Avatar

After all the hype, the speculation, conjecture, excitement, arguments, and exasperation, James Cameron's Avatar has finally invaded theatres on both sides of the Atlantic. Kimberly Gadette, Paul Martin, and Emma Rowley each give their verdict on 2009's biggest film.

More often than not, says Kimberly Gadette, an overly-hyped movie is bound to disappoint. Add to that filmmaker James Cameron's own swagger, as if he were daring you to like his films as much as he does. And yet, the sentimentalism of Titanic aside, any artist who could follow up the highly acclaimed Terminator with the brilliant encore of Terminator 2 can't be blithely dismissed. But come on ... in all honestly, could Avatar live up to the hype?

We go to the movies for many reasons: laughter, romance, suspense, intrigue, maybe a reinforcement of one's politics. But above all, it is the promise of escape that lures us to the screen. We'll readily volunteer for a new view, no matter the year, geography or genre. We buy a ticket not so much for admission but for a roundtrip journey. One please, and make it snappy.

Avatar is one trip that does not disappoint.

Flying along with protagonist Jake (Sam Worthington), we are transported 4.4 light years away to the Alpha Centaurian moon of Pandora (per Cameron, "the Garden of Eden with teeth and claws"). It's a magnificent rainforest of wonder, the rays of light playing peek-a-boo through the towering trees to the fantastical forest floor below. With all outlandish manner of flora and fauna bathed in shades of vibrant blues, greens and fuchsias, this is a world of three-dimensional depth and breadth of detail unlike anything we've ever seen before.

And wait till you meet the creatures, flying, gnashing, stomping, growling and flitting, of all shapes, sizes, colours and toothy wonders. But like the monstrous Thanator, a panther-like wildebeest who comes close to snacking on Jake for a mid-morning treat, I'm getting ahead of myself.

Though Jake, an ex-Marine, lost the use of his legs in battle, the military has a new job for him. Since he is a genetic match with his recently deceased twin brother – a scientist who'd been working on creating an avatar, a hybrid of the human mind and a Pandoran native (the Na'vi) – he's the only person who could mentally "drive" his brother's avatar. He soon becomes caught in the crossfire between the scientists who hope to study and befriend the Na'vi, and a private security force that's come to Pandora in order to mine its precious resources. If the Na'vi happen to get in the way of their goal, the military will simply shoot them down.

Cameron wastes no time in giving us a sharp sense of his protagonist. Through action rather than words, in early scenes we note that Jake's a loyal Marine; that he instinctively makes his own rules; that he refuses to wallow in his handicap, playing along to myriad insults about both his lack of legs and lack of brains; and that, when his back is up against a wall, he's a dogged survivor. Cameron uses the clever device of the "video log," in which Jake takes his thoughts and feelings straight to camera, allowing us further peeks into his character.

While the plot, action and pacing is superb, there is one glaring misstep regarding the protagonist. As the story progresses, Jake gets caught up in the sweep of the action, focusing on rescuing his Na'vi friends – to the point of turning his back on his own kind. With or without legs, this man takes a decided stand. But what's missing is watching him make the choice. For a gung-ho Marine to set out on another path, to reject the hawkish actions of the military in favour of saving the "savages" and their homeland, represents a crucial moment. Unfortunately, we never see it.

(When the army, represented by Stephen Lang's Colonel, refers to the Na'vi as "hostiles" because they dare to defend their homeland against the Colonel's troops, we get a sudden chill. Hitting a bit too close to our own homeland, as it were.)

Conversely, the corrupt industrialist company man (Giovanni Ribisi) suddenly, inexplicably gets a pang of conscience. Perhaps the bulk of his decision is lying on some editing room floor? Without an organic transition, it seems false.

But these are minor complaints for such an ambitious project. By definitively blending animation and live action, Cameron has broken the CG barrier, presenting us with a motion picture that easily transitions from the human world to the fantastical and back. And with his latest technology, the previous "dead eye" problem in performance capture has been eradicated ... hopefully to haunt us no longer.

