
Sam Worthington, Zoe Saldana, Sigourney Weaver and Stephen Lang try their hardest not be outdone by colourful trees, unintentionally hilarious digital monsters and blue-skinned, elf-like Aborigines.