Film Review: Avatar (Spoilers)

Jim Cameron’s first film in over a decade has been described as a ‘game changer’ and after sitting through its 2 3/4 hour running time there’s no question at all that ‘Avatar’ is precisely that. The CGI and 3D rendering aren’t just good they’re astounding – Cameron creates the most fully realised virtual reality in film history, and spends much of the bloated running time showing you pretty much all of Pandora that he could afford (including the marketing budget the film’s come in at half a billion dollars). The flora, the fauna, the inhabitants, the landscapes, the vistas, everything down to the Na’vi’s (for it is they who are the 10 foot blue creatures) cultural practices, Cameron wants you to know every last little thing you might want to know about the extra-solar system planet humanity has decided to strip mine for its natural resources in the late 22nd century. And here’s where a reasonably sophisticated audience encounters its first stumbling block – the plot

Cameron recycles his plots (just count the shout-outs from Terminator, from Aliens, from Titanic, from The Abyss), couldn’t write naturalistic dialogue to save his life and bashes you around the head at every turn with the issues – oh the issues. Environmentalism is good you see? Corporate America is bad (just who financed this film though?). Modern society is bad. Aboriginal societies are good. Going to war for natural resources is bad. Insurrections against imperial powers are good. You get the idea. And I’m sorry but the human race’s prize’d asset is called ‘unobtainium’? Please.

To get away with such facile storytelling and formulaic plotting Cameron needs sterling performances from his cast, yet only Cameron stalwart Sigourney Weaver seems in on the joke, essentially reprising Ripley Mark 1,  hamming up lines which could have been (and probably were) written for her more than two decades ago. Sam Worthington however fails again to make the grade, showing no emotion whatsoever as Corporal Jake Sully, the surviving twin needed to inhabit the test tube-created Na’vi ‘avatar’ humans feel necessary for their consciousness to inhabit in order to communicate with Pandora’s indigenous, humanoid population. It’s not just a drawback, it makes it downright bizarre that the actor’s CGI avatar should be more convincing than the actor himself. For a film steeped in attempts at melodrama it largely undoes the writer-director-mad genius’ conceit.

Except somehow it doesn’t, not quite. For this is the triumph of spectacle, it’s the Simon Cowell school of film making, where the style is so totally overwhelming you’re forced to ignore the fact that there’s no substance, emotion or authenticity to it at all. And it’s true – Avatar has none of those qualities – none – yet it succeeds in being relentlessly entertaining. It’s beautiful, it’s awesome, it’s oddly easy even to put aside the fact that most of the sequences Cameron shows us on & of Pandora (many strung together by outrageous deus-ex-machinas) add nothing whatsoever to the story; despite the film being fundamentally flawed it’s just plain likeable. It’s fun, it’s a game changer, it will change cinema forever, but as with Cowell’s X-Factor, as everyone sets out to use it as the industry standard, to be copied and lived up to, it’ll be at the expense of good cinema and will without doubt pollute the industry for a generation. It’s a guilty pleasure but an exercise in relentless cynicism.

8/10

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