Very enjoyable, very familiar.

Rating: 8/10 (30 December 2009)

I am going to call this James Cameron's equivalent of Total Recall. Why so? Because it is a very fine film; it is absolutely true to his career; and it should have been a great film, a stupendous one. But I have to say that it ended up workmanlike rather than brilliant. The high score I give for the graphics and animation work; totally seamless, totally immersive and a fantastic spectacle. As many other people have said, I can't give it for the plot, script or characters because they have been done a lot of times already - not necessarily better, but at least as well. If I want to be reminded that colonial genocide is bad... actually it's not the sort of thing anyone needs reminding about. Having admired the look of the thing (and I really really like the look of the thing) I have to repeat that the film resembles Total Recall in that it should have been a much more nuanced and subtle examination of the alien culture the humans were trying to destroy. Just as Total Recall should have been (and nearly was) a careful look at whether our identity can be separated from our memories and how far tampering with memory affects identity, so there were an awful lot of questions about Pandora that should have been answered better. Of course,it is a world carefully designed for the purposes of the film. That raises a problem in that it looks like a created artefact. Consider the largely unexplained ability of most of the important lifeforms to form this bond with each other and with the local vegetation. How is that the product of anything except intelligent design? (Babel fish, anyone?) But no-one takes that and runs with it. It's kind of an elephant in the room. Nor do we get any explanation of the effect of this "bonding" on the mind of a human. Nor is there any feeling that this really is a low-gravity world. Things seem to accelerate downwards at one gee. Minor flaws, but never mind that. I hope that people too young to have read the science fiction referred to in this film will go and find it; Harry Harrison's Deathworld series, John Varley's Gaia books, and for a rather cute and patronising way of dealing with First Contact H Beam Piper's Little Fuzzy books. For a more domestic way of having indigenes teaching humans a lesson, take Elizabeth Moon's Remnant Population. But also enjoy the film!