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Avatar
Directed by
James Cameron
Produced by James Cameron and Jon Landau
Produced by James Cameron and Jon Landau
With:
Sam Worthington, Zoe Saldana, Sigourney Weaver, Stephen Lang, Michelle Rodriguez, Giovanni Ribisi, Joel David Moore, CCH Pounder, Wes Studi, Laz Alonso, and Dileep Rao
Cinematography:
Mauro Fiore
Editing: James Cameron, John Refoua, and Stephen E. Rivkin
Music: James Horner
Editing: James Cameron, John Refoua, and Stephen E. Rivkin
Music: James Horner
Runtime:
162 min
Release Date: 18 December 2009
Aspect Ratio: 1.78 : 1
Color: Color
Release Date: 18 December 2009
Aspect Ratio: 1.78 : 1
Color: Color
There's a reason James Cameron's Avatar remains the highest-grossing film of all time and yet was pretty much forgotten after it left theaters twelve years ago. In 2009, when this film was released in IMAX 3D, it was a rare must-see cinematic event, well worth the price of admission for its thrill-ride aspects and breakthrough motion-capture technology. But its main character and ALL the non-mo-cap performances (and many of them too) are so generic and inconsequential that you forgot them a few days after seeing the movie.
Sam Worthington musters up all the charisma of a blank sheet of paper to headline Cameron's $237 million gamble. Worthington's Jake Sully is a disabled former Marine who unexpectedly becomes the star of the Avatar Program, "driving" the powerful body of a creature grown by mixing the DNA of his deceased twin brother and that of the native Na'vi people from the planet Pandora. Earth is mining Pandora for the valuable mineral unobtanium (Yikes, my spellcheck actually has Cameron's unimaginative placeholder term in its dictionary!). The Na'vi people live in harmony with nature, unlike the big bad "Sky People" who are only interested in what they can extract from it. Sully starts out following orders from his evil superiors but quickly falls in love with the Na'vi way and a Na'vi girl (Zoe Saldana) who is the daughter of the leaders of a major Na'vi clan.
Avatar was a spectacle that swept the viewer up in a kind of flight simulator, and really gave you the feeling of immersing yourself in a fantasy world. But that thrill was short-lived and not something you'd want to return to unless you could see it again in IMAX 3D (and really, one watch was more than enough). Viewed outside that immersive specialized format, Avatar offers nothing except its terribly written retread of Last of the Mohegans and Dances with Wolves with fifth-generation carbon copy quality versions of Cameron's characters from Aliens. In fact, I spent much of the film wondering how much better it might have been if the 1986 cast of Aliens had played these roles, even with the exact same God-awful script. There's no doubt it would be a huge improvement.
Worthington is about as engaging as a brick. But what if a young Michael Biehn had played the role? Or '80s-era Sigourney Weaver? There's no question the film would improve 1000% with either of those actors. And how 'bout if Paul Reiser had played Giovanni Ribisi’s role of the evil, uncaring, bottom-line driven corporate administrator? That would be a major enhancement because Ribisi is so unforgivably terrible in this picture you just want to walk out whenever he’s on screen; unlike the all too believably smarmy corporate suit Reiser played to a tee in Aliens. So let’s see this through and cast Lance Henriksen in Sigourney Weaver’s part of the head scientist in charge of the Avatar Program, and swap Bill Paxton in for Joel David Moore as the goofy xenoanthropologist who Jake Sully upstages. We don’t really need to recast Michelle Rodriguez’s feisty combat pilot with Jenette Goldstein or Stephen Lang’s mad military man with Al Matthews, but we sure could!
Fantasizing about upgrading this movie with actors from an infinitely superior film by the same writer/director highlights the most infuriating aspect of this picture. It is written by someone capable of crafting an exceptional screenplay with memorable, well-drawn characters who by this point seems to consider himself beyond the need for such trivial work. Cameron's got worlds to build; who cares if they're populated by clichés and poorly recycled tropes from his earlier work? Well, for a start, anyone wanting to engage in this world beyond the thrill ride aspect of the flying sequences and the novelty of seeing the realistic movement and expressions created for the motion-capture characters.
Avatar drew many comparisons not just to Dances with Wolves and Last of the Mohegans but to Lawrence of Arabia, The Last Samurai, Disney's Pocahontas, and many others for its tired "white saviour" narrative tropes. But at least in those movies, love them or hate them, the white saviour is written as someone extraordinary. Whereas Jake Sully is just some random dude with no skills, no training, and no unique perspective on the world; his thoughts and actions are no different than a hundred other guys who could have been disabled in combat and ended up in his place—how the hell does this beyond ordinary dude turn out to be better at being a Na'vi than any and all of the real Na'vi? He sure as hell ain't Lawrence of Pandoria, and even the least "woke" viewer should be turned off by how he rises to become just that.
