Avatar marks the utter decline of James Cameron as a filmmaking force

Rating: 3/10 (12 November 2010)

I'm a fan of quite a bit of James Cameron's pre-Titanic work. The Terminator is probably my favorite of his works: It's a mind-bending sci-fi/action hybrid with a main character that is very easy to root for.
I suppose that this is the formula that I expected, in part, from Avatar, as it worked so well for Ripley and Sarah Conner in past Cameron films. However, what Avatar ended up as is a film that looks pretty enough (though not THAT pretty) but that talks down to its audience and that does so through the eyes of an incredibly dull main character.
I don't know what to think of Sam Worthington as an actor based on his performance in this film. As Sully, he isn't given much to work with. He's glad to be free of his disability when he gets hooked into his avatar, that's for sure, but beyond a baseline sympathy for him, there's nothing there to make us care about what he experiences. Likewise, the characters are all gross caricatures that speak in obvious platitudes (more on this in a bit). There isn't a person--or people--that the viewer is driven to root for in this film, which, considering Cameron's very stark "Good versus Evil" characterization, is a major failure.
What bothered me the most is that James Cameron thought, well and truly, that his criticisms of imperialistic resource grabs were in any way intelligent or insightful. Is the topic a worthwhile one? Sure. Can an action movie be fun AND give us a little bit of food for thought? Sure--both his earlier Aliens and Ridley Scott's Alien were able to achieve these ends successfully, for example.
However, Avatar does none of that. The military leader is a bloodthirsty psycho; the corporatist co-leading the venture a goofy caricature of a Wall Street yuppie. Worst of all, as if we the audience were too stupid to understand who exactly the Na'vi represent, the blue-skinned race was played largely by black folks. Cameron probably considers himself clever for this, but in truth, it was painfully insulting. I don't believe that every film needs some sort of in-depth symbolism, but please don't treat us like morons.
In the end, this was a film that doesn't convince me that modern 3D film technology is worthwhile (strangely, Journey to the Center of the Earth remains the film that has best made use of this technology).
It certainly wasn't, by any account, a good action film. The characters represented what was essentially moralizing for kindergarten-aged children. In all, this was a rousing disaster. The Best Picture nomination that this film received at the Oscars is the perfect example of a studio hype-machine covering for a film that is otherwise a hot mess.