Avatar Movie Review (2009)

I was wrong.

There I said it. Are you happy?

      Having gleefully projected writer/director James Cameron's "Avatar" together of the "10 Fall Films That Are Really Gonna' Suck," i need to confess that despite the film's godawful trailer and over-reliance on new age techno-wizardry, "Avatar" doesn't , in fact, suck.

      "Avatar" does, however, represent everything that's wrong, boring, out of touch and unnecessarily excessive about the Hollywood studio machine. While "Avatar" very often dazzles, and indeed it does, "Avatar" is extremely nearly barren of that spark of humanity that might allow the film to soar. Instead, James Cameron is content to make magnificent imagery and awesomely beautiful worlds that feel uncomfortable and pointless without a way or purpose.

      Said to be the foremost expensive film ever made "Avatar" may be a depressing statement about Hollywood's desire to use its ever-advancing technology at the expense of films that entertain, challenge, inspire and shape the human experience. "Avatar" may be a much more successful photojournal than it's a movie , a set of impressive visuals best viewed in 3-D to urge the complete effect of Cameron's vision.

      The world that Cameron creates is utterly amazing with seemingly endless layers of color and textured landscapes within the zero-gravity land referred to as Pandora. Pandora offers a resource, unobtainium, that humans desire. The Na'vi, the blue-skinned peaceful people that inhabit the land, are wary of their human invaders and thus the humans utilize "Avatars" to penetrate the Na'vi community. The Avatars, genetically engineered to resemble the Na'vi but controlled by human users led by Jake Sully (Sam Worthington), a wheelchair-using Marine afforded the chance to measure vicariously as an Avatar. the matter becomes that as Jake infiltrates the Na'vi way of living, he involves respect their people, their ways of community and, of course, we even get a touch of a romance between Jake and Na'vi Neytiri (Zoe Saldana) tossed certain good measure.

      As Jake and Neytiri grow closer to at least one another, the humans, most notably a greedy business type (Giovanni Ribisi) and fellow marine (Stephen Lang), begin to ascertain dollar signs.

      At 150 minutes, "Avatar" warrants a phrase seldom utilized in movie reviews, "visually exhausting." "Avatar," if seen in 3-D, may be a visually exhausting potpourri of landscapes, layers of fauna and technical wizardry utilized, a minimum of in some cases, in much more creative ways than usually captured in 3-D ways. Most filmmakers are content to make moments of visual percept with 3-D, but Cameron seems bent literally immersing his audiences into a completely unique world. While these images are awesome, they're also, perhaps, a touch excessive and distracting given Cameron's complete lack of attention to character development and this tiny thing called dialogue.

      Not since the "Star Wars" films has dialogue this nonsensical, this insipid inhabited such an enormous budget, widely anticipated project. While there is no doubt that a lot of within the audience for "Avatar" are going to be so awestruck by Pandora that they simply won't even care about the film's structural issues and weak dialogue, regular moviegoers, true sci-fi fans and anyone actually listening will likely cringe on a daily basis because the bland Worthington spouts platitude after platitude.

      "Avatar" could are a masterpiece, though one can not help but think it might've taken a director, certainly a writer, aside from Cameron to form it happen. Often similar in tone to the present year's much lower-budget "Terra," "Avatar" is practically begging for a lighter touch than the narcissistic Cameron can possibly muster. Shot after shot in "Avatar" screams out "This is a crucial film" or "Wait. this is often a very important thing I'm saying here," instead of creating interesting characters and, even more importantly, trusting the audience to truly catch on without filmmaker manipulation. While Cameron has always struggled together with his self-importance, in "Avatar" this self-absorption is front and center, perhaps owing the maximum amount to having a rather weak lead who drowns under the load of the fabric .

      While "Avatar" is essentially barren of humanity, story, dialogue and character, there's little denying that in terms of its technical achievements it's nearly unrivaled this year including what's easily the simplest use of performance-capture technology yet. One can just feel Robert Zemeckis drooling at every cinematic frame. Yet, as detailed and wondrous as is that the technology it is also hard to not check out "Avatar" and desire it all adds up to a widescreen computer game with IMAX magnificence. Sure, it's beautiful to behold and knowledge but a mere few hours after the screening the pictures have already begun to fade, the planet of Pandora seems a foreign memory and, certainly, all traces of dialogue have escaped my consciousness.

In other words, for all its awesomeness, "Avatar" is totally and utterly forgettable.

© Written by Richard Propes

The Independent Critic