Avatar

Plot: It’s 2154, and Jake Sully is a paraplegic marine who’s asked by his superiors to take on an important assignment. It seems Jake’s deceased brother, a scientist hired by a multinational, has been working on using avatars to travel to a distant moon named Pandora, where the US (yes, it’s still around) hopes to retrieve minerals that will save the world from its energy crisis. Jake’s mission is to use his brother’s avatar to help the military keep meddling natives on Pandora at bay. But it seems everyone has forgotten the significance of the moon’s name, which is about to disrupt the military’s plan.

Review: It’s been 12 years since “Titanic”, but James Cameron obviously hasn’t just been sitting around doing his nails. His latest project is an extravaganza of technology that is to “big” budget movies what News Corp is to the Gammy Bird of Killick-Claw. $300 million was reportedly funneled into this movie, which resulted not only in new motion capture techniques being invented, but an entirely new type of camera as well.

This next generation technology is all there onscreen: the 3-D version, which thankfully stays far away from the usual cheap 3-D tricks like things being thrown at the audience, puts you deep into the movie: whipping around islands in the sky in helicopters, and leaping off cliffs on the back of a tame dragon. The colours of Pandora are rich and shimmering, with creatures ranging from funky to scary, and inventive landscaping adding to an amazing and fantastical mood.

If only a little more attention were paid to the story and the dialogue. It’s sad but true that most screenwriters in Hollywood get no respect, which is why so many otherwise fabulous movies are stuck with incredibly lame plots and characters (see “Stars Wars”, Episodes I through III – or better yet, don’t).
The story combines the cliché of the dumb white man who learns to appreciate love and peace through the noble savage with a very current and strong ecological message, and then storms off to the final act, where everybody gets out their guns and many things blow up very, very spectacularly.

So while James Cameron has made a visually stunning adventure and invented groundbreaking technology to do so, it still seems a bit of a waste. If he’d only paid just a little more attention (and only a fraction of his budget) to the screenplay, it could have been a real masterpiece.
(Katrin Gygax)