Expensive and preachy freak show

Rating: 1/10 (2 January 2010)

If special effects were the essence of movie-making, Cameron's fantasy "Avatar" might have been a film of value. However, this movie amazes the viewer with the complete lack of original ideas in its story-telling. We have almost half a billion dollars spent on a cheesy story, padded with political correctness and an annoying imposition of some mixture of neo-paganism, spiritualist environmentalism and Wicca-goddess worship. The preaching of the weird religious beliefs is in your face and relentless: besides the time spent on rituals and chanting, we even have a conversion-scene of a hard scientist to the religion of the planet's natives. And these "Navi" beliefs are good-old jungle "boogie" mixed up with some mother-earth nonsense.
Freakshow. The natives of the planet are "humanoid" yet not exactly human. Besides "taking you into another world", the choice of the "race" for the natives is quite offensive. They are a bigger version of humans with some elf-like features, vampire fangs, and the facial expressions of an ant-eater. We should not forget the proverbial tail – evolution has taken its own turn on the planet. The special visuals may make entering this world of Cameron's unobtrusive but the sense of mixing these creatures with humans is still unnerving to the viewer. And let's not forget – the color blue for the skin is only a little step away from the usual green-gray color of aliens.
The bad guys are the white males of military discipline and corporate greed. The good guys are the tribal planetary humanoid underdogs, and the breakaway humans sympathizing with the native's cause. The story telling is good as it follows the classical secrets of the trade. But the sheer length of it and the indulgence in special visuals makes it rather boring and lacking depth.
"Borrowing" from other movies is heavy. In it we sense the strain of Cameron's imagination to overcome its boundaries, set by his own liking, experience and pretensions. The film is a mixture which borrows from "The Matrix" (entering another world through a heavily-wired coffin), "Apocalypto" (kill the beast but apologize – after all, it is your brother), Count Dracula (the native's have protruding fangs), "Star Wars" (much shooting on a large scale in a strange planetary environment); "The Glimmer Man", with Steven Segal (Bad, bad company, digging for treasure under my house!); "Dances with Wolves" (I must become one of them.); "Aliens" is also present (some of the animals open their nasty mouths in the same way as the main beast of that movie).
This is an annoying and preachy film which, thanks to the enormous budget and mass-marketing, has become yet another blockbuster-symbol of human moral and intellectual limitations. Good movies are not just special effects wrapped up in New Age spirituality; but who am I to say that to the king of the world?