ViewGuide

Created Dec 21, 2009 09:14PM PST • Edited Mar 14, 2021 09:46PM PST

1. Quality

2. Summary

   Very Good 3.5

   Transcendentally beautiful yet cravenly appalling, brilliant yet formulaic, James Cameron’s latest magnum opus induces awe and disgust in equal measure. The former comes from its stunningly realized vision of an Edenic world, the latter from the seditious anti-Americanism that animates the story.

   Avatar measures up to its considerable hype and fills its nearly 3 hour length, yet its reprehensible politics and high-toned B-movie story suggest it’s likely to go down in history as little more than technical triumph.

   Will Fox sell enough tix and DVDs to justify its quarter billion dollar investment? Yes, especially given how well the Die Yankee Pig storyline will play in anti-American markets. Will it be as big as JC’s Titanic? No. While teenage girls won’t be disappointed with Avatar’s inter-species Romeo & Juliet romance, neither are they likely to come back again and again as they did to see Kate fall for Leo.

4. Acting

   Great 4.0

   Stephen Lang’s stunning performance personifies the movie’s core conundrum: A technical achievement of the highest order, it deeply betrays the honor of the United States. How could Lang, arguably the most upright actor of his generation, have stooped to play an ex-Marine Col. Craven type? He is, after all, the man who wrote and performed Beyond Glory, a one-man play about Medal of Honor recipients.

   Sam Worthington comes across as a generic stud, just as he did in Terminator Salvation.

   Zoë Saldaña voices Neytiri – the universe’s coolest alien – as sensually strong and oh so sexy. Capable of inducing blue balls? Hell yeah. Coming on top of her smoking hot Uhura, she’s the new Eartha Kitt.

   Sigourney Weaver barks effectively as the curmudgeonly scientist. But what’s up with her being a smoker? Hell, the woman doesn’t even have good cigarette moves. She looks like a priss with a hot rod. Damnit, what’s this thing doing in my hand!?

   Giovanni Ribisi has grown to be a real man. Bully for him. He plays a perfect asshole here and does it well.

5. Male Stars Really Great 4.5

   Lang is perfect, Worthington very good

6. Female Stars Great 4.0

   Saldaña is really great, Weaver very good

7. Female Costars Great 4.0

8. Male Costars Great 4.0

10. Film

    Very Good 3.5

    Cameron, a formulaic button pusher of the highest order, is extremely skilled at the fundamentals of filmcraft. To wit, every creature and most details – once introduced – return in key roles later in the story. He’s also a supremely accomplished SciFi conceptualist, as he proved with Terminator and Aliens. The King of Pandora doesn’t disappoint here, employing his fully fleshed-out avatar concept to brilliant ends. Bravo.

11. Direction Perfect 5.0

12. Play Barely OK 2.0

    The story is clever albeit formulaic. Mostly this personal vision of James Cameron is reprehensible, thus the low score.

    “Unobtainium,” there’s a clever name for a precious ore.

13. Music Good 3.0

14. Visuals Perfect 5.0

    • All hail the luminescent planet Pandora with its floating mountains and awesome flora & fauna.
    • JC uses RealD to great effect, getting extra credit for avoiding the cheap trick of flinging things into the audience.
    • The poster sucks.
15. Content

16. Edge

    Risqué 1.7

    Perhaps the most objectionable behavior is Sigourney Weaver’s smoking, as described in Acting above. Oops, am I being PC or is JC being adolescent?

17. Sex Titillating 1.7

18. Violence Fierce 2.0

19. Rudeness Polite 1.3

21. Reality

    Surreal 3.0

    Avatar’s worldview starts where the HuffPost’s leaves off. Call it HuffMeth: Left wing whack, tweaked out in 3D. Characteristically stuck in the 60s, its whole rape and pillage ethos went out with Nam movies like Platoon, yet continues to loom like a Deathstar in Hollywood’s tragically hip worldview.

    At the movie’s nadir – former US Marines destroy a civilization’s iconic tower by shooting missiles into its base and then watching it topple – it becomes clear that JC has foisted an obscene world on us in which 9/11 is fodder for popcorn propaganda. Nothing if not brilliantly calculating, he must figure that global audiences will be enticed to buy tickets for the privilege to jeer Americans.

    JC isn’t new to craven images: In True Lies he had the Governator and Jamie Lee Curtis conduct their long awaited clinch in the warm glow of a – what? – nuclear explosion. The guy’s a gas. Rhymes with ass.

    Finally, as if to reinforce the post-post-9/11 sense, my screening of Avatar was preceded by a trailer for Knight and Day, where Tom Cruise apparently plays a hijacker who kills everyone on an airliner. Great. Just great.

22. Circumstantial Surreal 3.0

    The movie’s absurdist reality conceit isn’t biological or physical but circumstantial. It asks us to believe that The Sierra Club, Greenpeace, Save the Whales, and the rest of the Left Wing Environmental Complex will have disappeared in 150 years so that Earthlings can wantonly rape and pillage a foreign land more beautiful and populated than the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

    Pigs will fly before that happens. (Oops, that would be a PhysioReality issue.)

23. Biological Supernatural 3.9

24. Physical Glib 2.0