A fun film but not a great film.

Rating: 7/10 (20 January 2010)

I think over the next 5 or so years this film will settle down to a score around 7. It is fun but it nothing like the world changing film that deserves a near 10.
I say this because I had a great time watching it, but it did have some significant weaknesses.
The main one is that it was escapist fluff with no real message or analysis.
For example The Sam Worthington character sacrifices his old life completely for the new one too easily. No struggle, no sorrow. LIfe is never 100%.... but he is able to drop everything. Is it just the chance to be the hero and get a tall blue babe? This was a great opportunity to really dig into what it means to be human and the choices that a future might give us as technology develops.
The tall blue dudes are just so perfect. Again life is never 100% The film says all the problems are caused by us people from earth. However the solution also comes from us - this is hugely disrespectful of the Navi and also duplicates the exact way that we have attempted to destroy Native American or Australian Aboriginal culture ... because we think we know the best thing for them. This is exactly what Avatar does too. It completely fails to look at the reasons us humans have made bad decisions and hurt other groups of people in the past. It is never pure greed or combativeness. Many of the people in Australia who hurt the aboriginal people thought they were helping and protecting them.
It reminded me of the first three Starwars releases.
And a lack of real emotion - which was the effect of the "story by numbers" approach. Where was I surprised about the story - not once. It was always going to end in a big fight.
But Sam's character was much less interesting than Luke Skywalker with Lukes struggles about who he thought he was and who he could be and his struggle with good and evil, what it means to be human and what it means to be a machine.
I could almost feel the Ewoks hanging around just offstage in the last third.
And there was never any real sorrow about the cost to both sides - life is never 100% but this film isn't really interested in that either.
There was never any examination of another way. This examination of another way might be what saves us right here, right now on this planet Earth today. This film doesn't look even slightly at any of that.
On a technical level the modelling of the flying machines was really poor - their dynamics were clunky in many cases and the models ... well looked like models - remember the scene where we see the helicopter next to the lab module they stole. It really really looked like a model - it should have gone back for tweaking as well as several other shots.
The regular camera-work used a really highschool quick zoom, a few times to focus on a face or some action - but didn't do anything to establish it as part of the way the film works. My guess is that they didn't have the intervening footage to make a smooth transition and fudged it ... or they thought it would work in 3D. That should have gone back for more fiddling too.
Also I am wondering ... why didn't the Navi just give them the rock?
Any paid film critic who says this is a great film is not being very objective. It is a firm 7 and gets there for the technology and scale, but not for plot, characterisation, cinematography, its philosophy or its depth. Even the CGI needs a good quality control person saying that "this is not good enough".
The film is very BLACK/WHITE. It is fun, i enjoyed it, but it is a fun film, not an important or deep one.