Avatar Review

Perhaps you’ve heard of this scrappy little flick struggling to make a buck.

Look, “Avatar” has been out for over a month, which means that it’s already gone from being “really good” to the “defining movie of our generation” to “wildly overrated” to (possibly) being on its way to becoming slightly underrated.

I’m sure you know the score. Before it opened, the talk was that this film was going to change the way movies are made. Obviously that remains to be seen, but what can’t be disputed is that, in seven weeks, “Avatar” has become the highest-grossing movie of all time.

Now that we got all that stuff out of the way, I’m going to try and do something that doesn’t usually happen when the subject of “Avatar” comes up – talk about the movie.

Unless you’ve been living under a (Pandoran) rock you know that the movie follows paraplegic Marine Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) who has been dispatched to Pandora, a moon located several light years from Earth. It’s 2154 and humans are mining a precious mineral called unobtanium (that’s a mighty inconvenient name). The biggest problem for the humans is the presence of the Na’vi, a race of 10-foot-tall blue humanoid creatures.

To interact with the Na’vi, the human colonists have developed an avatar program in which a person’s consciousness is transported into the body of a genetically-engineered Na’vi host.

Jake – thrilled over the fact that he can walk (and run) again – eventually falls in with a Na’vi named Neytiri (Zoe Saldana) and her tribe. The human colonists become impatient and Jake eventually has to choose sides between the violent mercenaries (led by Stephen Lang’s Col. Quaritch) and the peaceful Na’vi.

Where writer/director/King of the World James Cameron succeeds is in creating a fully immersive and engaging world the audience hasn’t seen before (I’m especially a fan of the Hallelujah Mountains). You get so sucked in that you don’t even think about things like, “Why spend SO much time and money on the avatar program if these mercenaries are chomping at the bit to wipe out the Na’vi no matter what?”

Still, I’m not exactly going out on a limb when I say that Cameron’s weakness has always been his writing and dialogue. Also, I’m sure you’ve heard how the plot borrows liberally from “Dances with Wolves”, “Pocahontas”, “FernGully” and others.

Fortunately, Cameron makes up for his shortcomings as a writer by being a masterful storyteller. Since he’s literally created this brand new world, it always feels like there’s something new to discover around the corner. (I see you’ve gotten use to the Na’Vi – well check out these pterodactyl-looking mofos!) As far as the “Dances with Pocahontas” criticism is concerned – I just feel that, if you look hard enough, you can find previous influences in almost any movie.

Cameron is also aided by a solid, if unspectacular cast. Worthington is appropriately steady as Jake Sully, while Lang brings a welcome, demented joy to playing Quaritch, though I wish he weren’t simply doing an impersonation of every single joyfully-demented military commander since Robert Duvall in “Apocalypse Now.” Just once, I’d like to see a villainous military commander, who is not a lunatic and uses smarts over brute force. (Oh yeah, that’d be Christoph Waltz’s Col. Landa in “Inglourious Basterds”!)

As is the case with almost every James Cameron flick, the women steal the show. Saldana (whose facial expressions and body movements are the basis for Neytiri, as well as giving a good voice performance) is sort of fantastic, while Sigourney Weaver gives an appealingly cranky performance as Dr. Grace Augustine, head of the avatar program.

Though I’m not exactly rushing out to give any of these people Oscar nominations for their acting, I think their performances have been underrated. To me, the biggest difference between “Avatar” and, say, the “Star Wars” prequels is that Cameron was still able to coax good work out of his actors, while George Lucas made good actors look embarrassingly-bad.

Cameron, making his first movie in more than a decade, also hasn’t forgotten how to direct an action sequence. In the time since Cameron has been gone, it seems like action movies have shifted toward a more jittery, hand-held camera, “you really are there” feel, which isn’t right or wrong. All I know is that I was grateful to see a director pull back the camera and actually let the audience see what was happening.

Sure, this movie has its flaws (the environmental message could’ve been a bit more subtle, the good guys could’ve been a bit more interesting, and the bad guys could’ve used a bit more shading), but you can’t help but come away impressed by the boldness of Cameron’s filmmaking.

In a landscape where every other big movie is a sequel to an adaptation of a TV show based on a theme park ride, the director has successfully created a brave and blue new world for movie fans (both casual and ardent) to come together and discuss, complain, argue or praise.

Avatar…A-