+3
It's dazzling and beautifully designed. James Cameron always intends to deliver to a more widespread audience, and that's why this film was a success. The fact that the story begins with the "every man's man" twin telling the story instead of the educated scientist brother speaks volumes on that alone. I even read somewhere where he said that Neytiri, "has to have t-ts." He designed her to be anthropomorphic enough for us to identity with her as sexy and attractive... to make Jake Sully's attraction to her more plausible. I thought that was sort of sexist and annoying... but at the same time, it makes sense if you want to make a movie "look good."
The hype surrounding the film is irritating--of course, the hype surrounding anything is--and can serve as a huge turn off for just about anything. (Expect much worse from cosplayers if you ever visit a convention.) When I first saw the trailer for Avatar, I scoffed at it and thought it was going to be yet another cheese-tastic, CGI-fest with a superficial story line... much like many of the big Blockbuster films released lately.
When I read the ratings were really positive, I thought I would go see it. I actually fell in love with it. It's the only film I've seen as an adult to make me feel in awe like a little kid again. I honestly think that's what it's for--to dazzle, to look beautiful, and to deliver a simplified story that many people can relate to. Many of those aspects do ring superficial.
However, the parts of the story that appeal to me personally is the allegory; One technologically advanced race subjugates a more primitive race that lives in an undeveloped world in order to obtain their resources. I found it to be culturally and politically relevant to western history and today's issues in the Middle East, and that spoke to me. Some of Cameron's past work has made subtle commentary on corruption in corporations--original? Not really... but it's relevant to me.
The smaller plot (a la Dances with Wolves) is the part there to allow audiences to identify with the main character as he delves into the alien world--including his link, a female of the other race. This was the most predictable and least original portion of the film.
The originality in the story is the literal representation of "all life being connected" with the bio-neurological tendrils that transmitted electrical impulses of information from one living thing to the next. The "Ewya" tree stored the information--which I thought was a rather fascinating concept bringing together spirituality and science--where their afterlife is potentially their neural energy (memories/souls) being stored in a tree as a bank of biochemicals.
I'm also a huge tree-hugger--horticulturist/botanist, so it's obvious why I'm going to identify with the film on an emotional level, but I leave room for criticism as well.
Another thing I thought was interesting, was it's one of the rare occasions that alien life (excluding Star Wars, because this is in respect to people from Earth) are less technologically advanced than humans. It's the flipside of the norm, and here humans invade an alien planet for resources.
So with that, the movie appeals to the senses beautifully, aspects of the story line touched my heart and had a huge emotional impact on me, but I would never go as far as to hail it the best film of all time. It was, however, surprisingly more than I expected it to be--and as a blockbuster film, it definitely had more substance than most I've seen from Hollywood these days.
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Hollywood?... Do you have to remake every successful Swedish film?
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