Revision

James Cameron is not a director who makes small films nor like a director such as Woody Allen is he content to duly churn out film after film every passing year. No, Cameron will wait until he feels he is as close to perfection as possible and until the technology is adequate for his vision. It has been twelve years since the release of Titanic, his last film. Like George Lucas, his predecessor in entertainments that furthered the special effects available in film; he is obsessed with furthering the capabilities of the movie-making process. This blockbuster auteur does not merely trade in spectacle but rather demands and revels it. Where a director like Cecil B. Demille may have taken the Bible as material for his epic films, Cameron enlarges his material to Biblical proportions, be it the love story from Titanic or the maternal relationship at the heart of the second Terminator film. Avatar may be his biggest movie yet by combining these aforementioned elements with technology that is light-years ahead of what most people have seen at the box office.
The film takes place on the remote planet of Pandora in the not-so-distant-as-it-seems future and the cinematographic and technological achievements of the film may appear as if they were beamed in from that time period. Never before have there been such advanced motion-capturing technologies as showcased in this film. The scenes containing the sacred tree of the indigenous Na’vi people are extraordinarily striking and seem to be straight out of a deep-sea diving documentary while looking incredibly realistic.
This technology also affects the physical representation of the actors and is best exemplified in the character of Neytiri, the Na’vi princess. The nuanced body language shown by her character shows how this technology could, combined with a fine acting job by Zoe Saldana, imbue an entirely new dimension to screen acting. In fact, the female characters in this movie, as in much of Cameron’s oeuvre, are the most headstrong and often downright fierce characters in the film, such as Sigourney Weaver’s chain-smoking, Na’vi expert Grace. By the end of his career, Cameron may be most remembered for pushing the technological boundaries of film and along with Ridley Scott, proving that women could be action heroes of their own, rather than merely the ingénue or femme fatale. Avatar is, however, not a film without flaws, the single largest of which is to be found within the screenplay. Where perhaps many of the tropes found within the script, such as a native people heavily in tune with their environment and the formulaic love story were meant to be seen as archetypal and universal, they instead come across as cliché and rote. Immediately after the showing, the film titles of Fern Gully and Pocahontas were bandied about by the patrons in the lobby of the theatre. A few even noticed the similarities between the Na’vi queen and the baboon Rafikki from The Lion King. The film’s dialogue also came off as stilted and trite in moments such as when the protagonist Jake is reaching out to a Na’vi prince and says, “I will fly with you, brother.” Such a cringeworthy and banal line should have been excised during script revisions. Moments like these and moments of none-too-subtle commentary on the politics of today, such as the stereotypically Southern human colonel played by Stephen Lang, that prevent Avatar from being a truly outstanding film but it is still a very good entertainment and an enjoyable and surprisingly quick way to spend 160 minutes. It is certainely better than many of the films that pass for spectacle today.