Avatar

Review by Jason Donner

Look out, everyone, James Cameron has emerged from his Fortress of Awesomeness and is about to kick your face in with a movie that will change the way that we look at movies and that movie is Avatar!  Could this movie possibly live up to the hype of being the best movie in the history of all movies ever?

Not quite, but it's pretty good.

In the future, mankind has sought out new life forms and new civilizations and is pissing them off by strip-mining their planets for a mineral called "unobtainium".  I'm not a hundred percent sure, but I think that's the same stuff they made Virgil out of in The Core so, in a sense, Avatar is a sequel to The Core, right?

The whole plot of this movie is an analogy for Native American relocation -- sort of a Pocahontas on crack with cat aliens.  You know the old cliched plot, right?  Man comes to learn from the natives, man learns to love the natives, man gets jiggy with hot native chick, man must stand against his own kind to protect the natives.

There's really nothing surprising about this plot and it's derivative of things that we've seen a hundred times before.  That's the bad news.

The good news is, by the sparkling light of Eywa, this movie is an incredible sight to behold!  James Cameron has really outdone himself and, even though Avatar might not be the game changer he was making it out to be, it's still amazing.  The alien landscape of Pandora is beautiful and imaginative with something new and unexpected around ever bend.

Even the Na'vi, the blue-skinned kitty people who represent the wronged Native Americans of Pandora, are beautiful in their own ways.  James Cameron said that he wanted us to feel lust for them and, I want to make it perfectly clear, I do not lust after them... but they are beautiful. 

I probably wouldn't kick one out of bed.

If there is one breakout star in this movie, it's Zoe Saldana who also stole the show in Star Trek earlier this year.  Miss Saldana gives a wonderful performance as the Na'vi princess, Neytiri, who the main character falls in love with.  Her range of emotion and raw passion in this movie was engrossing and had me fully convinced that the ten foot tall kitty woman was a real and breathing entity.  She sold it, folks.

James Cameron proves once again that he is a master filmmaker by providing us a tried and true story populated with people we get to know and care about.  Again, though, this isn't a completely successful effort.  I was put off by the black and white areas set up in Avatar where all the Na'vi were peaceful and kind and all of the military were gun wielding psychopaths.  What happened to those wonderful areas of grey?  Now all we have are flesh-toned and blue!

Avatar, while derivative as far as plot goes, is am amazing artistic achievement.  CGI characters have finally gotten to the point where they can be accepted as real lifeforms and not just waxy figures with dead eyes (although, I do have to give credit to District 9 - which I just watched - for pulling this off as well).  James Cameron's first movie in fifteen years might not be the amazing nuclear missile of ingenuity we were promised, but it's nothing to look down on.  Derivative or not, it's incredible to behold.