Snooze and Awe: Why James Cameron’s “Avatar” sucked.

SPOILER ALERT! If you have completely lost your mind and are still intending to see the new James Cameron film Avatar you probably shouldn’t read this because I’m about to piss all over it. If you don’t have any interest in seeing it, please read and enjoy me ripping it to shreds. 🙂

DISCLAIMER: As anyone who knows me will remember, I have no problem whatsoever in trashing a movie adored by critics and other viewers. Just because they liked it doesn’t mean I have to. We all remember The Dark Knight fiasco.

Should I start with a positive about this bloated misdirected film? The visuals, when not succumbing to an as-yet unrefined 3D technology, were impressive. I’m not going to go into the various sequences as I can’t describe them properly. I will say that big tree falling down was pretty awesome. That’s about it.

Once again, here we have a movie that had all the makings of a blockbuster that instead sacrificed any kind of coherent interesting or well-written story for big spectacle, expecting its audience to drink its Kool-Aid without stopping to think or care about what’s being flashed in front of them. Ironic that the movie was shown, at a whopping $14 per ticket, in 3D since all of the characters were, well, let’s say it’s a stretch to say that the characters were even one-dimensional.

The movie begins with our male protagonist Jake Sully burying his brother. He’s about to take his smarter brother’s place as an Avatar on the foreign planet of Pandora. The premise is that us bad, evil Americans came to this unpolluted yet populated planet to extract some kind of valuable mineral to sell back home. These specialists, like our guy Jake, inhabit factory made carbon copies of the local natives to infiltrate and pose an illusion of diplomacy as the evil suits rape the planet. It’s your basic alien-movie premise in reverse. Of course, Jake is one of only 5 people in this operation that have any sense of morality and quickly falls for the natives way of life, prompting an all-out war between the Na’vi and the stereotypical military general who gets off by shooting things and talks like Keifer Sutherland in Monsters vs. Aliens. To fill out this over-worn story, you have all of the clichés: Jake starts as a spy for the military then has a change of heart. The girl he falls in love with feels betrayed and she pushes him away just to be reunited with him 5 minutes later, there’s a warm-hearted scientist that dies, a geeky assistant that doesn’t and absolutely no black people allowed. The only minority in the whole movie, Lost’s Michelle Rodriguez gets to die heroically but without having done much of anything.

All of this even wouldn’t have so bad had the script not be cringe worthy. Filled with pat lines and tired jokes, the script was a joke in itself. The dialogue was horrid, worse than Twilight. There wasn’t enough humor, no wit or wisdom and nothing that we hadn’t heard before. The first 30 minutes of the film was nothing but exposition without actually managing to tell you why you should care about these blue creatures or where the technology had come from or anything that could anchor your emotions to the plot.

And that was the major misstep of the movie. When you have visuals that border on the magnificent, that only matters if you care about the creatures living in it. Would that stupid ship in Titanic have been as impressive when it went down if Kate and Leo hadn’t been on it? No. An epic movie is made of character relationships, not of computer technology, however awe-inspiring it might be. What could have saved the abysmal script, besides a person 10 years ago giving a second opinion to James Cameron’s pompous story, would have been good or charismatic acting. Think that had it?

Sigourney Weaver as the head scientist (if you will) was okay. She tried with the material she had but the hard-ass she started out as turned into a whimpering girl by the time she died. The real problem was the lead who played Jake Sully. His name is Sam Worthington and you never need to remember that name. It was very confusing. He was supposed to be a former U.S. marine but his voice kept slipping into an Australian accent for entire scenes. His voice did not have enough expression when he was the blue Avatar to make that character worth watching (which was, like, kinda the focal point of the whole thing). He wasn’t even cute. The only acting I thought was decent was Zoe Saldana (Star Trek) who played the lead Na’vi, Neytiri. They used motion capture to do the blue people so that the acting would come through the digital characters and hers was the best (though how much of that was added by CG you can’t know).

“But your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.”

That quote is not from Avatar but from a big, epic movie that actually succeeded in melding emotional attachments to big spectacle. But it also speaks to the overlying issue with Avatar. It seemed that James Cameron and his team of animators and CGI wizards got so excited with created a “new” way of filmmaking – which, btw, did not remotely look real but more like a deluxe video game – that they didn’t stop to think about what they were presenting. It’s a big shiny package with a lump of coal inside.

Bottom line, this movie could have rocked and I think that’s why I have such a strong reaction to it. Had more thought been put into a meaningful, poignant story and not just creating this admittedly beautiful imaginary world, this could have been the movie of the season and as big as some of Cameron’s other work. As it is, it just left me disgruntled and wanting to see something else.