Avatar (12A)

Alison Rowat's Review

Cut to the chase time. Avatar will not pay off your mortgage. It will not give you the body of your dreams, cure the common cold, or remove 99% of household stains. What it will deliver is an old fashioned, highly entertaining tale told with all the bells and whistles that £180 million – at least – can buy.

As for whether director James Cameron has given us a glimpse of cinema’s future, I doubt it. 3D is not for every cinemagoer, never mind every genre. Science fiction, horror and thrillers suit the form, but drama, comedy, documentary?

Avatar is not without flaws. Some of the characters struggle to be two dimensional never mind three, the dialogue can be ropey, and the picture feels as if it has been edited in a rush. Then there’s the running time of 161 minutes, from which a good half hour could easily be snipped.

For all that, Avatar works. It works because Cameron, a Hollywood showman to rank alongside DeMille, knows how to draw an audience in. His story might be positively hokey in parts, but put the low-fi tale together with high tech effects as good as anything in Titanic, and Avatar zips together to make an impressive whole.

The journey into this brave new world begins on grubby old Earth with injured ex-marine Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) waking, paralysed, from a coma.

In voiceover, a device used successfully throughout the film to connect the character to the audience, he tells us that at another time he might have expected “new legs”, but “not in this economy”. Earth 2157, it seems, is capable of treating its soldiers about as well as Earth 2009.

Sully’s summation of his plight is the first of many crude but effective political jabs the picture delivers. Cameron, writer as well as director, has a long list of points to raise, from the wickedness of waging war for energy (wonder where he got that idea), to mankind’s short-sighted savaging of the natural environment in the name of progress.

Also in the mix are references to 9/11, and the Bush administration’s war on terror stance (“Our security lies in pre-emptive attack,” says military man Miles Quaritch, played by Stephen Lang). The warfare in the jungles of Pandora, the planet on which the story is set, inevitably calls to mind Vietnam.

Pandora is home to a rare mineral which a mega corporation wants to mine and ship back to Earth for vast profits. Just one problem. The indigenous population, the Na’vi, a community of 10ft tall blue creatures, doesn’t fancy moving, no matter how many roads and hospitals the corporation are to build elsewhere.

Since the air on Pandora is toxic to humans, scientists – led by Sigourney Weaver’s fag-smoking Grace Augustine - have developed avatars to go in and do the face-to-face stuff with the Na’vi.

Controlled by their human counterparts back at base, the avatars look exactly like the Na’vi, and therein lies the cunning plan. It is Sully’s job to get to know the Na’vi, the better to understand their strengths and weaknesses.

So Cameron embarks on his stranger in a strange land tale. Think the original Lost World meets Jurassic Park by way of Apocalypto, with a little romance (between Sully and Zoe Saldana’s Neytiri), and a lot of mystic moonshine thrown in along the way.

It’s surprisingly easy to believe in this world because it’s not wildly beyond our ken. Okay, it has blue giants with tails, but they bear enough resemblance to their human “drivers” to be acceptable. Weaver’s avatar is recognisably her. The creatures, if they don’t look like regular dinosaurs, dragons or dogs, are modified variations of the original – horses with six legs, and so on.

Where Avatar takes the technology one giant leap forward is in the eyes of the Na’vi. “Dead eye” syndrome has traditionally been the Achilles heel of performance capture animation. No matter how much had been spent making skin and hair look just so, the lifeless eyes were never windows to a character’s soul. In Avatar, finally, they are.

With the money spent on it, I went into Avatar expecting to be impressed by the special effects. I was. The 3D has a depth and clarity far in advance of anything seen so far. But it is hardly the immersive cinema experience as hyped.

Avatar is not a game changer on a par with the arrival of the Talkies. Let’s get real: 3D specs or no, you will still feel you are at the pictures.

What I hadn’t expected was to be so moved. For all the wonders on display, Cameron has not forgotten that the job of any picture is to excite the emotions. Make it big, make it brash, spend the GDP of a small nation on it, but above all make it thrilling. With Avatar, he can consider the job done.

Paul Greenwood's Review

So just how do you follow the biggest film of all time? If you’re James Cameron, you disappear for 12 years, using the time to develop your own technology that will allow you to realise your cinematic vision, and return with what may well be the most expensive film ever made.

Avatar is Cameron’s first film since Titanic, when he became the self-proclaimed king of the world with a film that won 11 Oscars and made off with $1.8 billion at the global box office.

In production since before the current fad for all things 3D went supernova, if the hype-makers are to be believed, it represents the future of cinema. Almost unprecedented levels of anticipation have been building for several months, since Fox took the unusual step of showing a couple of reels of footage which was not met with universal acclaim.

Whether this resulted in taking demand through the roof, or Avatar-fatigue among the naysayers is hard to judge, but the final product is likely to silence all but the harshest critics.

Set in the year 2154, Avatar takes place on the planet Pandora, where humans are mining for a priceless mineral but are in conflict with the indigenous population, the Na’vi, a race of 12 foot tall blue creatures who have a strong bond with their natural habitat.

Sigourney Weaver plays a scientist who has developed technology that allows humans to place their consciousness in an avatar, a physical representation of the Na’vi that allows humans to breathe their air.

Sam Worthington is a wheelchair-bound marine, Jake Sully, who is chosen to take part in the programme, and hopefully gain the trust of the Na’vi and persuade them to move their village, so the humans can get to the mineral deposits.

When Sully gets stranded on the surface, he is saved by Neytiri (Star Trek’s Zoe Saldana) and taken into the Na’vi tribe where he is met with fear and resentment, before being grudgingly accepted. But with a peaceful resolution unable to be found, war is looming and Sully must choose which side he is on.

With so much of the film, from backgrounds to sets to characters done on computer, the challenge is to make it not look like a cartoon. For some time this is exactly what it looks like, with little weight to any of it, but after a while the eyes do get used to it. The CG characters are the most successfully realised, given a depth and range of emotion often missing from such things.

If it doesn’t quite have the impact of Titanic, again partly because it’s so cartoonish, Avatar is still a film that offers audiences a bit of everything. It’s almost always engaging, sporadically jaw-dropping, occasionally moving and frequently idiotic.

All of Cameron’s weaknesses are on display, from the sentimentality to the juvenile dialogue to the one-dimensional characters. With its occupying force intent on exploiting natural resources, the parallels to Iraq are not subtle, but the environmental message is nicely incorporated.

If you can suffer through some of Cameron’s more cringe-worthy impulses, and his cribbing of ideas, plotlines and philosophies from all manner of sources, from Star Wars to The Matrix to Dances With Wolves, then the good certainly outweighs the bad. That’s because his many strengths are also to the fore, as he flexes his muscles in several outstanding sequences that really are like nothing we’ve ever seen before.

It’s in the final hour when Cameron really spends the money, as the humans and the Na’vi collide in a breathtaking action onslaught. It’s also startlingly beautiful, a feat of design and imagination that comes close to rivalling Lord of the Rings.

By no means is Avatar the future of cinema, but it is a remarkable piece of entertainment.