No wonder Avatar was such a big hit at the cinema - in this shallow age of ours it is the ultimate expression of style over content.If as much time and devotion to detail had been spent on the script as is put into the building of the world of Pandora, it could have been amazing.
As it is, Avatar - out on DVD in the UK tomorrow (Monday) - is a beautiful movie let down by a hackneyed script, full of unnecessarily drawn-out scenes for James Cameron gets to show off his swanky CGI.
There are lengthy portions of the film where there are no humans on screen, just CGI aliens and beasties in front of CGI scenery when you realise that this is a studio head's wet dream - the technology has finally arrived to eliminate pesky, temperamental actors from the whole film-making equation.
Sam Worthington is Jake Sully, a wheelchair-bound marine called back into service to replace his dead scientist twin brother on a trip to the alien world of Pandora. There he will be bonded with an 'avatar' - a vat grown clone of a native that was created with a combination of his brother's DNA and that of one of the locals, the giant, blue-skinned Na'vi.
It is supposed to be a scientific mission to learn the ways of the hostile Na'vi and hopefully negotiate a way for the humans to obtain the rare precious substance called Unobtanium (don't get me started on that particular red flag!), but he is approached by the stereotypically two-dimensional military commander Colonel Miles Quaritch (Stephen Lang) to act as a spy in the Na'vi camp, obtaining useful "intel" for when the military move in to forcefully evict the Na'vi from their sacred lands.
Unsurprisingly, it all goes a bit Dances With Wolves and Jake falls for Na'vi princess Neytiri (Zoe Saldana), comes to realise that the humans are the bad guys and helps the Na'vi drive the invaders from their lands.
And for some reason this takes two-and-a-half hours.
That said, Avatar is never boring, it is a visual treat with alien flora and fauna - but isn't exactly food for the brain, despite its best efforts to drive home a pro-Green, anti-corporation message. Both sides in the fight are such stereotypes - with the noble savages of the Na'vi on one side and heartless military machine of the Earth forces on the other - that it's not that easy to take the conflict seriously.
It's simply 'ewoks versus The Empire' writ large and with a quality of CGI that would make George Lucas weep.
The planet of Pandora is the true star of this film, with its cornucopia of native life forms, totally integrated ecosystem and freakish geology - the flying mountains are breathtaking, an amazing realisation of '70s prog rock album cover artwork.
But let's address the elephant in the room: Unobtanium, the McGuffin that set this tragic chain of events in motion, a substance so valuable that no one ever explains what it does (or why it's so valuable) and is promptly forgotten about after 20 minutes and never mentioned again.
The moment corporate stooge Parker Selfridge (Giovanni Ribisi) delivers his expositional infodump to Dr Grace Augustine (Sigourney 'Ripley' Weaver), the head of the Avatar program and Diane Fossey to the Na'vi, about the whole raison d'etre for the human presence on Pandora - which you would have thought she was probably well aware of - you know James Cameron isn't trying very hard on the scriptwriting side of things.
Once you accept this and just enjoy the idea of watching the best-looking video game you've ever seen, Avatar is a lot of fun - but purely on a superficial level.
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| While his friend tried to explain the "brilliance" of Avatar |
Once again Our Valued Customers has nailed a key issue of geekdom in a brilliantly well-observed single panel.
