The Prettiest Void You Will Ever See

Rating: 3/10 (28 February 2010)

James Cameron is a talented director. Most of his movies from 1984 until now have been decent and watchable pieces of entertainment. As with many directors of the "Film Brat" generation, there are many cloying drawbacks to Cameron's films (trite and often unbearable dialogue, needless filler scenes to ensure a 2-plus hour runtime, and god-awful soundtrack scores), but they could be overlooked because the overall films have huge amounts of entertainment value.
I do not know what went wrong, but Avatar is by far the worst James Cameron vehicle to date. It makes sense that Fox sunk so much money into the development of the technology and cameras needed to simply film Avatar, because the movie looks so lovely that you forget (for about the first half-hour) that you are merely watching an amped-up version of the "noble savage" narrative cooked up more creatively in already-negligible films like Pocahontas and Fern Gully. It seems as if Cameron invented the technology and said, with astonishment, "oh, right, now I have to make a movie," and hammered out a script.
The movie follows a paralyzed soldier who must slip into his twin brother's shoes, taking over the (fully-able) body of a N'avi replica that was designed for scientific and quasi-anthropological (if the N'avi are considered humanoid) research. Being an army man, the soldier is corrupted by an unfailingly evil colonel and convinced to infiltrate the native inhabitants with the objective of duping them into moving from their home ("Hometree," a laughably unoriginal pun on "treehouse"), which just happens to be situated on top of a rich deposit of "unobtainium" (another great pun, right?), the precious metal that an additionally unfailingly-evil corporation is mining. The army man falls in love with an attractive native inhabitant and (predictably) her entire culture, eventually training them in an insurrection against the jingoistic and avaricious invaders. In true High Concept fashion, huge social, cultural, economic, governmental, and environmental problems are essentially solved through one heterosexual couple's love.
Although many people have argued that the movie is racist, hypocritical, or patronizing, I will just argue that it is overly simplistic. This film is a poor excuse for an allegory -- it is heavy-handed and incredibly indulgent (running just over two and a half hours, at least one hour of the film could be trimmed). This year, a much more effective allegory for corporate greed and racism came out: District 9. Also, a much more effective statement on the effects of the Iraq War came out this year: The Hurt Locker. Do not be tricked into thinking this film means something. It is a film that is shamelessly unaware of its own irony. It (supposedly) critiques the ravages of capitalism while, simultaneously, being the most expensive movie in the history of film-making and the proverbial accessory to technology companies which are hoping to release HD3D televisions concurrently with Avatar's release on BluRay. This movie is savagely dishonest and meaningless, while being a huge financial success. Cameron will be glad- handing corporations for years to come.
Furthermore, the film tragically wastes talented actors like Sigourney Weaver and Giovanni Ribisi. The script fills their mouths with trite dialogue and makes them act in obviously-arduous 3-D environments. They seem lost within their gigantic green-screen stage. When the actors are not swamped by the cloying 3-D imagery, they are overshadowed and silenced by the film's action scenes.
This is yet another film that is rated PG-13 and delights in violence. Many of the action sequences (the destruction of hometree, the climactic warfare sequence, etc.) contain gleeful machine-gun and machete fueled mayhem without the bloody consequences of such extreme violence. Although I seem preachy, I am merely trying to point out that this is a film which attempts to deplore violence and titillate its viewers with action scenes. Frankly, the action scenes seem so carefully planned and disturbingly choreographed that it would be logical to assume Cameron cares less for his characters (with the exception of Jake Sully and Neytiri) than his obligatory explosions.
Avatar's visuals become painfully overstimulating at the end of the movie. The battle scenes are the worst, but the peaceful sequences (which are little more than setup for the violence sequences) contain too much within the shot. Everything pops out, every prop must have its share of the limelight. By the end, it doesn't matter, it's all a blur. What was once pretty becomes a painful mess.
Since almost everybody has seen this box office juggernaut and it seems needless to write a review or synopsis for such a film, there are too many individuals calling Avatar a "revolution in film-making." This is only an aesthetic revolution. Avatar is to film-making what Magic Eye is to literature: fun to look at, but there is nothing within the work besides a few pretty images that pop out at you.