Avatar Film Review

Avatar is a film that tries to be too clever. Much like The Matrix, Avatar revolves around humans entering a world in virtual bodies (hence the 3D experience) in order to run tests on alien habitats and communicate with the locals. This is very much established in the first thirty minutes of the film but what is to follow in the next two hours is edited (to be more precise not edited) in a way that leaves the viewer waiting for the credits to roll. The effects of mass deforestation caused by an oafish army general are laid out whilst romance of the mudblood kind happens between wheelchair hero Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) and Neytiri (Zoe Saldana).

It is at this point in the review that one might assume the phrase “mass deforestation” means Al Gore had something to do with the production of Avatar. Not true. It is in fact James Cameron, who having already wasted vast amounts of money in the past on Titanic, directs what he would probably describe as an “intelligent interpretation” of Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth. Instead Avatar is a dumbed down version of Gore’s Oscar winning documentary as portrayed by “blow shit up” extraordinaire Colonel Miles Quadritch.

Avatar plays as a pieced together action/adventure story packaged with an environmental warning for the future advertisement. Cameron as a result of clumsily illustrating the effects of deforestation highlights the ineptness of the Army in the film (made to retreat by blue people with spears!?!?). The wrong parallels can certainly be made between the film and real life and whilst the script isn’t necessarily dreadful, the acting definitely is.

No matter how big the budget is of any film, if the acting is bad it remains bad and this is directly aimed at lead Sam Worthington. An ex-army man torn between helping scientists and his army compadres, Worthington’s inexperience tells when it is most needed after he finds romance. Maybe he should have taken acting lessons off of Chris Pine who knows a thing or two about anonymous leads starring in big blockbusters a la Star Trek.

One could argue that the plot and dialogue is irrelevant when the viewers can be wowed by all the colour and beauty of a mystical world in 3D. As a linguist myself I do marvel at the morphological and phonological features of this alien language. Yet this film, for all its hype and budget, fails to be an innovation in film making and is more like an extended recording of someone entering World Of Warcraft. A sight myself and not many other people want to see.