The British Fantasy Society Forum

[Tony Williams]

I'm rather startled to see that no-one seems to have posted anything about this yet. This is my take on it:

I finally managed to see this one, although it was a close-run thing. I was determined to get the maximum benefit from the much-praised 3D CGI by seeing it on the huge IMAX screen, and duly booked to go to the nearest one, a train journey away. On the morning I was due to go, a heavy overnight snowfall had added to the chaos of almost three weeks of freezing weather and snow, causing major transport disruption with doom-laden warnings for those foolish enough to poke their noses outside their homes. I nearly didn’t bother to make the attempt, but in the end I slogged the half-mile through the snow to the station, to find that not only did my train turn up (and arrive at its destination) on time, but the one home did as well. Just occasionally, everything goes right!

So, to the film. This review will contain some spoilers but I don’t think this matters because the story has been written up so widely; also because the plot is straightforward and predictable with no unexpected twists, so knowing what happens is unlikely to spoil anyone’s enjoyment of this highly visual entertainment.

The plot has been much criticised, with reason. It is very simplistic, divided into good and bad guys with no grey areas; the characters are little more than caricatures. The good guys are the humanoid natives (purely CGI) of the planet Pandora, who live in harmony with their environment at a stone-age level of technology, aided by a handful of the humans who have arrived on the planet. The bad guys are all the rest of the heavily-armed humans, who are systematically strip-mining the planet for a valuable ore without regard for the natives or their environment, and are motivated by a combination of ruthless corporate greed and gung-ho militarism.

The few good humans are mostly scientists who have developed avatars to deal with the natives. These avatars are vat-grown bodies which look like the natives but have a mixture of genes from them and from specific humans. These humans can mind-link with their avatars and effectively inhabit their bodies as if they were their own for hours at a time. One of the avatars belongs to Jake, a crippled former US marine, who accidentally becomes accepted by one of the native tribes and literally goes native himself. He eventually leads them in their fight against the human invaders, an opportunity for some dramatic – and rather overlong – battle scenes.

I’m not quite sure exactly what the director, James Cameron, had in mind (it’s never wise to assume that you can tell – I’ve had reviewers be quite wrong about the source of inspiration for my books). The film seems to me to be a condensed allegory of the 19th century clash between native North American Indians and the European-origin settlers. This is rubbed home by the fact that the culture of the natives is reminiscent of the Indians while the bad humans are American; a source of unhappiness to some in the USA, although they should take comfort in the fact that the good humans are American as well (in contrast, I am told by film buffs that Hollywood usually employs English actors only to play the bad guys…). Just to make audience support for the natives even more certain, they are preternaturally appealing - especially the females, who have huge wide eyes, sexy voices and supple bodies which move with fluid grace.

So there is nothing special or original about the plot, a standard tale of brave natives helped by a hero who has changed sides to battle against the evil members of his own kind, plus a dollop of cross-cultural (in this case interspecies) romance. It has been rightly observed that the plot closely resembles Dancing With Wolves, with a dash of Dragonflight thrown in. The only time I was taken by surprise was right at the end, when Jake’s voice-over commented on the “aliens returning home” – a nice touch which inverted normal assumptions.

However, it wasn’t the plot which made me (and I suspect most other viewers) want to watch Avatar but the spectacle, and on that score the film does indeed deliver spectacularly. The exotic landscape, flora and fauna of Pandora are richly portrayed; the quality of the CGI would have seemed miraculous only a few years ago. The 3D greatly adds to the effect without being obtrusive, and so does the big IMAX screen which allows viewers to become immersed in the film.  Whatever you may think of the plot, this is a wonderful visual treat and is well worth seeing for that reason alone. It really does raise standards to a new level, and any future SFF films with fictional CGI environments will be judged technically against Avatar. Do try to see it at an IMAX if at all possible, or at the very least in 3D at a cinema. This is one film that I don’t expect I will ever bother to watch on TV since it would lose the great majority of its impact. To sum up: the story is easy to poke holes in, but the film must be seen.

(An extract from my SFF blog)

[Pigasus]

This gets a 4-star rating from The ZONE's reviewer...
Avatar review on zone-sf.com

I agree it deserves an 8/10 score for sci-fi action & spectacular visual effects, even if its genre content is derivative (basically, just Emerald Forest meets Aliens), and its plot is entirely predictable.

[Leemanchee]

I feel sorry for James Cameron & Avatar. True it's not the most original story line and it's simple. But why spoil something so spectacular and revolutionary with complicated plots. I think keeping it simple worked for the movie, it allowed us to be able to concentrate on the imagery and wonder of such a fantastic world.

Also some of the films it's been compared to arrived after Cameron had originally penned his idea, he unfortunately had to wait for the tech to catch up with his imagination.

I loved the film, but I'm not happy to hear that there may be a sequel and even possibly a third. It won't have the same impact, unless they do pull out a spectacular story to match the vision.

If it were my film, I'd be very proud and pretty smitten with the billions it's racking up.

