Review of Avatar (2009) by Danny D — 25 Jun 2014

Many of the things that I loved about this film are the exact things that caused my discontent. to begin with, much of the visuals were obviously astounding. the design of the planet, as well as the design of the plant and animal life and the vehicles used by the humans were incredibly impressive.

cameron also used color very well. on the other hand, the computer generated characters were far too cartoonish, and the real life characters and computer generated ones didnt blend together quite as well as I had hoped for considering how advanced this film was supposed to be.

I would have much rather preferred costumes and make up than the cartoonish look the film had. while the planet looked impressive, david lean made more visually stunning films using actual landscapes rather than artificial ones.

the story also had its up and down points. on the one hand the story was engaging enough that even after 160 minutes I could have kept watching if the film were longer. on the other hand, the dialogue was very weak, most elements of the story were completely recycled and unoriginal, and the main antagonist of the film was as cheesy of a villain as we could have received.

he was basically a caricature of the villains of the corn ball action flicks of the 80's. the film also relied too much on the demonization of humanity in order to serve its agenda. cameron left the entire human race completely underdeveloped, allowing no conviction to the masses of people on pandora who were far too willing to slaughter innocent natives, and he unfortunately left us completely in the dark as to what earth or contemporary humanity looked like.

finally, the film uses a macguffin in the form of "unobtainian", which is a stupid name for the mineral, that is more of a plot hole than a point of interest. its more entertaining than it is interesting and is not without some pretty massive flaws.