Avatar - Review

So what better way to kick off my new digs than to review a flick that's been shoved down our throats more than the swine flu scare?

James Cameron used to make movies for men.  I mean, these flicks were dripping with so much testosterone that watching one could get you a 50-game suspension from MLB.  And he understood how to get chicks into the theater too.  Make the lead a strong, kick-ass chick.  The type of chick women would look up to and men would want to hang out with.

And then the bastard went and made a $200 million chick flick.

So, suffice to say, once you've made the biggest-grossing film in history, people are gonna be interested in what you're planning to do next.  And it only took him 12 years, but Cameron's back to grace the big screen with Avatar, which, in a nutshell, is a $300 million advertisement for Greenpeace.

See, a couple hundred years from now, humanity will be bored with raping our own planet, so we'll head out to space to find other virgin planets to violate.  Which is how we wind up on Pandora, which is a moon orbiting some big-ass planet that kinda looks like Jupiter, but blue.  There's some ore on the planet which is worth $20 million an ounce, so we all know that if there's profit to be made, there will soon show up unscrupulous persons to reap said profit.

But there's just a tiny glitch in the program.  There's this indigenous lifeform on the planet, the Na'vi, who live in harmony with the planet.  Harmony in this case being defined as living inside this big-ass tree which just happens to be sitting on the largest deposit of this mega-profitable ore on the planet.  So, naturally, the corporation pillaging the planet would really dig it if these Na'vi would please relocate from this tree to another big-ass tree so they can get to this deposit and see some nice fat bonus checks down the road.  And, naturally, the Na'vi are taking the position that they kinda dig the big-ass tree they have right now, so they'll just be staying put, thank you very much.

Now, the soulless corporation has a contingent of Marines on the planet, led the the mustache-twirling Colonel Quaritch (Stephen Lang), and enough high-tech weaponry to invade Paris.  But the head of operations on Pandora, played by Giovanni Ribisi, recognizes that just blowing the Na'vi back to their maker without trying to negotiate first would be a black eye PR-wise for the corporation.  I mean, he'll send the gunships out to the strains of "Rise of the Valkyries" if necessary, but he'd like to wait for that as a last resort.  So, instead, the corporation uses Avatars, hybrid Na'vi/humans, to try to win the hearts and minds of the Na'vi.  These Avatars are hella expensive, and are keyed to a particular person's DNA, so only the person whose DNA was used to make a particular Avatar can link with it.  That is, with one exception...

Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) is a Marine wounded in combat and paralyzed from the waist down.  His twin brother Tony was a scientist working on the Avatar program, but died before he could ship out to Pandora.  Now, anyone who's ever worked for a multi-national corporation knows that the last thing they want is to waste money, so they recruit Jake to go to Pandora in Tony's place.  Since they were twins, Jake can use Tony's Avatar with no issues.  So Jake is sent in to bond with the natives, an accomplishment that not even someone like Sigourney Weaver, who's studied the Na'vi for years, can pull off.  Of course, if he can't make friends with the Na'vi, that's fine with Colonel Quaritch, as long as he can get a look inside that big-ass tree and discern any structural weaknesses so they can fly in and blow that mother into a million toothpicks.

Of course, you get the obligatory scene with Jake's Avatar trying to survive in this crazy environment, only to be rescued by Neytiri (Zoe Saldaña), daughter of the Na'vi chieftain and queen.  She initially wanted to kill this "dreamwalker", as the Avatars are known to the Na'vi, but then a big-ass piece of pollen lands on her arrow as she's about to shoot him, so of course that means that the Earth Deity of Pandora has special things in plan for Jake.  He's taken in by the Omaticaya Clan and taught their ways, so that maybe he can explain to the Sky People (what the Na'vi call humans) about the Na'vi ways and...

Hey, wait a second.  I've seen this goddamn movie before!

Dammit!  It's fucking Dances With Wolves in space!

Look, most folk could care less about the story.  They just wanna know how this flick looks.  Well, let me tell you, this is one of the most visually stunning films you'll ever see.  I saw this film in 2-D and was just blown away, so I can only imagine what it would look like in 3-D IMAX.  Cameron's taken a quantum leap in CGI as big as the one we saw with Gollum in the Rings trilogy.  OF course, the CGI also lets Cameron get away with a ton of deforestation without, you know, actually harming the rain forest or something.

Because if there's one thing Cameron's good at, it's blowing shit up.  And man, does he blow up a ton of stuff.  The action set pieces in this movie are all first-rate, and the CGI mixes with the real seamlessly.  You really can't tell that everything's blue screened.  The technical aspects of this movie are awesome, and the last hour of the movie is pure adrenaline.

But to get there, we've gotta tread through over 90 minutes of the most one-note, broadly drawn characters we've seen in a long time.  I mean, I guess in order to give these people some personality would have required this movie to be over 3 hours long, and as it is you can already feel all 150+ minutes of this flick.  And the movie's theme is about as subtle as a chainsaw to the groin.  One of the first shots you see when the movie gets to Pandora is a giant strip mine.  Of course, we all know Hitler got his start as a strip miner, so you know from jump that this corporation is headed by Satan.

This is a decent enough popcorn flick.  There's enough here to entertain.  But the reason this movie misses greatness is because it tries so hard to attain greatness.  Cameron was trying to make a political statement when all his audience wanted to see was shit blow up.  If he'd saved the preaching for the pulpit, he would have had an incredible flick.  Instead, all he's got is a decent movie.