Avatar is Titanic

The long awaited (12 years since Titanic) and hugely expensive ($400 million) film by James Cameron has finally arrived.  During the shock and awe marketing campaign before the opening of Avatar, I was struck by how negative the geek community was about this movie. The general consensus was that Avatar was going to suck. I'm not sure why this was, although Titanic did leave a bad taste in a lot of people's mouths. But this is James Cameron, director of geek classics like Aliens and Terminator. So I wanted to give him the benefit of the doubt. I was thinking that Cameron had lost his nerve after Titanic and couldn't come up with something to top it. Well, Avatar doesn't suck. In fact, it's pretty good. And technologically, Avatar is a huge leap beyond previous motion-capture "animation" films like Polar Express and Beowulf. Cameron seems to have overcome the main problem of these movies, which is that the characters look dead. In Avatar, the characters' faces are very expressive.

Avatar tells the story of a soldier (Sam Worthington), who has been wounded and lost the use of his legs. He jumps at the chance of a new life by shipping out to the planet Pandora where an extremely rare mineral is found. The planned strip mining of this beautiful planet has been slowed down by the presence of an indigenous people, the Na'vi. The head of the mine (Giovanni Ribisi) and an army colonel (Stephen Lang) have been unable to convince or force the Na'vi to move. A scientist (Sigourney Weaver) has cloned Na'vi bodies that humans can "inhabit" in a manner very similar to hacking into The Matrix. Weaver has tried using this technique to befriend the Na'vi but without success. Worthington is able to join up with the Na'vi after being separated from his fellow pseudo-Na'vi, and immediately begins to bond with them, particularly with the beautiful Neytiri (Zoe Saldana). You can guess the rest. The army moves in to wipe out the Na'vi, and Worthington switches sides to help them to defend their land and their lives. In addition to Weaver, a couple of other humans switch sides to help out, a geeky scientist (Joel Moore) and a hotshot helicopter pilot (Michelle Rodriguez).

Storywise, Avatar employs the timeworn plot of a hero who, for whatever reason, feels like an outsider in his own world and yearns for somewhere or something different. Then his wish is answered, and he (I use "he" because it is almost always a "he" in these movies)  is plunged into another world where he actually is an outsider. Over time he becomes one of them and when the time comes, he defends them against his old world. This plot has been used innumerable times in films like Lawrence of Arabia, A Man Called Horse, Dances With Wolves, Medicine Man, and The Emerald Forest. Avatar strongly resembles Dances With Wolves, since the Na'vi, other than being blue, are quite like the Indian tribe that take in Kevin Costner. But there are also more than a few hints of Medicine Man and The Emerald Forest as we see huge bulldozers destroying an Amazon-like rainforest on Pandora.

Avatar is also a SciFi movie, of course, and in the first scene where we see Sigourney Weaver, she is waking up from hypersleep with a bunch of soldiers around, reminding one starkly of Aliens. It is unfortunate that Weaver never picks up a gun  in Avatar because Ripley really rocks. There are lots of other nods to SciFi classics. The Na'vi live in trees and look a lot like the elves in LOTR, and they talk a lot about, "an energy field created by all living things. It surrounds us and penetrates us. It binds the galaxy together." Wait, that's a quote from Star Wars, but you get the idea. I don't know who first came up with the idea (Cameron has been working on his script since 1994) but Avatar and Eragon have almost identical concepts of dragon riders who are bonded to their steeds. Avatar is bit cooler since the riders actually plug themselves into the dragons in a sort of Matrix within a Matrix. Maybe I'm being unfair with all these comparisons but Avatar does feel very derivative. They even use "Unobtainium" as the name of the mineral that they are mining. This was also the name of the very dense metal used in The Core. And at some points in the movie, I almost expected Worthington to start miming a buffalo while saying, "tatonka."

The casting of Avatar is quite nice. It's really great to see Sigourney Weaver in a fairly meaty role even though it's a supporting one. And she looks great as a Na'vi. Sam Worthington has gone from total obscurity to being hot, hot, hot in 2009. He came out of nowhere earlier this year to star in Terminator Salvation along with Christian Bale. I'd forgotten but I had seen Worthington several years ago in Somersault, the Australian movie that launched Abie Cornish's career. I like him. Another person who has gone from nothing to something this year is Zoe Saldana who starred as Uhura in the new Star Trek and as Neytiri in Avatar. Unlike the other leads, she appears only as a Na'vi. I like her too. Stephen Lang, who is the  singleminded Colonel, played exactly same part in Men Who Stare at Goats. Strangely, he doesn't change anything in how he plays the role and that movie was a straight comedy. Giovanni Ribisi is pretty much miscast and wasted as the mine director on Pandora. It was very nice to see Michelle Rodriguez. I have missed her since her character, Ana Lucia, was killed on Lost. She has a nice part  in Avatar as a soldier with her heart in the right place.

Avatar definitely exceeded my expectations, which weren't set that high to begin with. Make sure you go to the bathroom first since it runs 2 hours and 42 minutes. I think this is already the director's cut. But this is a very watchable movie and it doesn't drag in the middle. As I mentioned above, the motion capture in Avatar is very good. The Na'vi are quite realistic and easy to watch. The cinematography is beautiful and Pandora (actually New Zealand) looks great. This movie was many years in the making and cost an incredible amount of money but it came out ok. You should definitely see Avatar. It'll probably look better for you that for me since I was forced to see it in 2D at the Galaxy in Owen Sound, Ontario.