Being outrageously, globally successful doesn’t tend to lead to a wave of pity, but somewhere in the past decade it had to suck to be James Cameron. No one could have blamed the director of Titanic if he decided to go out on a career high. Who would want to face the comparison with their next film? So first and foremost it takes a giant set of balls to follow up the most successful movie of all time with the most expensive movie of all time.
So here it is world. Avatar is set well in the future, and tells the story of a paraplegic marine called Jake (Sam Worthington) who is sent to the distant planet of Pandora. The world is peopled by an indigenous group called the Na’vi who are blue, literally and metaphorically. They are at one with their planet and its wildly varied and coloured flora and fauna, but aren’t too pleased with the human mining company that’s trying to take over. Jake has arrived to ‘drive’ a human/Na’vi hybrid avatar, sent to infiltrate the natives.
On the surface it might appear that Cameron’s Aliens and Terminator skills would come to the fore here, but his flick about the duel between a boat and an iceberg wasn’t too far from my mind. This is big and grand… Titanic in scale, but at its heart is an old fashioned love story. Jake can’t help but fall for the chief’s daughter. It’s a tale as old as time itself – blue girl meets alien hybrid driven by paraplegic soldier, and the two find themselves madly in love.
Sam Worthington is great, but his accent is horrendous. Sigourney Weaver pops in to chew the scenery, and Zoe Saldana does a fabulous job emoting through so many digital effects as Jake’s forbidden love.
The real star is the world Cameron has created. It is stunning, layered with elaborate detail, and utterly believable. I was worried I wouldn’t be able to care when faced with so many visuals that were created inside a computer but the result is a vibrant and engaging universe filled with a well crafted and thought out culture. I feel I should see it again just to catch all the incredible elements going on in the background.
James Cameron is like George Lucas with the power of scriptwriting. He has created a cinematic world with the story and characters to match it (as opposed to the cardboard cut-outs that peopled the Star Wars prequels).
It’s quite odd that more hasn’t been made of the overt political message in the movie. Climate change deniers should be pissed off that such a potent tale of the abuse of nature has been allowed into mainstream popular culture. A very big deal is made about humanity’s own dying world. If you believe we haven’t done anything to earth that it hasn’t suffered before (because I hear the dinosaur version of the industrial revolution really took its toll as well), then you might want to prepare for a dramatic storm out.
Also a warning to the weak of bladder – all up the Avatar experience took three hours (including the 30 minutes of ads and trailers that came before it). Gird your loins. There is certainly a part after the first climax that I couldn’t help check my watch. But it is worth it, and frankly the only way to view this is on the big screen. You have to be able to soak up the atmosphere and scale of yet another epic outing from the King of the World.
Nice review but I really wasn’t a fan of this film – I thought it was far too long (you could have easily shaved 30 minutes off it), and I disliked the lack of subtlety regarding the overall message of the theme (global warming = bad, love and peace = good). If you can spend billions of dollars on effects, spend some time and energy on creating a storyline that doesn’t fit the standardised Hollywood method (boy meets girl, boy chooses love over duty, bla bla bla) and I found it incredibly annoying that Sam’s character was privotal in saving the Na’vi and Pandora – why does Hollywood have to paint native tribes as inadequate until Hero Man enters?
Sigh.
The effects were ace though, I wish Pandora was a real place because it looked amazing!
lol what? I didn’t get that