Avatar is far worse than a bland, generic story. It's a bad story badly told. It gets two stars from me because it really was incredibly fun to see when ti came, provided you could see it under ideal circumstances in a huge IMAX 3D cinema. Watching it at home, or even on a normal movie screen, it's not worth anyone's time.
Sam Worthington musters up all the charisma of a blank sheet of paper to headline Cameron's $237 million gamble. Worthington's Jake Sully is a disabled former Marine who unexpectedly becomes the star of the Avatar Program, "driving" the powerful body of a creature grown by mixing the DNA of his deceased twin brother and that of the native Na'vi people from the planet Pandora. Earth is mining Pandora for the valuable mineral unobtanium (Yikes, my spellcheck actually has Cameron's unimaginative placeholder term in its dictionary!). The Na'vi people live in harmony with nature, unlike the big bad "Sky People" who are only interested in what they can extract from it. Sully starts out following orders from his evil superiors but quickly falls in love with the Na'vi way and a Na'vi girl (Zoe Saldana) who is the daughter of the leaders of a major Na'vi clan.
Avatar was a spectacle that swept the viewer up in a kind of flight simulator, and really gave you the feeling of immersing yourself in a fantasy world. But that thrill was short-lived and not something you'd want to return to unless you could see it again in IMAX 3D (and really, one watch was more than enough). Viewed outside that immersive specialized format, Avatar offers nothing except its terribly written retread of Last of the Mohegans and Dances with Wolves with fifth-generation carbon copy quality versions of Cameron's characters from Aliens. In fact, I spent much of the film wondering how much better it might have been if the 1986 cast of Aliens had played these roles, even with the exact same God-awful script. There's no doubt it would be a huge improvement.
Worthington is about as engaging as a brick. But what if a young Michael Biehn had played the role? Or '80s-era Sigourney Weaver? There's no question the film would improve 1000% with either of those actors. And how 'bout if Paul Reiser had played Giovanni Ribisi’s role of the evil, uncaring, bottom-line driven corporate administrator? That would be a major enhancement because Ribisi is so unforgivably terrible in this picture you just want to walk out whenever he’s on screen; unlike the all too believably smarmy corporate suit Reiser played to a tee in Aliens. So let’s see this through and cast Lance Henriksen in Sigourney Weaver’s part of the head scientist in charge of the Avatar Program, and swap Bill Paxton in for Joel David Moore as the goofy xenoanthropologist who Jake Sully upstages. We don’t really need to recast Michelle Rodriguez’s feisty combat pilot with Jenette Goldstein or Stephen Lang’s mad military man with Al Matthews, but we sure could!
Fantasizing about upgrading this movie with actors from an infinitely superior film by the same writer/director highlights the most infuriating aspect of this picture. It is written by someone capable of crafting an exceptional screenplay with memorable, well-drawn characters who by this point seems to consider himself beyond the need for such trivial work. Cameron's got worlds to build; who cares if they're populated by clichés and poorly recycled tropes from his earlier work? Well, for a start, anyone wanting to engage in this world beyond the thrill ride aspect of the flying sequences and the novelty of seeing the realistic movement and expressions created for the motion-capture characters.
Avatar drew many comparisons not just to Dances with Wolves and Last of the Mohegans but to Lawrence of Arabia, The Last Samurai, Disney's Pocahontas, and many others for its tired "white saviour" narrative tropes. But at least in those movies, love them or hate them, the white saviour is written as someone extraordinary. Whereas Jake Sully is just some random dude with no skills, no training, and no unique perspective on the world; his thoughts and actions are no different than a hundred other guys who could have been disabled in combat and ended up in his place—how the hell does this beyond ordinary dude turn out to be better at being a Na'vi than any and all of the real Na'vi? He sure as hell ain't Lawrence of Pandoria, and even the least "woke" viewer should be turned off by how he rises to become just that.
Avatar is far worse than a bland, generic story. It's a bad story badly told. It gets two stars from me because it really was incredibly fun to see when ti came, provided you could see it under ideal circumstances in a huge IMAX 3D cinema. Watching it at home, or even on a normal movie screen, it's not worth anyone's time.