By now, everyone and their mum has heard about James Cameron’s film, Avatar.  It’s the highest grossing movie of all time, beating out Cameron’s last movie, Titanic.  Is Avatar good?  Yes.  Is it great?  That’s debatable.  Did I like it?  Yes.  Did I think I would?  Not really.

Jake Sully is a paraplegic ex-Marine who is asked to take his late twin brother’s place on the planet Pandora to negotiate with the natives, the Na’vi.  Since he has the same genome as his dead brother, Jake will be able to use his Na’vi avatar.  So Jake gets his legs back, and will be able to get into the trenches one again.

The human military force on Pandora are hired guns working security for the mining corporation.  The planet is rich in the jokingly named unobtanium; Earth is sadly all used up when it comes to resources (pay attention, this one of many messages Cameron does his best to hammer home).  Jake, or Avatar Jake, becomes accepted into the Na’vi society, training as one of them to become a member of the tribe.  Real Jake, the wheelchair bound one, makes a deal with the nutso security chief to gather enough intel on the Na’vi to make a successful armed strike against them.

It becomes complicated, though, as these things so often do.  Jake actually feels more at home with the Na’vi, and he falls in love with the Na’vi leader’s daughter, Neytiri.  He learns their ways, and eventually does become accepted by the natives.  But the humans have a job to do, and no tree hugging, talk-to-nature indigenious peoples are going to stop the bulldozers.


At almost three hours long, Avatar doesn’t feel like a long winded epic movie; to Cameron’s credit, the movie takes off running from the start and doesn’t stop- it doesn’t get boring.  The movie is always interesting, or at least always interesting to look at.  The environments are simply wonderful, brilliant, and beautiful, and more fully realized than the people occupying them.  The computer generated characters seem almost real, but still have a slight “otherness” that CGI characters can’t seem to shake, no matter how good the technology.

Cameron seems to throw everything in except the kitchen sink, and that’s probably because the kitchen sink would hurt the environment somehow.  The message of Avatar is protect the environment, preserve Nature, yadda yadda yadda, but it keeps from getting too preachy due to some wonderful action scenes, and the clunky dialogue helps too.  The whole environmental message and fears of the Man nearly drown in the standardized plot.  The technology may be new and groundbreaking, but the story is far from it.

But originality is dead, storywise anyway.  What is here in Avatar is worth seeing, and Cameron’s best work since Aliens and Terminator 2.

4 out of 5
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