Avatar review

Avatar Review

So the dust has finally settled on the PR hype juggernaut that is James Cameron’s Avatar. It’s made over $232m internationally over its opening weekend so it’s safe to say that Cameron’s folly looks likely to be a huge gamble that has paid off. Waterloo’s IMAX is sold out for Avatar until mid-January, so lucky for me that I booked tickets back in October as Avatar is a film of epic scope that deserves to be seen on a screen of epic proportions.

Cameron has been talking up Avatar as a game-changing picture for nearly ten years, but has any game been changed by the movie? I would say that it is a benchmark now for CGI effects for the foreseeable future, but whether it has indeed “changed the game” is hard to say. This is a film that lives and dies on its SFX, so luckily for the film, the SFX works completely. The photo-real motion capture animation effects are utterly convincing, so much so that after a while you give up looking for the joins and accept that Pandora is a real place, inhabited by real creatures. If, at any moment, the SFX had failed, the film would have been a stinker as the actual story; characters, plotting and dialogue are down right silly.

At over two and a half hours long, the film feel very baggy in the middle third and some judicious editing would have helped. The dialogue is pretty lame and there is never really a great deal of suspense or mystery as to where to the plot is heading. As far as the characters go, they’re all pretty 2D with clichéd archetypes throughout. Need a concerned environmentalist scientist, see Sigourney Weaver. Money-grabbing corporate guy? Giovanni Ribisi. Blood-thirsty meat-headed military leader? The guy with scars on his head. You get the idea. Poor old Sam Worthington struggles too. The guy seems likeable but he’s a bit of charisma-void in the middle of the film, granted he doesn’t have much to go on, he’s either grumpy ex-marine lumping around in a wheelchair, or a 10-foot blue cat-person tarzanning around the jungle. “Sam, more gravitas please.” Yeah right.

But the human characters are merely observers to Cameron’s grander spectacle. His pure force of vision has created a whole tangible world, utterly convincing in its conception. Whilst in the forests of Pandora it is impossible to tell what’s real and what isn’t. When night falls, the forest lights up with electro-luminescence and the magical vision of this neon wonderland is truly breathtaking. But, for me, this is where the film began to get silly. What bothered me the most was the new-age hippy-dippy gaia-theory nonsense at the heart of the middle section. The native-american allegory was fumbled, as was the anti-Bush Iraq war leaning. It all felt just a little bit clumsy.

Nonetheless, once the wonky middle part was over, Cameron’s action tendencies lurched into life as he proceeded to blow lots and lots of sh*t up. The final battle sequence is pretty f***ng awesome, even if it feels like bits borrowed from Return of The Jedi, but when pretty much every aspect of the film has been borrowed from somewhere anyway, it’s a churlish point to bring up.

The film is worth seeing for the mind-melting SFX on display, but whether this is a film that will stand the test of time is open to debate. Jurassic Park was hugely praised for its ground-breaking SFX work by ILM back in 1993, but the film is a rewatchable icon thanks to Spielberg’s direction and judicious story-telling. Avatar – storywise – is overlong, clichéd and messy whilst the SFX is mid-bogglingly impressive. So whether this will bear up to repeat viewings at home… I’m not so sure.

Regardless of my nit-picking, Avatar is the event movie of the decade and I would urge you to find the biggest and baddest screen to see it, and prepare to have your eyeballs assaulted in every dimension.

5/5 for SFX, 3/5 for everything else.

Review by Tom Butler – follow him on Twitter here.