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Visual:		10.0
Audio:		6.0
Acting:		7.0
Writing:		4.0
Score:		7.0

Director(s):	James Cameron
Writer(s):	James Cameron
Starring:	CCH Pounder • Giovanni Ribisi • Joel Moore • Laz Alonso • Michelle Rodriguez • Sam Worthington • Sigourney Weaver • Stephen Lang • Zoë Saldana • Wes Studi
Genre:	Action • Adventure • Sci-Fi
Website:	http://www.avatarmovie.com/
Release Date:	December 18, 2009
Rated:

In 1984, James Cameron gave birth to The Terminator, by all accounts a rudimentary action movie that is also responsible for the widespread popularization of the technopocalypse. What is Skynet if not the fearful prophecy that one day technology would be so advanced that humans would struggle to catch up?

But Cameron is not a technophobe himself. Far from it. He's always pushing to improve it, and in Avatar, a dream project 15 years in the making, he's pushed it to a point where he himself struggles to catch up.

While the tools are always adapting, story is an element of filmmaking that has more or less stayed the same. There's part of it that's world-building, requiring a great deal of creativity, and another part that's just telling interesting conflicts, requiring a great deal of judgment.

With the former, Cameron succeeds tremendously. The alien planet of Pandora trumps every sci-fi environment of the past decade in its sense of completion. There's a working flora, fauna, language, and even religion and tradition that compliment one another; so believable in their execution that it must've been tempting to just scrap the movie's plot and make a Baraka-style documentary about Pandora instead, especially given Cameron's affinity with nature exploration.

Some of the most joyous moments in the film are ones of discovery. It's disappointing that the battle scene (note the lack of pluralization) contains nothing quite as exhilarating as strange plants glowing in the night. The awe is not just in how astoundingly close to photorealistic the computer-generated images are, but also in how beautifully they are arranged on screen.

Avatar is stubbornly science-fiction. The mechanics is that of fantasy: primitive elven humanoids, ancestors merging with trees, flying dragons, fantastical wood creatures, etc. Even the conflict—industrialism vs trees—is straight out of The Lord of the Rings, matching Tolkien's environmentalist message. Pandora's native Na'vi people are obviously modeled after Native Americans as well as other familiar aboriginal tribes, and the sci-fi comes in how Cameron insists on explaining their mysticism through biological science. The connection with animals is made literal and the spirits of ancestors are just data stored in tree-like memory banks.

It's with storytelling that the movie stumbles, relying on an incredibly simplistic and predictable direction that many (including South Park) rightfully compared to Dances with Wolves. There's not going to be any character or plot development that will surprise anyone. Every character just seems to be going through the motions in their rigid roles, as if they have a set of moments to hit in order for Cameron to make a thematic point. And plenty of themes he doth waved, from the aforementioned environmentalist message to a really late-in-the-game (and not very convincing) Iraq War commentary.

Most interesting, though, is the one spelled out in the title. The idea of body replacement is prevalent in Avatar. Sam Worthington's Jake Sully is wheelchair-bound, given a second chance at walking only by using an Avatar, a biological remote-controlled husk that looks like the Na'vi. Meanwhile, the military use movement-controlled mechas to even the playing field when fighting against Na'vi warriors. Then there's the whole concept of the Na'vi joining their consciousness with the animals they ride on through an organic plug. They all seem to overcome a disability or inability by using surrogates, and Cameron seems to be at the lead of this "avatar" swing. It's reflected in how he made the film: using motion-capture technology to give his actors new physical appearances. When many films tout the "be yourself" mentality, Cameron is all about the "be all you can be," even if it means altering what nature gave you.

Speaking of the tech—if there's anything surprising, it's how good the acting is, especially Zoe Saldana as the Na'vi "princess" Neytiri, even buried under CG. It's a crime that it'll be years before the consensus will finally recognize mo-cap as legitimate screen acting.

Cameron was never much of a wordsmith, but in the past, his screenplays have always been serviceable, full of poetic narration and fun zingers. Here it's mostly exposition and dull; his attempt at some bells and whistles in the spoken words results in hilariously verbose voiceover by Jake ("My brother's journey was ended by a man with a gun for some paper in his wallet..."). This from a guy whose third act rah-rah speech is so generic that it simply boils down to "So I was a spy, but now I'm in love and I totally dig you guys. Let's get the other tribes and kick the ass of those jerks who want our (your) land!"

Come to think of it, that's Avatar in a nutshell.