Brain Assassin

I saw AVATAR on Sat­ur­day and I’m still impressed. James Cameron once again employs state-​​of-​​the-​​art tech­nol­ogy to cre­ate some­thing we’ve never seen before. Of course, with the largest bud­get a writer-​​director has ever had at his dis­posal, one would expect lots of things to be done right. Unfor­tu­nately, the movie matches awe­some spe­cial effects with a lousy script. To be hon­est, that’s some­thing Hol­ly­wood has been doing for a long time now.

AVATAR is visu­ally stun­ning and very pleas­ing to watch. The story takes place on a dis­tant planet called Pan­dora which looks like a jungle-​​covered par­adise. It’s forests are filled with fan­tas­tic crea­tures and intrigu­ing plants. Vibrant col­ors dom­i­nate the jun­gle, even at night. Pandora’s pre­dom­i­nant species is an intel­li­gent life form who call them­selves the Na’vi. Due to the low grav­ity the blue-​​skinned humanoids grow enor­mously huge: they’re roughly 11.5 feet tall. The Na’vi’s move­ments are fluid and their eyes can con­vey cred­i­ble emo­tion. Well done!

While the film is great to look at, the story dis­ap­points. This is even more true because of the stark con­trast between the mas­ter­fully real­ized CGI effects and a lousy plot that goes like this: The Na’vi hap­pily live in their Eden until some nasty humans arrive to mine a min­eral known as unob­tainium. The min­ing cor­po­ra­tion comes pro­tected by space marines and, of course, they need to get the Na’vi moved because under the tree this spe­cific tribe lives in there is the biggest unob­tainium resource within the area. At least, humans can’t breathe in the atmos­phere with­out a breath­ing appa­ra­tus. Read more…