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.

To explore the fauna and flora unhin­dered of the planet Dr. Grace Augus­tine (Sigour­ney Weaver) has come up with a bizarre plan: She and her team of sci­en­tists have grown fully mature Na’vi from test tubes. These “Avatars” con­tain DNA spliced from their human “dri­vers” allow­ing them to psy­chi­cally link with their Avatars and pilot them to explore the planet. One of the dri­vers is Jake Sully (Sam Wor­thing­ton) who is the only one capa­ble of pilot­ing his dead twin-brother’s Avatar. Sully is a Marine par­a­lyzed from the waist down after a com­bat injury.

Nat­u­rally, Jake gets lost dur­ing his first expe­di­tion and is res­cued by a female Na’vi hunter named Neytiri (Zoe Sal­dana), the local tribe’s chief’s daugh­ter. Her par­ents want her to instruct Jake in the ways of the Na’vi. Mean­while, Jake’s mil­i­tary and cor­po­rate mas­ters plot to steal their land to start min­ing the pre­cious min­eral. Undoubt­edly, the main bad guy is Colonel Miles Quar­itch (Steven Lang) the commander-​​in-​​chief of the mil­i­tary forces on Pandora.

A lot of the message-​​free dia­logue is bad and can be seen com­ing a mile away. While the movie seems long you won’t really notice that time flies by. By the way, I’m told that 3-​​D doesn’t add much to the expe­ri­ence so you don’t need to pay extra. Any­way, Avatar may not be a rev­o­lu­tion­ary movie but its amaz­ing spe­cial effects make it easy to for­get about the 162 min­utes you’ll spend watch­ing it. Still, it makes you won­der why an alleged bud­get of US $230,000,000 couldn’t buy a bet­ter script to go with an oth­er­wise amaz­ing film.

Even though Avatar didn’t live up to my expec­ta­tions, I’m gonna buy it on Blu-​​ray. If there’s ever going to be a Director’s Cut, that is. And I seri­ously hope that they will improve on the story if they ever cre­ate a sequel.