Review of Avatar

Avatar has recently becoming the top-grossing movie of all time, beating out James Cameron’s other epic film, Titanic. After seeing it two weeks ago, it’s easy for me to understand why. It is a movie with an uncomplicated, action-filled plot and visually, is revolutionary in its use of computer-generated characters and setting. As I watched the move in my 3-D glasses, I certainly had the feeling I was in the midst of an extremely high-tech computer game or on a simulated amusement park ride.

The movie has garnered a great deal of attention on the Hollywood awards circuit, already winning a Golden Globe for Best Picture and seems likely to walk away with the Academy Award as well. According to Director James Cameron, the movie was fifteen years in the making as he waited for technology to catch up with the vision he had for the film.

The plot, such as there is, goes like this: Jake Sully is a marine, wounded in an undisclosed battle on Earth, and paralyzed from the waist down. He travels to the distant world, Pandora, in order to take the place of his twin brother, an accomplished scientist, who has been killed in a robbery. On Pandora, Jake takes his brother’s place in the Avatar program. This program calls for a human to merge with the DNA of a Na’vi, the native intelligent life on Pandora, the nine-foot tall blue-skinned, nature loving creatures who appear identical in character to Native Americans. The purpose of the program is to bring Jake in contact with the Na’vi in order to convince them to move away from their sacred Tree of Voices, under which lies a precious mineral the Earth needs for survival. Jake is willing to cooperate fully with this plan at first, but through twists and turns, he bonds with the Na’vi princess Neytiri, and begins to consider himself more Na’vi than human. The powers that be, most notably Marine Colonel Quaritch, strongly object to Jake’s going native. They attack the Na’vi with all the overwhelming force their advanced weaponry can muster.

The movie’s outcome is predictable, and the entire plot appears to serve as somewhat of a necessary artifice in order for Cameron to display the film’s spectacular visual effects. The theme of an indigenous people’s struggle against technologically superior, profit-driven trespassers is much more movingly and ably demonstrated in Dances With Wolves as well as a number of other movies.

The comic-book reading, Star Wars loving kid in me found Avatar to be a stunning, thrilling spectacle, but the side of me that goes to a movie to see a moving story providing insight into the human condition was sorely disappointed, and started to wonder how much longer the thing was going to run about an hour and half into it.

While I certainly agree that Avatar is technically the best film of the year, dramatically, it is far from it. But Avatar, with its superior technology and popularity, seems destined to steamroll the competition. The other Oscar-nominated movies seem to have about the same chance of winning as…well…the Na’vi themselves.