I got to see the 3-D version of Avatar, all two hours and 42 minutes of it. The graphics are the best ever but the story is nothing new. Here is my review in case you aren’t one of the millions of people who have stood in line to see this soon-to-be $1 billion+ international hint.
Avatar (Sam Worthington, Zoe Saldana, Sigourney Weaver, Stephen Lang, Giovanni Ribisi) – For a quarter-of-a-billion dollars, the viewer (not to mention the studio) ought to get an amazing movie. Avatar is a really, really fine film with THE best special effects ever. In that sense, it’s Avatariffic. The risks for uber-director James Cameron (Titanic, Alien, True Lies, The Abyss, The Terminator) were incredibly high. He passed the test easily but didn’t knock your socks off. The fact that Cameron invented a language for the Na’vi, the inhabitants of Pandora, is meaningless to me but it impresses the critics and is terribly relevant to any budding cultists just as Trekkers bask in Vulcanism.
With the prospect of Avatar, reaching $1 billion of box office internationally, it will rank among the “biggest” movies of all time while costing the most of all time. While the film soars in effects, it is merely mainstream in plot. At its heart, Avatar is a love story and a war movie. It most resembles Star Wars but with supersized graphics and characters that are mostly computerized. The humans, led by paraplegic Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) and Dr. Grace Augustine (Sigourney Weaver, Cameron’s star in Aliens), are compelling characters as real people trying to infiltrate the Na’vi and convince them to move in order to allow their unnamed “corporation” to mine “unobtainium” (really?), a precious natural resource desperately needed on Earth. Zoe Saldana (Star Trek’s Uhura) as Neytiri is exceptional. Of course, as Jake becomes one of the Na’vi, he is captivated by its people and its culture, deciding in the process to scuttle the plans of his corporation. Apparently, unobtainium isn’t worth causing a new diaspora in Jake’s estimation. But the “corporation” (or is it ’The Force”) is determined to get the unobtainium (the audience is never told why Earth needs it or what it does). That means we need a bad guy. Colonel Miles Quaritch (Stephen Lang) is the leader of the military whose job it is to decimate the sacred land and mine the unobtainium. The character and Lang’s portrayal of Quaritch (or is it Darth Vader) are one dimensional; he is all evil. The rest of the film is technological triumph and typical war movie of the all-powerful invader against the little people.
At 2 hours and 42 minutes, the film has to be too long but I was only bored early in the movie as Cameron felt compelled to painstakingly introduce us to the new world. Once the action began in the Second Act, the movie was exciting, compelling and engaging. I saw Avatar in 3-D, which is really the only way to see it. I was pleasantly surprised to see that Cameron did not overdo the 3-D; it truly enhanced the film. A certain Best Picture nominee, we’ll see if Cameron gets to claim he’s “king of the world” again.