film.every.day.

What better way to start they year (and essentially this blog) than with a look at James Cameron’s latest experiment in wallet-draining escapist entertainment.

First, some background.

I have spent many a lazy afternoon watching James Cameron movies. I’d be clicking through the void, past women’s billiards and reality drivel, and I’d come across Aliens, The Abyss or The Terminator. The scope and spectacle of these movies (and others like it) have always found a way to engage me. These are movies, not films, and in creating that distinction, I’ve been able to suspend all available disbelief and get lost in the world or reality in front of me.

I am not a genre-whore, nor am I a fanboy of any particular filmmaker. Even the best are capable of films like “Hook” or “Jack,” and though I may anticipate some a bit more than others, nobody gets a pass based on past work. So I went into Avatar with as clean a slate as possible.

That said, I find myself having to divide this review into two parts.

The Making of a New World

Pandora is as real as any sci-fi world ever seen on film. That’s about the highest praise I think you could offer a film like Avatar. The goal was not to raise the bar in terms of computer-animation and 3-D motion capture technology. The vision had to have been, quite simply, to bring a new, strange world to life completely, from top to bottom. And they achieved that vision, and then some.

It starts aboard the “military” mothership, where technology and science take on shapes and forms that seem both completely fresh and largely plausible. There are machines that seem like evolutions of the “loaders” in Aliens, and there’s high-tech displays and technology that looks like so real I’d expect to see them at the Apple Store next week.

When we move to Pandora, the world becomes organic and wild, rendered in shades and textures familiar and alien. The plants and animals that bring Pandora to life are wondrous, frightening, playful and spiritual, again making this imaginary world completely believable.

And the Na’vi, the blue-skinned inhabitants of Pandora, are rendered as true as the humans who would destroy it. Not once in the entire film did I think to myself, “boy, those aliens look really lifelike, considering they were born on a computer.” No, they simply existed, as believable as any other part of Pandora.

Finally, the integration of 3-D in Avatar is jaw-dropping. Finally, this technology is used for what it can offer beyond mere movie gimmickry. There are no laughable weapons being thrown into the audience, no ridiculous crap crashing into the seats. Here, it’s as if we’re staring into a living shadowbox, one that invites us in and shares its secrets with us.

In short, Cameron has created a living world, fully realized, that feels every bit as authentic as our own.

And The Action Figures Who Populate It

That’s right, action figures. Not actors. Not characters. Simply ready-made caricatures, pre-cast archetypes seemingly designed as much to populate kids’ meals and video games as they are to move the story of the movie forward.

If the technical achievements of Avatar soar to heights previously unseen (which they most certainly do), the shortcomings of a stilted dialogue, one-dimensional characters and a thin, all-too-familiar story brings the film back down to earth.

Most, if not all of the characters, are under-served by the material. Sam Worthington, as Jake, and Zoe Saldana, as the strangely-hot ten-foot tall blue alien Neytiri, manage to get all the mileage they can out of what they’re given. In fact, this is the first time I’d say the technical imitations presented by computer animation is not the limiting factor in the audience connecting to characters “meant” to appear as real as we are.

The problem is that regardless how authentic this world seems, the characters are cardboard cutouts, stereotypes of what studios think we want to see on screen. It’s not enough that Jake is there to replace his twin brother, he also has to be a wheelchair-bound veteran? Colonel Quartich, the black-hearted, win-at-all-costs military man has to wear the battle scars of a previous encounter with the natives, as if his boiling hatred wasn’t enough to get the point across? Again, all of this plays well when molded into action figures, but it just feels forced and over-the-top here. Welcome to the land where nuance is dead.

And when the so-obviously evil Quaritch barks his orders to his “troops” or delivers Cameron’s idea of a clever one-liner, chances are you’ll cringe, like I did. You might wince. And you’ll wonder why the bad guys have to be so bad, the good guys so pure, and the grey area in-between, where things really get interesting, remains empty.

But the greatest failure of the material has to be that, from the moment Jake steps foot on Pandora, we know how this is going to go. We know what he wants. We know who is going to stand in his way. We know which characters will be sacrificed. And we know, come the end credits, that a song, possibly sung by Enya, will be played.

And throughout, Cameron does nothing to make us question any of it. In a world where anything seems to be possible, the biggest disappointment has to be that the story just doesn’t live up to the setting.

And so, what ’s the take-away?

You will be entertained. Period. You will, at times, lose yourself in Cameron’s world. (I certainly did.) But I left the theater thinking how much greater the experience could have been, if for a moment Cameron wouldn’t have followed the obvious road map to get to Pandora.

You owe it to yourself to experience Avatar in 3-D, on the big screen. Just be sure to switch off the logical, critical side of your brain first. And enjoy the long ride.