[gileadslostson]

Richard K Morgan's Carefully Considered and Balanced Review

[Raven Dane]

Loved Avatar !!!!   I was enchanted by the depiction of Pandora and its eco system. The 3D was used to perfection, not to shove images into the audience's face but to bring us into the world. I know I wasn't the only one trying to catch one of those dandilion fluffy things when they seemed to float around our heads.
I was also delighted to note the three 12 year old lads I took to the film were cheering on the Na'vi and not the gungho space troopers.

[Dave Price]

I would agree about the spectacle, but the story was an outer-space rehash of films like 'Dances With Wolves', 'The Last Samurai', 'and 'A Man Called Horse'. The spectacle aside, there was a definite feeling of having seen it all before. Having said that, it is certainly worth seeing.

[LouM]

I finally managed to get to see this last night in 3D.

I completely agree with everything said about the derivative nature of the plot, but I think (at least in the 3D aspect) it doesn't really matter. I would probably have been just as happy with it if there had been no attempt at a plot at all! The attention to detail, too: things like the flies among the trees in Pandora and the floating sparks... absolutely wonderful.

When you remove the 3D, of course - if you were to watch it at home on dvd, for example - you would be left wondering what all the fuss was about: no doubt about it, as the writing wasn't particularly strong. But as it is, in 3D, at a cinema with a decent screen and sound - it's really quite something (and well worth the babysitter...).

[Pigasus]

..if you were to watch it at home on dvd, for example - you would be left wondering what all the fuss was about

A good point also made by VideoVista's review of Avatar.

I wonder... what are the odds that we'll see a cash-in DVD re-release this Xmas, with loads of extras?

[John Forth]

A film best described as 'functional'.

[Stephen Palmer]

I watched this for the first time a couple of days ago, and, well... nice eye-candy, but otherwise every bleedin' cliche in the book! 

[David A. Riley]

I've had this on DVD for several weeks now and haven't been tempted to watch it. Not sure why.

[Wroclaw]

Watched Avatar last night, at last. I see now why the aliens had to look like punchable American teenagers: if the facial expressions were too alien the audience would have been unable to relate to them. Damn, I found that 15 foot blue girl quite attractive...  makes me feel kinky just admitting that.

Of course, at one literal level it was the most ridiculous hokum (floating sky islands defying gravity while water falls normally... Roger Dean would have been well advised to sue) with all the expected macho Hollywood clichés. Then again, at a metaphorical level it worked very well, and indeed is an utterly blatant anti-war-in-Iraq statement. Unobtainium (can't believe they used that term) = oil? Also, then the macho clichés could be read as part of the satire. Significant, with all the other options possible, that they chose to have helicopter-type human vehicles, to recall Vietnam and more recent debacles. If they'd released this film say three years earlier, I think it might have run into real trouble with right-wing critics.

Of course, visually it was utterly stunning, and the years of research gone into creating alien lifeforms and scenery and culture are a milestone: showing us what a moment in human imaginative development we have really arrived at now. So are we ready to meet real aliens? Ha ha, the film could be read as a public information film offering a very uncomfortable answer to that, then again, the fact that we are capable of such circumspection is in itself a kind of salvation, but not enough, I fear. That black safety curtain cordoning off our solar system shall remain in force for another century yet one suspects...

I have a theory that Hollywood's films can be read like the dreams of a vast mind, and that films like this are very revealing of the state of the western psyche. Never before have I seen a film that expresses such wistful national self-loathing on the part of America. It's a good sign, and if the latest “Insurgents” (Taliban) could swallow their pride and drag themselves to a good cinema, I reckon they'd be dancing in the aisles. Hell, it's just entertainment, I know that too. Nobody could watch this film and not be hugely entertained and that's the bottom line. Even occasionally, despite your best efforts to resist its sticky-sweet moments, moved, let's face it. It's our own very tragic human history they're busking with, even though they didn't ask our permission to do it, and you'd have to be a numbskull not be emotional about that.

Like all good sci-fi, Avatar is a warning rather than a statement of what will necessarily ever happen. The statement that Earth has been laid waste is cleverly held back until the end of the film, lest we have too much sympathy for the real "aliens": us. It is not too late for us to halt the deforestation and destruction of our own eco-system. To me, this film seems to foreshadow a complete schism in society between the vested interests of our current way of life, and those who are tired of it. The most alienating recent American experience has been the so-called War On Terror, and Avatar in a way is its mirror image. That something so alienating as to turn ourselves into the villains could also be so universally entertaining is a perverse miracle, and to be applauded.

As a footnote: I was interested by the ridiculous but endearing notion in the film of every creature on Pandora having a kind of USB lead dangling from its hair, waiting to be connected up to fellow creatures. The stuff of weird dreams indeed. A great example of how, as predicted, Mankind will redefine itself in terms of the machine. There is a deep terror as well as appeal about such a notion, and there are disabled people as we speak cruising the net via neural implants. Like I said, try reading these films like dreams of the disturbed, and you’ll discover a whole new level. Funnily enough, there’s more mileage for this kind of psychoanalysis in these big blockbusters than in better arthouse films, possibly because of the huge teams of people that work on them. But that comes back to my theory of latent group-consciousness, and that will have to wait for another day...