Mediocre in every aspect but the technical ones

Rating: 6/10 (28 July 2010)

This is not the worst movie ever made, but it's not something that will change the direction of cinema either, and it's definitely not something I would want to sit through a second time. Like Cameron's Titanic it will largely be forgotten in ten years to the point that people in the future will just not believe all of the hype that went on at the time it was in theaters.
Cameron is brilliant with special effects and technology, but he's a good businessman with a sense of showmanship too, and thus he realizes that if he simply made a documentary entitled "How I Did It" and showed off and explained how he produced some of his pioneering technological tricks, that nobody but a few dozen geeks such as myself would buy a ticket to see it.
Thus a narrative is added - usually an obvious and emotionally manipulative one - to draw in the largest audience. That was what was done in Titanic, and that is the case here. I can't say that Cameron plagiarized the story either, because he's also a master at taking known story lines and putting them through a blender where you can at no point say this is a retread of any one story. However, it is retread of several well known ones. I won't tell you which stories or else I might give the plot away to the few people left on this planet who haven't seen Avatar and still intend to do so.
My recommendation - see it or don't see it. This one won't change your life.