Avatar

In an admittedly odd turn of phrase, Avatar is the most correctly rated movie, maybe ever. In other words, it is neither overrated, nor is it underrated. Everything that people say is great about it, and all the things that made people fall in love with it, are very true. But also, every criticism, every complaint, every snide remark made about the film is also completely and totally valid. If you have taken in the discourse about this movie, you have a fairly accurate picture of what you are going to get when the lights dim and the opening scene begins to play.

Perhaps the most commonly named strength of the movie is in its visuals. The movie is absolutely gorgeous. Of all the science fiction movies I’ve seen, and at this point there are a lot of them, this is the movie that most made an alien world feel completely alive. Some movies, like Brazil, Dark City, or Blade Runner, are able to create these unique settings rich with lived-in details and complexity, but they are all essentially manifestations of urban humanity. Some movies, like Star Wars, Star Trek, or Aliens, give you a slice of a truly alien environment, but due to the constraints of time, budget, or existing special effects technology, only show you a tiny slice of that place or planet, as is relevant to the story. On Dagobah, we only see maybe the kilometer-squared of swamp where Yoda lives and where Luke trains. On Pandora, we get grand vistas, sweeping (faux) helicopter shots, and journies through different planetary zones, altitudes, and micro-climates full of their unique, and overlapping, floras and faunas.

Now the way that all that flora, fauna, and planetary zone design comes across is not always internally sensible or logical, relying heavily on the rule of cool to make you suspend your disbelief and enjoy the ride, but the end result is something fairly magical. You feel transported. There are tons of cultural touchstones that feel relevant to trying to explain what the viewing experience is like. It has this great love of its own fictional environments, and of flying around them, which makes it at times feel like the Disney ride Soarin’. If you think about it, it is also borrowing from the turn of the century literary tradition of lost world stories, hiding its primary fascination for the otherworldly behind a veil of a populist adventure story like Journey to the Center of the Earth, and with a utopian bent like Lost Horizon. At times, it is even so in love with its own ecosystems, as bizarre and incomplete as they may be if you look at them too closely, that it almost feels like Planet Earth, or some equivalent documentary series, with the Na’Vi and avatar characters only there to remind us this is, in fact, a fictional movie with a story. It is all those things at once, and yet unlike anything else. Nothing else really combines this kind of lushly designed planet with the beautiful, loving cinematography of someone who has been dreaming of this place as a story setting since childhood.

However, all that praise is balanced by some serious faults. For starters, the story is incredibly simplistic, childish even, and the dialogue does nothing to elevate the material. I mean, the story’s main Macguffin is literally called unobtanium. Need I say more? All of the comparisons you’ve likely heard people make, from Dances With Wolves to Fern Gully to Disney’s Pocahontas, are apt but inaccurate. The film is not really a straight rip off of any of them, but trades in such familiar tropes of simplistic environmentalism and nuance-less anti-colonialism that it feels like it stole from all of them. The villains are cartoonish depictions of the greed of mercantilism on the one hand and the dehumanising genocidal military industrial complex on the other. It is crazy to me that the same writer/director that produced Titanic, a movie I think is a near flawless blended work of art house and populist cinema, could produce something whose story, dialogue, and acting are so dull. Sam Worthington has about as much charisma on screen as a lump of clay and, unlike other blank(-ish) audience inserts like Keanu Reeves’ Neo in The Matrix, fails to sell his empty performance off as understandable bewilderment. Even Sigourney Weaver, who I normally love, feels like she is phoning it in on the clunky expository dialogue.

As beautiful and richly realized as the world is, it is also flawed. If you are swept away by the grand majesty of it all you might not notice it, but the world itself is basically designed to serve the plot rather than simply be a setting for the plot. If intelligent design is a debate on Earth, it is a near certainty on Pandora. This shouldn’t be a surprise for a setting that was dreamed up by a boyhood Cameron and iterated on over and over again through the years of bringing it to reality, but it may rub hard science fiction affectionados the wrong way. Things like the mother tree and the soul preserving fungal chutes may have some attempted explanation in narrative, but they really exist to drive the environmental message home with a spiritually attuned sledgehammer. The fact that the NaVi can use their braid tails to interface with multiple animals makes little to no sense from an evolutionary standpoint, but does make a cogent thematic point about the interconnectedness of Pandora, and by extension all living ecosystems including our own on earth. Personally, I took less offence to the possibly accidental quasi-religious underpinnings of the world as presented, but did see the level of thematic form-follows-function worldbuilding as rather shoddy writing. It just makes so much of the function of Pandora, below the surface glitz the camera so lovingly captures, seem like nothing more than conveniences of the plot.

The movie is also very long and noticeably so. I saw the extended edition, since many people who like the movie have said that it is the definitive version, and I can’t say it impressed me. Ironically, I looked up after the fact what had been added, and a lot of it was scenes I actually liked and thought added something to the story, especially the extended opening that shows more of Jake Sully’s life before being shipped to Pandora and what a dreary urban dystopia Earth has become, in contrast to the unspoiled wilds of Panora to come. This leads me to believe that a lot of the fat is in the bulk of the theatrical cut of the movie, possibly in tightening up some of the exposition and in the areas where Jake both gets to know the NaVi tribe and the planet. I can’t help shake the fact that somewhere in the nearly three hour run time there is a really fine two hour or two and half hour movie. On the other hand, the movie set the record for box office earnings, so what do I know?

Would Recommend: If a staggeringly beautiful alien planet, created in splendorous detail by world class visual effects artists, and captured with loving affection and passion by one of the great directors of our time is enough to carry a movie.

Would Not Recommend: If you are a real stickler for writing, dialogue, and acting.