Avatar takes on multiple ideas, melding them into a marvellous epic: true love, maternal/earthly love, environmental awareness, spiritualism, self-respect, the evils of war waged merely for financial gain. We also get to witness such small, intimate joys as when a 10-foot blue man, simultaneously a paraplegic, wiggles his toes in the warm earth. Toes that he hadn't been able to move for years.

Just got back from Pandora. What a trip!

Rating on a scale of 5 blue genes: 4.5

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How strange and unfamiliar an experience it has become to watch a mega-budget blockbuster that is a completely original property, says Paul Martin. Not based on a graphic novel, a child's toy, a board game, a theme park ride, video game, old TV show, a book about boy wizards or abstinent teen vampires. Instead plucked from the filmmaker's own imagination, and asked to fly or fall on its own merits, rather than relying on dumbly reflexive nostalgia to shore up its box office take. Which is not to suggest that James Cameron's first directorial outing for ten years, the hyped, hyped and hyped some more Avatar, is bereft of filmic forebears. Though the mondo expensive technology which has created the alien world of Pandora, its blue-skinned, lank-limbed Na'vi inhabitants, and the eponymous avatars may be the latest word in cutting edge, Cameron's story is really rather straightforward action fare. Indeed, its getting-down-with-the-noble-savages shtick means it actually plays a bit like a futuristic version of Ed Zwick's The Last Samurai, although there are also occasional echoes of Cameron's own Aliens, albeit with the marines cast as the bloodthirsty villains and the extraterrestrials as the menaced party.

The uncomplicated narrative approach adopted by Cameron generally works quite well. There is none of the bitty, enthusiasm-sapping 'and then this happens, and then this happens, and then this happens' plotting of a Revenge of the Fallen or Spider-Man 3 here; the Titanic writer-director instead laying out his basic premise from the get-go, and – a bit like his famous creation, the Terminator – subsequently refusing to deviate from his expressed objectives. But while the pacing is mostly effective, striking a decent balance between exposition and action, much of the actual dialogue is just dreadful, particularly in the case of the titter-inducing soggy mysticism espoused by the Na'vi tribe.

Even worse than those pellets of verbal dung are the blaring great allusions to real-life that Cameron inserts with all the subtlety of a hippopotamus crashing a toddler's paddling pool party. The repeated nods to the Iraq War, all needlessly couched in the media language associated with that conflict, are so patronisingly signposted that you keep expecting the actors to turn round, clamber out of the 3D screen, and slap you round the face while shouting “It's just like the Iraq invasion, dummy!” And for Avatar to paint corporate profiteering (embodied here by Giovanni Ribisi playing Paul Reiser from Aliens) as the root of all evils is a hypocrisy that sticks in the throat like a porcupine burrito, coming as it does from a Hollywood production bankrolled to mind-boggling monetary heights by a monolithic media conglomerate and which is currently eye of a publicity storm of sufficient heat and noise to flatten the Giza necropolis.

However there is no escaping the fact that, viewed in 3D and preferably on the largest screen you can wrap your peepers around, Avatar looks pretty awesome. So smoothly does the copious CGI pass by, and so pleasing is it to the eye, that it would be perversely easy to underestimate the technical wizardry and sheer effort that has must have gone into creating the world of Pandora and investing believable life into the Na'vi. But while Avatar may presently make for recommended viewing on account of its technical achievements, the unremarkable substance lurking under all those dazzling visual accoutrements means that anyone stumbling across it on TV in a few years time is likely to be genuinely bewildered as to what all the hullabaloo was about. For, much like Spielberg's Jurassic Park a decade-and-a-half before it, Cameron's off-earth extravaganza seems likely to go down as a special effects trailblazer rather than a classic film.

