Doublespeak

Cameron’s ‘Avatar’ is a great movie. It’s absolutely beautiful to look at and people will be talking about it for a long time to come. However a great looking movie doesn’t always mean an interesting one. (Just look at the last two Matrix movies or 300 or even Transformers) Here’s what makes this movie a disappointment for me

1. For all the creativity shown in depicting the planet Pandora, it feels like all the creativity was spent on the beauty of the forests and the level of detail in the creatures, but not on the concept of what would make the planet different. Pandora seems to be just like earth, just prettier and completely interconnected. The trees look like earth trees (just more luminescent), the animals are just like earth animals, only with six legs and a lot more prehistoric. Almost as if Pandora is a Disney fantasy mated with Jurassic Park. Is that the best they could come up with in ten years?
2. The Na’vi are just Native Americans in a different world. Taller and blue skinned instead of dark skinned, but otherwise the same. Down to the jewellery and customs. I can understand why they would be humanoid for the story, but it’s hard not to draw conclusions about this being a space-Pocohontas when you are constantly feeling that the Na’vi are just humans with blue stuff smeared on them. After a while, you stop noticing that they are taller than humans because there are few scenes where they actually stand with humans.
3. The natives have very unbelievable statistics. Where are the variations that you normally see everywhere? The women are identical, have the same boobs and the men are all exactly the same kind of lean. It’s almost as if they made one model and then multiplied them for the animation.
4. Very cheesy dialogue and predictable plot. A predictable plot is not bad as long as the treatment is different. Unfortunately this is as cheesy as it gets.
5. Deux ex machina – when Jake Sully was praying to the tree, I almost felt like I was watching a 60′s era hindi movie where the heroine would pray to some gods and there would be a miracle in the climax of the movie. And that’s exactly what happened here.
6. The airships are all armored and bulletproof (made amply clear in the scene where an airship is shot at and nothing happens). They show arrows just bouncing off them, but when Jake Sully decides to fight back, he’s able to punch holes in the glass using the same arrows. Really?
7. Very stereotyped and one-dimensional characters. The bad guys are almost comically bad – beyond what’s believable. The good guys are almost stupidly good. Jake Sully gets accepted into the Na’vi clan within a few lines of the script with no good explanation why. (Yeah, there was a ‘sign’)
8. A lot of work was put in to make the Na’vi look believable with incredibly good detailing and skin textures. However, while the robots are huge and appear to move with the expected body weight, the Na’vi move in a cartoonish way as if they are feather-light. Reminded me of the bad physics in the first Hulk movie.

These might be little things, but when you are watching something that’s billed as an epic, these little things can be big ruiners.