Avatar DVD 2010It’s a peculiar thing to review a movie that has grossed enough money to launch the space shuttle twice or to build a complete Virginia-class nuclear fast attack submarine. Is there actually a point in doing so? If I say it’s overrated will that stop anyone from renting it? If I say it’s underrated will that encourage someone who’s on the fence? What if I say it’s both?

For those who don’t already know the premise of James Cameron’s Avatar (I know there are, in fact, many of you out there), it is set approximately 150 years in the future on an alien planet called Pandora. This planet is home to both the primitive, blue-skinned Na’vi and a miraculous mineral referred to simply as “unobtainium.” Humans from Earth have been greedily mining this substance while studying the natives and teaching them English. To the latter end, they have produced “avatars”: half-human, half-Na’vi bodies controlled remotely by a human via a neural interface. Enter Jake Sully (Sam Worthington), a paraplegic Marine who is given the lucrative job of inhabiting an avatar after his identical twin brother, a scientist, unexpectedly dies. In exchange for this work, Jake is promised the expensive surgery to restore his ability to walk.

All of this is established in an aggressively–and often awkwardly expository–first act. But once the rules have been explained, Jake finally ventures out of the human compound, and this is when the movie becomes a little bit amazing. A significant percentage of Avatar, particularly its middle section, is essentially entirely computer-generated, much like a Pixar film. But you probably wouldn’t be able to guess this if it weren’t for the fact that no human being alive could fit into a Na’vi suit. The forests of Pandora are rich with detail and authenticity, mixing familiar green foliage with exotic and colorful alien fauna, most of which glows in the dark. The Na’vi themselves display facial cues with extreme subtlety and authenticity, aided by a performance capture technology evolved from that developed for Gollum in The Lord of the Rings. For a solid hour or so, Avatar is about as immersive and escapist as filmmaking gets.

Cameron concludes his epic with an impressive enough action climax, but the beats he hits at the end are nothing particularly new. It’s very easy to compare the plot of Avatar with films like Dances With Wolves, The Mission, and Fern Gully: The Last Rainforest. The love story is a little better than Cameron’s last attempt in Titanic, but the environmental fable/morality tale that frames the story is not groundbreaking. The Na’vi are a sexy, idealized proxy for our world’s many diminished indigenous cultures, and the humans are conquistadors who should really know better by now. If you’re looking for a truly challenging and powerful science fiction allegory, rent District 9.

As for the question of whether Avatar is the Jazz Singer for a new age of 3-D movies, it’s still too early to tell. I’m tempted to admit that it might be as important for live action films as Toy Story was for feature animation. Hollywood’s misinterpretation of the success of that film and its successors had grave consequences, though, and I hope the deluge of bad 3-D movies now coming down the pipe won’t drown the good ones. – [DVD] [Blu-Ray]

Action/Adventure/Fantasy/Sci-Fi

Rated PG-13

DVD Release Date: 4/22/10

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