Avatar is, first and foremost, thoroughly entertaining. The visuals are so all-encompassingly mindblowingly radically awesome that there isn’t much point in spending too much time discussing them, other than to say that they are worth the price of admission alone - infinitely more so than, say, Transformers 2, on account of that the art is of finer quality, and the rest of the movie is pretty darn good. I highly recommend seeing it in Digital 3D.
Despite it being hard to deny the “Dances With Wolves In Space” attack on the film, I found the story satisfying overall, and the characters better than those in the average tripping-out-on-themes-of-global-consciousness-and-then-blowing-some-shit-the-fuck-up romp. Sam Worthington is a solid teenage-minded grunt brought to reflection, and Sigourney Weaver does a great hard-love Biologist. Joel Moore and Giovanni Ribisi hand in amusing performances, although it’s hard to gauge how funny Ribisi’s role was intended to be.
The Colonel, played by Stephen Lang (who, according to the Avatar Wikipedia article, auditioned for a role in Aliens) is a great 80’s evil-military-dude throwback that I found very entertaining. This is a character Arnold could have faced off with at the end of Commando without any loss to the film, or one that would have been right at home spouting destructivist dogma in Starship Troopers.
Cameron’s fascination with hardware reaches new heights here, to great effect. We’re treated to many shots and sequences of Badass Military Shit Doing Stuff and Looking Awesome, for no other purpose than that they look really cool, and boy, do they look really cool. There are some large military vehicles that are so utterly convincing in their physical manifestation of Badassness, that they deserve special mention. Cameron is also as interested as ever in the procedures of hardware. At one point, characters preparing to take to the air in a piece of the aforementioned Badass Military SciFi Shit take the time to remove some sort of covers from what look like the vehicle’s intake air vents. However much of this there may be in the film, however, I never felt like it was detracting from the story.
Cameron’s skill at depicting chaotic scenes of violence is well put to use, although the intimate perspective we used to see it from, in movies like Aliens and Terminator, is sacrificed in the name of Scope, which isn’t too much of a surprise, but a shame nonetheless. I want to discuss some pros and cons of the final battle scene here, but it is impossible to do so without dropping spoilers.
To best explain the problems the film has, I direct your attention to the 154-minute, 1996 “Director’s Cut” of Aliens. The cut, purported to be Cameron’s intended vision of the film, included 17 minutes of additional footage that may as well have been an extra hour. The scenes, in general, revealed unnecessary information at awkward times, interfered with character, and downright killed the momentum of several sequences.
Avatar, running at 160 minutes, could probably lose about 30 of those minutes, but perhaps 17 would do the trick. We’re robbed of momentum quite a few times in the current cut, and there are a few things that happen one too many times. Perhaps in 2019 we can have a “Caterer’s Cut”, or some such.
Overall, I feel like I can recommend Avatar to pretty much anyone. The visceral violence of Cameron’s early movies has been toned down quite a bit at this point, and there is nothing more violent than what I can remember from Titanic.
-TH
