With an 82% fresh rating, most all the Usual Suspects are gushing over ‘Avatar,’ but everyone knows that when you trash America you can bank the glowing reviews. So here are some contrarian voices not on Big Hollywood — others who had many of the same problems we did with the dull, cliched story and, in some cases, with the over-hyped visuals [Nolte review here; Kozlowski review here]:
“If Cameron wasn’t going to make a great movie with his rumored half-billion dollar budget, he could have at least given us an entertaining train wreck. But Avatar, which plods on for a punishing two hours and forty-two minutes, is more boring than bad. There’s no denying that the motion-capture 3D visuals are some kind of technical achievement, but after spending a while in the aquarium-like world of Pandora, I started to feel like I was staring at the world’s most expensive screensaver. The New Age-y rituals of the Na’vi put me in mind of dancing Ewoks, and the big battle scenes looked like outtakes from Attack of the Clones. Maybe that’s a little too harsh, but certainly Cameron does nothing with digital warfare that Peter Jackson didn’t do better in the Lord of the Rings trilogy. Your mileage may vary, but to these eyes, Avatar looks like the emperor’s new clothes — and the King of the World is naked.”
“James Cameron’s love of technology is enough to sell Avatar to fans awaiting his first techno-feat since 1997’s Titanic. But will they understand the awful thing he’s done with it? Avatar’s highly-touted special effects depict an army from Earth traveling to Pandora, a moon in the Alpha Centuri-A star system, to mine rare ore from under its inhabitants, tall, blue-skinned creatures with tails called the Na’vi. These F/X show Cameron’s ex-Marine hero, Jake Sully (the great everyman Sam Worthington), taking part in a quasi-military program where he enters the alien society via a hybrid body (an avatar) made from human and Na’vi DNA. Cameron’s “fully immersive” 3-D technology is irritating to watch for nearly three hours. And then there’s his underlying purpose: Avatar is the corniest movie ever made about the white man’s need to lose his identity and assuage racial, political, sexual and historical guilt. …
“Cameron’s superficial B-movie tropes pretend philosophical significance. His story’s rampant imperialism and manifest destiny (Giovanni Ribisi plays the heartless industrialist) recalls Vietnam-era revisionist westerns like Soldier Blue, but it’s essentially a sentimental cartoon with a pacifist, naturalist message.”
“The CG characters are painstakingly rendered, but movie magic makers still haven’t found a way to make CG players look less like finely drawn cartoon characters. When CG-dominated films can create onscreen creatures indistinguishable from real-world humans and animals (without toeing the uncanny valley), a wall will come down. For this reason, Avatar remains visually impressive but not as groundbreaking as, say, George Lucas’ Star Wars, which pushed traditional special effects techniques to the next level.
“Unlike Lucas’ more playful science fiction epic, Cameron reaches for a heavy environmental message. Avatar is every militant global warming supporter’s dream come true as the invading, technology-worshiping, environment-ravaging humans are set upon by an angry planet and its noble inhabitants. But the film’s message suffers mightily under the weight of mind-boggling hypocrisy. Cameron’s story clearly curses the proliferation of human technology. In Avatar, the science and machinery of humankind leads to soulless violence and destruction. It only serves to pollute the primitive but pristine paradise of Pandora.”
“Anyone who has seen “Dances With Wolves” or “Quigley Down Under” or “The Last Samurai” will know the answer to that question.
“Some will be angered by the facile anti-business, pro-eco-terrorism plot Mr. Cameron has constructed, but that’s the least of the audience’s worries. Far worse is the utterly predictable — and, at 161 minutes, seemingly interminable — way in which the movie unfolds.”
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