AVATAR

Opening Pandora's box

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Review

The planet Pandora is a lush forest paradise with an atmospher that will humans in mintues. It is also home to Unobtanium, which is the most valuable mineral ever discovered. As a result, a corporate operation is currently underway to strip mine the planet. In the way of that operation are the Navi, an indigenous race of humanoids who live in harmony with the planet. The nearest clan's home is right on top of the richest vein of Unobtanium ever seen.

Enter Jake Sully, a soldier who has lost the use of his legs. On Pandora, however, he won't need thsoe lets as he has mind transferred into an avatar, a half-human half-Navi hybrid body. His mission is to gain acceptance from the Navi and negotiate their relocation to a new site. Failing that, he is to provide intelligence on how and where they can be attacked and destroyed. The more he learns about the Navi and their way of life, however, the more he comes to questions the motives of the company, and his own.

We don't think James Cameron could make a bad movie if he tried and AVATAR doesn't make us feel any different about that. We want to get that out of the way before we start becuase we have so many reservations about AVATAR that we don't want to lose sight of the fact that the film is a thrill ride with startling, breathtaking images and bravura actionl sequences. You might fidget for a while in certain places, but it is unlikely you will be bored.

AVATAR is filmed mostly in CGI. The backgrounds of the alien world are all rendered inside a computer (or more likely a bank of computers) and those backgrounds are huge, impressive, often beautiful and occasionally outright gorgeous. With the technology at his command, the vision of James Cameron has nothing to constrain it ay longer, except perhaps for the budget. Then again, considering the rumours of what the film cost, perhaps even budget is no longer a constraint. Pandora is a world so detailed in its creation that it amazes, though the fact every single thing appears to be bioluminescent to some degree does make it look like an overblown 80s disco at times.

The Navi, however, are another matter. The detailed facial expressions captured from the actors for these computerised characters are mainly faultless and go a long way to creating believable charactes worth caring about, but in mid and long shots they don't convince for a second. They just don't move right at all and when they are in the shame shot as actual humans they jar horribly. By their very nautre, they constantly remind that this is a CGI creation (unlike THE LORD OF THE RINGS' Gollum) and make it more like you're watching a cartoon than a live action film, or perhaps more like you're watching someone else play a very expensive video game.

That is especially true when the war between human and Navi breaks out. The scale and scope of the destruction is huge and orgiastic, revelling mechanised devasation with a glee at odds with the supposed environmental message. How better to show the importance of the environment than by blowing it all up? It doesn't really play. Even the human's military leader is played, or overplayed, by Stephen Lang like the villain from a poor manga comic strip. And since all the creatures being killed are just CGI animations, there is less resonance than there really ought to be.

It's hard to judge peformances, since they are mainly animated, but Sam Worthington sounds distractingly like Mel Gibson throughout as our hero, all gruff and suprised at discovering his own supposed depths. He gets lumbered with a terrible, and completely unnecessary, voiceover and struggles with the leaden dialogue in the awful script, but he is far from the only person to suffer that fate. Sigourney Weaver can't do a whole lot better with a thinly-written irritable scientist role. Zoe Saldana's entire role is motion-captured and is the only Navi who comes even close to gaining any empathy from the audience. The person who comes out of this best is Michelle Rodriguez, but that's only because her character is recognisable from so many of her other performances.

The plot is simplistic and lifted from much better films such as A MAN CALLED HORSE, DANCES WITH WOLVES, THE EMERALD FOREST and the finale is just a more explosive version of the Ewok versus the empire battle from RETURN OF THE JEDI. Predictable doesn't even begin to cover it. However, plot is not what this film is about. AVATAR Top