OK, so here's my review of
Avatar. 
If I had to sum up the movie in two words, they would be: loud; colourful. You get plenty of noise for your money and your eyes will be overloaded by stimuli. Visually, it's gorgeous. Graphics are smooth and elegant. Cameron must have cranked his AA settings right up to the max. ("
nVIDIA: the way it's meant to be played"!)
The 3D, sadly, is a mixed bag. There were some great scenes like when some little shiny particle things were drifting around and it honestly felt like I could reach out and touch them. I also had a few good "wince" moments when stuff flew at me from the screen. But as I've said in a previous post, the 3D effect seemed to fade in and out. Scenes with real actors looked best; scenes with a predominance of CGI varied in quality. Some were jaw-droppingly real; others felt rather flat. This is not ground-breaking, history making stuff. It's just vanilla 3D with chocolate sauce, in need of some more beta testing.
An unfortunate side effect of the CGI was that it tended to disassociate me from the Na'vi (the blue space monkeys who inhabit the planet of Pandora). While I really enjoyed the switch between Jake's two "worlds" (blatant
deus ex machina but nevertheless very well handled) the CGI stuff never felt real and the graphics used to create them seemed a trifle cartoonish. Consequently,
Avatar looks like it's been pasted together with vidcaps from a sophisticated MMORPG.
The Na'vi were shamelessly based on the classic "noble savage" stereotype, which immediately made me care less about them than I do about the dust under my fridge. A curious mixture of Native Americans and African Americans (two peoples traditionally enslaved and abused by white Americans, ironically enough) they were so dumb and hippyish that I couldn't take them seriously. During the rare times when they weren't babbling pseudo-mystical nonsense at the humans, they played "cowboys and Indians" with each other and hung around looking moody. Like that's going to save the planet from intergalactic invasion?
Even worse, they had no idea how to mobilise themselves against the humans. It took Jake (a symbolic "Great White Chief from the Skies") to unite the clans and get them doing what they should have been doing since before the movie even started. Apparently only Jake could do this because - having spent all of several weeks on Pandora - he had magically become a complete expert in every aspect of their language, culture, society, politics and history. Or, to put it another way: only Jake could do this because he was a white American (
Avatar is replete with heavy overtones of cultural imperialism and white supremacy). Huzzah!
I've barely touched on the plot holes. Examples could be multiplied. There were also some dizzying leaps of logic - but don't even go there, girlfriend.
To cut a long story short, Jake leads his new people to war after becoming even more of a noble savage than the noble savages themselves and accomplishing the great "once-in-a-lifetime-feat-which-only-five-of-the-clan's-greatest-Na'vi-have-ever-achieved-in-the-entire-history-of-Pandora." Which we knew he was going to do because the movie blatantly telegraphed it at least an hour beforehand. As, indeed, it did with so many of the plot's crude developments.
You see, the problem with basing your movie on stereotypical plot elements and stereotypical characters is that everyone can see what's going to happen from miles away because they already know what to expect from the stereotypes.
Avatar slavishly adheres to this tired old formula which is why the story just isn't very interesting. It wastes new technology on old cheese.
I was checking my watch at the 90 minute mark, yawning after 2 hours and wishing I could grow a third buttock for extra coccyx support by the time we entered the final 20 minutes. That's when I wasn't laughing loudly at the atrocious acting and cringe-worthy dialogue.
In fact, there were quite a lot of laughs in the cinema and when the movie finally ended everyone just sort of shrugged and walked out. No applause, no "WOW!", no excited chattering. Like me, they were simply glad it was over.
5/10
