Film review: Avatar

Published on Thursday 17 December 2009 18:04

AVATAR (12a) ** DIRECTED BY: JAMES CAMERON STARRING: SAM WORTHINGTON, ZOE SALDANA, SIGOURNEY WEAVER, STEPHEN LANG, MICHELLE RODRIGUEZ

FIRST things first: Avatar is not the most eye-popping, jaw-dropping, movie-topping cinematic experience ever created. James Cameron's sci-fi epic may have arrived on a wave of hype, but its supposedly revolutionary 3D motion-capture visual effects are more cosmetic than seismic. So forget any thoughts of Avatar representing the most significant sensory breakthrough in film since the introduction of sound/colour/Angelina Jolie.

There's very little in Avatar you won't have seen before, especially if you're a regular attendee of mainstream blockbusters. That you won't have seen it done in quite as much flawless detail is where Cameron's main achievement lies. Building on the advances made by Peter Jackson in Lord of the Rings and King Kong, Avatar offers a near-seamless blend of human and CGI-rendered motion-capture characters in a virtual world shot through with the kind of clarity and depth of field previously available only in a full-scale live-action shoots. That immersive™ experience everyone keeps bleating on about depends upon your willingness to stare goggle-eyed at the screen and drink in every three-dimensional detail of Cameron's richly designed alien world.

Alas, that's a bigger ask than it should be. For all the technical wonders on display, the film doesn't reach the levels of photorealism that would make it easy to get lost in. There's still something a little computer-gamey about the end results, a fact not helped by long stretches of screen time in which there's no straight-up human presence. That Cameron needs us to appreciate every single thing going on in each busy frame is desperately telegraphed throughout.

Kicking off with a symbolic close-up of lead character Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) opening his eyes, Cameron proceeds to fill Avatar with lots of instructive dialogue imploring Jake (and by extension us) to learn how really to see what's in front of him. Which would be fine, except much of this risible dialogue comes from the mouths of the Na'vi, the indigenous race of ten-foot-tall, blue-skinned aliens that Cameron has anointed as this film's heroes.

Looking like a weird genetic fusion of Apocalypto's Mayan warriors and the Smurfs, they're a bit too cute and sentimentally conceived to really convince. They are blessed with long neural cords that enable them to plug directly into nature, and Cameron delights in showing us swathes of them grooving in synch, like nirvana-nearing numpties at a New Age rave, scenes that hilariously bring back long-buried memories of the wild crusty rumpus from The Matrix: Reloaded.

These Na'vi are the inhabits of the distant planet of Pandora, which is home to a lush, verdant ecosystem that is toxic to humans, but also rich in a valuable, energy-generating mineral called Unobtanium (the name is presumably a joke, if not a very good one). This is where Jake comes in. A paraplegic marine, he's been seconded to Pandora to participate in a project that allows humans to exist on the planet inside hybrid human-Na'vi avatars. Led by Sigourney Weaver's chain-smoking doctor, their plan is to win the "hearts and minds" of the Na'vi and find a diplomatic solution to the problem of what to do with the "blue monkeys" standing in the way of the corporate suits determined to strip-mine their planet.

But Jake is pulling double duty. Promised new legs by a battle-scarred, warmongering general (Stpehen Lang), in addition to reporting back to Weaver's Na'vi-nurturing scientist, he's feeding strategic intel to the military in preparation for a scorched-earth, "shock-and-awe" campaign to wipe them out.

Cameron makes it easy to play spot the political allegory here with direct references to Iraq and Vietnam, and he goes back further, transforming Avatar into a sci-fi Dances with Wolves by having Jake bat eyelids – and eventually bump uglies – with Neytri (Zoe Saldana), a Na'vi warrior princess who takes a shine to him. As Jake learns the Na'vi ways, his allegiances flip, and Cameron lets us share Jake's every simplistic thought courtesy of a droning voice-over soundtracked with motifs from Leona Lewis's horrible Celine Dion-approximating theme song, I See You.

This lengthy second act eventually segues into a full-scale assault in which Cameron finally breaks out every piece of military hardware in his CG arsenal. Unfortunately, he regurgitates a few too many ideas from Aliens, which may sound like a churlish complaint (he did direct it after all), but its ubiquitous influence has devalued the currency of its ideas over the years, ensuring that, even in full-action movie mode, Avatar has none of that film's heart-in-mouth tension. Indeed, for all Cameron's chat about using technology to service the story, it's the story that seems to have been the secondary concern.

This is the film he says he dreamed about seeing when he was 15, and it often sounds as if he got his 15-year-old self to write it. Almost rivalling George Lucas for clunkiness, Cameron opts for the simplistic, broad-strokes style he deployed in Titanic, rather than the terse, pared-to-the-bone brilliance of his original Terminator screenplay.

At times it's wince-inducingly weak, and no amount of lush visuals can disguise that. Nor can they disguise how second-hand everything feels. Having waited the best part of 14 years for the technology to catch up with his narrative ideas (he first wrote the treatment back in 1995), Avatar ironically arrives in a world where those narrative ideas suddenly seem very dated. Maybe it's time Cameron opened his eyes.