Director James Cameron ought to have dedicated Avatar to the memory of Poul Anderson. Anderson’s seminal 1957 science fiction short story Call Me Joe shares so many core elements it’s hard to believe the similarity is coincidental. Both feature crippled humans remotely operating artificially created alien life-forms on a hostile planet, life-forms that afford them the freedom they yearn for in their real lives. Both of these human operators come to identify more with their alien cultures than their own. Both end up . . . no, wait . . . that would be telling. If you haven’t read Call Me Joe, I highly recommend it. It’s not just one of the early greats, it’s one of the all-time greats.

Let me be blunt, friends: Go see Avatar. See it in 3D on an IMAX or equivalent screen. Cameron spent close to a decade preparing this industry-changing CGI picture, and it shows. The effects are more than spectacular. More than riveting. More than overwhelming. When combined with the IMAX screen size, six-track (five spatial point) DTS sound, and state-of-the-art 3D technology, they literally transport you physically into the lush, exotic jungles of the planet Pandora. Thundering herds of hammer-headed rhinos. Six-legged, armor-plated horses. Bioluminescent airborne jellyfish. Flying dragons. Floating mountains tethered to the ground by vines bigger than subway tunnels. Trees thousands of feet tall. Impossibly lifelike alien natives, blue-skinned, chiseled, sculpted, and hauntingly beautiful. A soundscape like nothing you’ve ever heard. Chattering insects. Whistling plants. The distant cries of the natives echoing through the blackness of night.

Does the plot match this visual and aural magnificence? No. But the story’s decidedly Cameronian shortcomings aren’t going to mean much to you. It’s the environment that dominates. Everything else pales next to it. Sure, you’ll shake your head at the recycled cardboard characters. Giovanni Ribisi’s small-minded, ethically challenged corporate hack is an excellent example. He’s merely an updated version of Paul Reiser’s unctuous Carter Burke from Aliens, just smarmier and more transparent. And, yeah, the overlong conclusion will annoy you. Cameron still doesn’t know when to stop. He just keeps on going and going and going. The final fight, the scene you knew in your heart had to happen, is so derivative you’ll actually laugh out loud when it starts.

That brings to mind a question: Is it really theft if you steal your own ideas? Cameron has looted his previous films shamelessly here. But I’m not going to tell you how. I’ll let you find out. It’ll be a little game just between us. It’s almost as if Cameron has but one story inside him, and he’s telling it to us over and over again, just on increasingly bigger screens.

The wags down at the club are already calling this thing Dances with Smurfs. A fair, if snarky, description. Yep, there’s a lot of Dances with Wolves in Avatar. And the natives have blue skin. What of it? The concept’s strong and the story’s at least serviceable, if not inspired. Handicapped ex-Marine Jake Sully (tough-guy Sam Worthington, of Terminator Salvation) grudgingly agrees to fly to the distant planet of Pandora to participate in the Avatar project. Using a powerful computer and a sensory-deprivation chamber, he links to a lab-grown human-alien hybrid (a creature built with his own DNA and that of Pandora’s intelligent though still primitive ten foot–tall humanoid inhabitants). His mission is to infiltrate the aliens’ civilization, learn as much as he can about it, and ultimately try to convince them to let their homeland be strip-mined of its super-valuable (though ridiculously named) unobtainium, a mineral with anti-gravity or magnetic-repulsion qualities.

Sully falls for the striking, headstrong daughter (Zoe Saldana) of the local tribe’s chief (Wes Studi), comes to appreciate the vibrant alien culture, and respect its Lion Kingish “Balance of Life” philosophy. This leads inevitably to a crisis of allegiance.

Need I say more?

Didn’t think so.

The best acting turn in the movie is delivered by Stephen Lang as the vicious and uncompromising Colonel Miles Quaritch. Remember the Tommy Lee Jones–voiced Chip Hazard toy in Joe Dante’s 1998 overlooked classic Small Soldiers? Think that guy—but full-sized and ten times more menacing. Lang is steely, unyielding aggression incarnate. Bravura work.

The rest of the cast is superb, with especially notable performances by Sigourney Weaver as a passionate scientist out to protect the natives at all costs and Michelle Rodriguez as a no-crap female chopper pilot (one of Cameron’s staples).

James Horner’s score roars like one of the film’s turbo-fanned assault ships. Booming during combat. Majestic while the natives are soaring among the floating mountains on their dragons. Mystical when they join with the planet’s tree-net (for lack of a better term). My only complaint is that at times it’s so much like his work in Aliens that if you close your eyes you can actually see the Alien Queen chasing Ripley through the corridors of LV-426's atmosphere factory. . . .

Avatar is far from a perfect film. Cameron is, after all, no Kurosawa. But make no mistake. This film is a milestone. Ground-breaking material.

Must-see material.

Avatar
Twentieth Century-Fox Film Corporation
U.S. Release Date: December 18, 2009
Director: James Cameron
Screen writer:James Cameron
Running Time: 162 minutes