Avatar, for a while, looked to be the kind of insanely ambitious film that would put the venerated James Cameron under for good.
The good news is, despite some script problems, it’s such a visually amazing ride that it actually makes good on Cameron’s promise to be the Citizen Kane of 3D films.
The story follows Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) as he takes over for his deceased twin brother in piloting a 10 foot tall alien avatar Na’vi on planet Pandora. What follows after that is essentially what you would expect, a Dances With Wolves with aliens that features Jake turning on his human employers and making sweet, sweet creepy love to Na’vi princess Neytiri (Zoe Saldana).
Avatar is the Citizen Kane of 3D films in the sense that it doesn’t use it as a gimmick. Instead it works together with the mesmerizing special effects to absolutely draw you into the world of Pandora.
Holographic displays jump through the screen, vegetation zooms past the audiences head’s and multilayered sets take on true depth. It enhances every frame in a way that is, to put simply, amazing.
It also helps that the CGI is equally well done. The Na’vi look and act real, with never one texture or animation giving away that you are watching something that isn’t a living creature.
The performances of Worthington and Saldana have a large hand in achieving this, with their facial expressions mapped to their blue characters. While this isn’t a new practice, Avatar is definitely the first movie to get it right, as it feels truly organic and never falls victim to the glassed eye zombie syndrome you see in The Polar Express or Beowulf.
The biggest wrench in the experience is the story and dialogue, which gives us the kind of cheesy lines and plot holes that would bog the experience down in lesser movies.
Also, the reason the big bad military corporation is on Pandora? To harvest a mineral called “unatainium.”
Yes. Seriously. This is a movie with such a ludicrously large budget that nobody could of bothered to pay a decent writer to come up with something better than “unatainium.”
But before you can really reflect on that sample of brain nuking stupidity, you’re flying through the trees again in one of the best movies of the year.
It has a few problems, but Avatar does so many things right you don’t care.
