Avatar is a mediocre movie with a weak plot, poor dialog, poorer editing and because of this pales when held up against 2009’s District Nine and Moon. It is however, amazing to look at.
2009 was great year for Sci-fi. District Nine showed us how a new angle on the classic Alien Invasion plot could create a really compelling context within which an utterly believable story, with well crafted, engaging characters, could be expertly told.
Moon showed us that you don’t need megabucks to make a classic – with a great set-up, a tight script, classic cinematography and a tiny cast you can produce a thoughtful, poignant classic of our time.
What Avatar shows us is the opposite – with a twelve year development period and an estimated cost of four hundred million dollars – “Moon”: five million, “District Nine”: thirty - you can still mess it up.
Avatar starts off by taking your breath away. Not a bad start. Then it plods for thirty minutes, but that's OK, because it does well to show off the revolutionary production techniques employed and a solid explanation of the Avatar system is provided. Great. Now the set-up is complete, this movie could have been taken anywhere – a revolutionary classic was there in the making.
What follows though is a bit of a mess.
The story is generic. The dialog uninspired. The main characters uninteresting, killed off, or hackneyed stereotypes. The countless references to Cameron’s classics tiring (the Vasquez like Trudy shouts “bitch” whilst handling heavy weaponry, the Home Tree cashes down like the sinking Titanic, sparingly, nobody needs clothes, boots and a motorcycle.)
And remarkably, even with all the techno wizardry and a major scene clumsily omitted, it even gets a little bit, er, boring. Guess all those hours of rendering were just too precious to edit out.
And all that precious rendering. Wow. You can’t talk about Avatar without touching on the look of the film and it has to be said initially it is quite stunning. However it’s not so good that your disbelief is totally suspended: there are times when you know, fully, that you are watching CG, and unlike the Pixar films that celebrate the medium, in Avatar the effect jars, as what came before was so convincingly real.
Without District Nine and Moon all this these flaws may have gone unnoticed. Avatar stands up well to this year’s true monstrosities – Terminator Salvation and Transformers II – and you’d hope so given the time and money spent on it. It’s not that bad, and many will genuinely enjoy it. However, viewed through the lens of District Nine and Moon, Avatar will be slung into the same dump as Salvation and Transformers – an unremarkable movie save for its lavish production: a missed opportunity.
