Review: Avatar 3D

One of the perks of being an Oscar-winner and self-proclaimed ‘king of the world’, is that you can take a 12 year holiday and then return with something that heralds the next generation of filmmaking.

Arriving this week on a giant wave of hype and hyperbole is writer and director James Cameron’s long gestating project about paraplegic Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) and his journey to the far-off exotic-but-deadly planet Pandora. Here, he plans to learn how to inhabit a lab-grown ‘avatar’ body of his dead brother’s DNA bonded with seven foot tall aliens the Na’vi so that ‘evil’ earth corporations can mine Pandora for a precious metal called unobtainium. Honestly.

Like Dances with Wolves and The Last Samurai, Jake falls in love with an alien native (Neytiri, played by Zoe Saldana) and her life and culture, so when the evil soldier/leader of the company Col. Miles Quaritch (Stephen Lang) wants to blow them to hell and take the metal by force, Jake is forced to choose sides and fight for what he believes is right.

Right off the bat I should say that in digital 3D, Avatar looks astounding. Cameron had to wait years for science to catch up with the vision in his head and he developed the cameras used to motion capture his actors’ facial expressions and movements in a new virtual studio called The Vault. This also allowed him to see computer generated images live while the actors carried out their performances rather than wait months to see the final rendered images. While this is brilliant and amazing in its own right, as Hitchcock once said, “To make a great film you need three things – the script, the script and the script.”

Unfortunately it seems Cameron had forgotten this, as the story is piss poor and even though the film is littered with awesome set pieces you don’t really care about any of the characters. The three-and-a-half hour running time brings another Hitchcock quote to mind: “The length of a film should be directly related to the endurance of the human bladder.”

Avatar is worth seeing as it is a spectacular visual feast, and if you can simply unplug your brain and stay comfortable you will be rewarded with what might herald the future of filmmaking, as long as a decent writer can come up with a decent plot and use the tools to tell a proper story with characters that you actually care about.

Peter Jackson did this with Lord of the Rings but the real test for Cameron will be to shoot a low budget film without any special effects and with a decent story. Then we’ll see if he really is the great director he thinks he is.