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Review published by edd on 17th Dec 2009. 0 Comments.

Avatar

Cameron first wrote avatar, if Entertainment Weekly can be believed, thirteen years ago. At the time, it was completely impossible to film, so it sat on a shelf until recently. In the last eighteen months, people have been going crazy over this film, with phrases such as “going to change the face of cinema forever” being bandied about. It was finally released this month, and I went to the IMAX to see if it could live up to the hype.

Firstly, I should preface this with a disclaimer – this was the first movie I'd ever seen in IMAX 3D (although I have seen some things in 3D, these have not included a feature length film) so I may not be entirely the best judge of how different this movie is from previous 3D movies.

So on to the film. Anyone who's seen the trailers will know the basic plot. Think “Dances with Wolves” or Disney's “Pocahontas” (around the time of the first full trailer, some fans coined the term “Dances with Smurfs” to described the plot. This turned out to be a surprisingly apt description. We're introduced to our protagonist Jake Sully at the beginning as he comes out of cryostasis (the moon Pandora is four and a half light years away, and they did not appear to have FTL travel). His reasons for being there are quickly explained via a flashback: His twin brother who was picked for the mission was shot in a botched robbery a week before he was due to leave earth, and the company behind the Pandora expedition recruited Jake as the Avatars are genetically grown to match their handler – with Jakes brother gone, he was the only one who could control the (very expensive) avatar they had already grown.

He arrives on the base to initial hostility, the scientists don't want him because he's not a scientist, and several of the soldiers make disparaging comments due to his disability. He's not had the training in biology of Pandora or the Na'vi language the scientists have had, and he has had no practise in his avatar compared to the five hundred or so hours the other scientist who shipped out with him had had. Dr. Grace Augustine (Sigourney Weaver) is especially sceptical about his usefulness. He quickly wins them over with his natural skill in piloting the body however, and ships out with them to study the flora and meet the Na'vi. Whilst out there, he gets chased away from the others by a giant black predator, and ends up lost in the jungle.

After a while, (and a few brushes with death, and some “signs”) he ends up in the Na'vi village, where Neytiri, the Na'vi princess, is tasked with teaching him the ways of the Na'vi, so he may learn more about them. She is reluctant, but agrees. It is here that an interesting juxtaposition of the film emerges. Whenever Sully's avatar goes to sleep, he wakes back up in his human body. The film does a very good job of showing his conflicts between these states. With the humans, he is grilled for intel about the Na'vi village in case the military need to attack, information he he initially seems happy to provide, but with which he becomes increasingly disillusioned over time as he learns the Na'vi culture. The difference is not just mental - physically the fit athleticism of his avatar (increasing as he is trained by Neytiri) compared with his crippled human body, (which becomes less fit as the time goes by, due to him spending all his time either in the avatar link chamber, or asleep) is very noticeable.

He eventually completes his learning with Neytiri, which includes learning how to use a fibre-optic-esque link between himself and the animals of Pandora (If you go into this film expecting hard science, the biology of Pandora is going to send you mad ;)), and is inducted into the tribe. He and Neytiri mate, and all seems well. That is until the next morning, when the bulldozers arrive to tear up the land for the mineral the humans are after (Unobtainium >.<). When Sully reveals he knew they were coming and didn't tell anyone, the Na'vi get very pissed off. He attempts to convince the Na'vi to move, but they refuse, and effectively cast him out. The military arrives, and as you would expect, unleash explosive hell on the Na'vi home, completely obliterating it. After escaping, Scully joins the Na'vi in their hiding place (After a highly predictable stunt to make them see he is one of them) in the Navi's most sacred place on Pandora. He convinces them to go to war, and they start calling the other Na'vi tribes in. The military spot this movement, and plan their attack – to drop a huge tonnage of bombs on this area and obliterate it. Cue fight scene extrodinaire, with guns and helicoters up against bows and arrows and flying lizards. I'm sure you can guess the outcome ;).

This scene, whilst an awesome spectacle, did highlight one of the problems for me with the film. They take the black-and-white nature of the conflicting sides to an extreme. On the one hand, you have Colonel Miles Quaritch, the leader of the military on the planet, who takes great pleasure in his job of destroying the Na'vi, and on the other you've got the Na'vi – fierce but not aggressive and entirely blameless for their plight. I don't know if it would have spoiled the environmental/pacifist message they were pursuing, but it might have been nice to see some humanity amongst the humans running the operation. There is only one member of the military who shows any conscience about what happens, the rest all seem happy to blow sentient creatures up.

However clichéd plot and some simplistic characters aside, the movie is still brilliant. A lot of this is down to the look of it. The effects are almost universally amazing, keeping you engrossed, but it's only when you see Pandora at night that you truly appreciate it. Put simply – Pandora is beautiful in the dark. Almost all of the plants, and a lot of the creatures are luminescent, and the whole place is simply gorgeous. Whoever was responsible for the design should be given a medal, because it makes the planet have so much personality – you can see quite clearly what the Na'vi are trying to defend from the humans. I would go so far as to say this is the most beautiful film I have ever seen.

Having said that, I'm not sure I entirely agree with the commentators who are suggesting that this will change the face of film forever. Yes the effects are used to a larger extent than in most films, but it didn't feel revolutionary – bigger, and more detailed, but not fundamentally different. Maybe scaling it up required revolutions that I do not know of, but crucially it didn't feel like it. Cameron gains points in this 3D extravaganza for resisting the urge to throw in gimmicks of things flying at the screen to get a jump out of the audience – something that has seemed surprisingly necessary to creators of other 3D productions recently. The 3D is understated but enhances the beauty of the surroundings. Several time things float past the screen you feel you can reach out and touch, but they're then gone in an instant.

Any criticisms in the end are nitpicks – the story is clichéd but not overly simplistic, some of the characters are overly two-dimensional, but really there's precious little to complain about. It's well worth viewing, and I will almost certainly see it again. Whether it will lose some of it's impact on DVD/Blu-ray remains to be seen, but I'll probably end up buying it anyway! It appears my favourite film of the year has waited until the last month to appear, but it has at last arrived!

9/10

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