"Film Review: "Avatar" Doesn't Live Up To The Hype

One of the effects Richard Donner experimented with in the test photography for 1978’s “Superman: The Movie” was a hologram of Superman flying off the screen and over the heads of the audience. It worked, except for the small detail that the man of steel was reduced to less than a foot in length during said flight. Fortunately, Donner was in the director’s chair, not James Cameron, who would have used the effect to trumpet his achievement as the greatest in film history.

It is thirty-one years later and the world has yet to witness Superman flying off the screen. It has, however, seen The Titanic rise again. Not just once, but many times, although Cameron’s resurrection was arguable the most impressive, at least by his own measure. It has been ten years since he waved his Oscars for that film in the face of the world, and he has now returned with something that, again by his measure, is the greatest thing since creamed corn.

Is “Avatar” the greatest technical achievement in motion picture history? Hardly. The 3D is typical of today’s state of the art, with an emphasis on depth of field rather than things popping out of the screen for shock value. The live action scenes look like they are taking place in a sno-globe, while the CGI stuff suffers from the unstable dimensions of the moving figures. I sat in two locations during the course of the picture. In the fifth row from the front, the image filled my field of vision, but the quality was poor, In the back row the image had no visceral impact but was quite lovely in appearance.

As for the other technical aspects, I will have to leave that up to the critics who are able to seriously argue such things as the comparative merits of “Transformers 2” versus “G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra.” I have never been impressed by claims of technical achievement in films that are otherwise mediocre. I tend to cherish and remember scenes from movies that are achieved through simple things such as composition and light, not laptop design lab.

The background artwork, although well-done, with some excellent landscapes and vistas, does not supplant the memory of the more naturalistic forests  of Walt Disney's "Bambi." The creatures are imaginative, but there are too few of them, For a planet this rich in vegetation, the variety of life forms would be much more diverse. Regardless, Cameron makes sure that our eyes are always well-nourished with a constant flow of unusual sights.

But  impressive images alone are not enough to keep a seat warm for three hours. For that, you need a good story, and the one Cameron tells is pretty crackerjack. The high-tech military of Earth is planning an invasion of the planet Pandora in order to steal its natural resources.   Jake, a paraplegic Marine, gathers intelligence for the invasion by the falling asleep and awaking on Pandora in the virtual form of one of its humanoid natives. Before long, he goes native, falls in love with a local girl, and leads the resistance movement against the invaders.

The most entertaining sequence pulls a reversal of the Tarzan-Jane roles, when Neytin, the native girl with whom Jake falls in love, teaches him that survival in the jungle is a matter of learning to trust the instinctive movements of the body rather than the reliance upon the sometimes inaccurate calculations of the mind. There are similarities here to both “Starship Troopers” and “Apocalypto,” though both of those films are superior to “Avatar,” the former for its wit and verve, the latter for the irrepressible energy of its idiotic chase mentality.    

“Avatar” is a film that exists primarily to be admired. As an object of cinematic beauty, it is too flawed to impress any but the most ardent suitors.  The acting is not so much bad as non-existent. Sigourney Weaver, playing Dr, Grace Augustine, who seems to be in charge of the Avatar Project, and exuding less humanity than the CGI creatures, comes across like a wax figure in a department store toy display. Stephen Lang, as the adversarial Colonel Miles Quarich. plays his scenes like a psychotic GI Joe doll. The only character with a chance of winning our hearts is Zoe Saldana’s Neytin, maybe because she is such a perfect cross between a human being and a cartoon.

Much as James Cameron would like to see himself as the one who ushers in the second century of Motion Picture magic with the show to end all shows, he is not that herald. But until such a herald arrives, the one who will truly change the nature of movies and moviegoing for 21st century audiences, there will be plenty of pictures like “Avatar” to carry on the existing traditions.

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