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I did not like Avatar. This is hardly surprising; I do not like most movies. Still, I watch in horror as Avatar starts gaining some serious Oscars momentum, and I feel like I need to vent a bit. I sat down to watch I thought would be a fairly formulaic action movie that is at least expertly and entertainingly executed. But instead, I sat through a series of thwarted expectations.
SPOILERS AHEAD.
Here, for example, are some basic expectations for a movie in this genre:Bonding with nature -- Usually in these movies, the hero goes through some profound experience in which he gains appreciation for nature. But all Jake did was learn how to run around in the jungle and, indeed, overcome nature by learning how to ride and control two creatures. These are feats that could be accomplished by anyone with good hand-eye coordination, but don't really require much wisdom beyond that. Just to move the plot along though, Jake randomly (and conveniently) confessed in his video blog that he has learned to respect the planet after three months. I didn't know that; good thing he told me.Clever underdog strategy -- Typically, in the pivotal final battle, the underdogs are out-gunned, but they come up with some clever strategy to overcome their disadvantages. As Jake said, they have the home field advantage! And apparently, the best plan they could come up with was "CHARGE!!!" And so they sent the bird warriors to attack the airships, and the riders to attack the foot soldiers, head-on, with zero strategy. In the middle of the battle, the natives retreated; Norm: "We're being gunned down!" No shit. Seriously. Even the Ewoks in Return of the Jedi took the time to make some traps!Some cool thing at the end -- The most disappointing thing about the final battle is that it introduced absolutely nothing we hadn't seen before. No new creatures. No new weapons. When Jake gathered all the clans on the planet together, none of the clans contributed anything that was new (why bother even telling us about this?). When Eywa decided to heed Jake's call for help, she sent in the exact four creatures that we'd seen before -- more birds, more rhinos, more hounds, and that big black thing. Pandora feels unsatisfyingly tiny -- like I'd already seen everything it has to offer in the first half of the film. There's nothing here approaching the awe of, say, the forest spirit in Princess Mononoke. Avatar blew its load early, and then just kept going.These are just some of the most basic genre pleasures that I expected to enjoy. I'm not saying that Cameron should stick more closely to formulaic elements; but in their place, he has substituted nothing. It's a movie that follows the formula, but takes away the rewards.
I don't even want to go into the smaller faults of the film -- the quickly abandoned conflict between Jake's loyalty to the military and the natives, the extremely uninspired design of the mechs and airships that are straight out of any other sci-fi movie, the always-annoying way in which Jake's betrayal was needlessly revealed, the mildly insulting way in which Jake waltzed in and became a better native than other natives (though still way less insulting than Tom Cruise in The Last Samurai), the lazy use of narration that tells but does not show, and the overall lack of subtlety in everything.
But now I sound like I'm nitpicking. The movie is beautiful to look at, and the CGI is very impressive. But it never awes, it never inspires, and ultimately, it's just not very satisfying.