Rating on a scale of 5 blue movies: 3

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If James Cameron’s highest-profile films have taught us anything, says Emma Rowley, it is that we cannot trust technology. That our greedy thirst for tech, whether of the bioengineered (Weyland-Yutani’s desire to exploit alien life in Aliens), nautical (Titanic), or robotic variety (Terminator, Terminator 2: Judgement Day), will get us into trouble. His oeuvre also insists, however, that the natural world – whether in the shape of an alien life form, a protective mother or an iceberg – will assert itself in the end. These are more or less the plot and themes of Avatar, which is pretty bizarre when you consider that Cameron has marshalled the newest and most expensive of technologies to bring us this message. But who ever expected pop culture to make sense?

Thanks to a stunning display of editorial organisation, the London-based IndieMovies team found themselves attending a 3.40 am screening of Avatar at the Waterloo IMAX. Our reckoning was that Avatar – like fireworks, circuses and Lady Gaga’s millinery – might really only work on a pretty sizeable scale, so we wanted to see it on the largest screen the UK has to offer (60 ft). The experience was probably characteristic of future-times moviegoing: it’s a tech-led event movie where venue and time are key. Just as Demolition Man predicted that, in the end, all restaurants would become Taco Bell, so there is the chance that in the future, all movies will be Avatar. Thanks to this film, cinemas around the world have implemented or updated 3D technology, put on round-the-clock screenings, and created popcorn mountains the likes of which the planet has never seen.

But for once, champion though I am of all things indie, this does not strike me as a wholly bad thing. Cameron has created a paradigm that other filmmakers can exploit. In a year that’s seen new script sales drop, and executives green-light only the safest and most derivative film projects, this monster movie could swallow whole all the X-Transforminators that have outstayed their welcome. In the wake of The Dark Knight, tentpole movies tried to get a slice of that moneymaking grittiness but only succeeded in succumbing to a kind of slouching cynicism. In contrast, Avatar exudes a wide-eyed innocence that is genuinely charming and all of its own.

Watching the film, especially from the steep tiers of the IMAX, and even at 4am, was a completely immersive experience from its wonderful, space-set opening moments on. 3D (as we also saw from Pixar’s Up) has come of age and shed the gimmickry that characterised its use last time around. There are no projectiles flying at your face, no branches designed to make you automatically duck – instead, it is used more subtly and successfully, to give the film depth and scope. And, alongside the incredible motion capture and CG effects, it works to phenomenal efffect. Oh yes, indeed.

But while Avatar undoubtedly succeeds as an experience, it often fails as a movie. If you removed the alien backdrop and effects and situated the film in say, the Amazonian rainforest, it would be a laughably simplistic tale, hampered by unintentionally comic dialogue and two-dimensional good and evil characters. While many people have suggested that the tone/narrative/dialogue had to be kept simple to accommodate the visual scope of the film, I disagree. If these elements were better, the overall effect could have been sublime, rather than just impressive. Nonetheless, the Cameron formula of likeable actors getting away with saying frankly rather ridiculous things holds true (as it usually does for Lucas) and Worthington, Saldana, Weaver and Ribisi make a success of their one-note characters.

Nonetheless, the key problem for me was the signalling of plot points far in advance. If you can’t extrapolate the entire story of a Cameron movie from its first ten minutes, you’ve probably never been in a cinema before. But Avatar reached a new low in terms of the fact that, once the narrative is in motion, there is really only one question to trouble the engaged viewer. Cameron plants a giant great plot resolution on the surface of Pandora which might as well be marked: ‘may come in handy for denouement’. In doing so, he avoids having to make a difficult call but also robs the film’s conclusion of any dramatic tension – a failing indeed after two hours and forty minutes invested in this story.

Still, this kind of quibbling seems churlish and somewhat Scrooge-y. Yes, it’s riddled with flaws but in a non-vintage year, Avatar is undoubtedly the best of the 2009 blockbusters.

Rating on a scale of 5 Blue Man Groups: 4

Release date: Out now
Directed by: James Cameron
Screenplay by: James Cameron
Starring: Sam Worthington, Zoë Saldana, Sigourney Weaver, Stephen Lang
Rating: US = PG-13, UK = 12A
Running time: 161 minutes

Note: Angela Burton had to miss the Avatar screening, thanks to a cold.