“Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart,” said William Wordsworth. Thus, without letting our admiration for James Cameron come in the way of our verdict on ‘Avatar’, with a heavy heart, we’ll have to say that we found Cameron’s highly anticipated, expensive motion picture ‘Avatar’ not living up to our expectations. Many who have seen the film have an opinion that since so much time (10 years), effort and sweat has gone into creating stereoscopic 3D effects for the film, and combining live and computer animation, one ought to appreciate it. True as it might be, at the end of the day, if a film fails to establish an emotional connect with the audiences, no effects whatsoever can salvage it or make it special.
Coming to the story, Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) is an ex-marine who is forced into participating in Avatar program. The program is setup by humans and comprises of encroaching a distant moon Pandora as it has an abundance of precious minerals on its land. However, getting hold of Pandora won’t be easy as humans can’t breathe on it. Also, the warrior Na’vi tribe resides in it.
In order to encroach Pandora’s land, one has to be able to breathe its air and thus become one of the Na’vis. Scientists thus create these genetically-bred human-Na’vi hybrids known as Avatars. The Avatars have a Na-vi body and a human DNA. Jake becomes one such Avatar...human kind’s weapon to make truce with Na’vis and thus force them to evacuate their planet. As Jake starts shuttling between his human and Na’vi body, he starts getting emotionally attached to Pandora and there begins the conflict between his medium of existence.
Avatar begins well but goofs up as it progresses. The story which seems promising initially starts faltering the moment Cameron shows Jake fall in love with a Na’vi woman. The film then on becomes just another clichéd love story where a hero will save his lover and her people from the villains. The villains happen to be humans here who now want to wage a war on the Na’vis as they refuse to give in to their demands. Jake even readies himself to battle it out with the humans to save his Na’vi tribe... things people do for love! If the love wasn’t clichéd enough, Cameron even makes his hero single out the lead villain and engage him in a one-to-one fist fight with him!
Avatar begins well, drags tremendously in between and then picks up on its pace towards the climax, but its too late by then. Titanic oozed romance and we loved it but the setting of Avatar didn’t require romance as its prime ingredient. This wrong move of Cameron transforms a sci-fi ‘Avatar’ into a highly clichéd run-of-the-mill dramatic love story set against a war backdrop.
The film is a visual delight, but lacks an original plot. This visual treat doesn’t make up for the weak storyline. The infusion of human trauma in an idyllic fantasy setting doesn’t seem to be a good idea! Avatar loses direction somewhere along the way, and its huge length plays spoil sport too.
Performances are decent, but not outstanding. Unfortunately, so is the film! However, ‘decent’ is not what one expects from a James Cameron.
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ReplyDeleteAside from the fact that the whole thing was basically made in the valley, like mike says it “disrupts an entire industry.”