Film review: Avatar

BY CHRIS SCHULZ

Can a man in a smurf suit fall in love with a smurf?

At its most basic level, that's the premise behind Avatar - director James Cameron's massively hyped first feature since 1997's Titanic that, at US$237 million, is the most expensive movie ever made.

But Avatar is about one heck of a lot more than two lean and lanky blue-hued aliens - one of which is a human posing in his "avatar" body - falling in love and gadding about on a foreign planet.

Cameron packs his ambitious film full of stunning visuals, vibrant colours, richly rendered landscapes, looming mountains, towering trees, giant flowers and glow-in-the-dark fireflies. You can certainly see where all that money went.

Pandora, the foreign planet that provide's the film's setting, is also populated by incredibly detailed characters, robotic machinery and lush scenery straight out of Cameron's imagination - and possibly updated from his earlier films Aliens and Terminator - all of which comes to life thanks to the film's pioneering use of 3D technology.

If you haven't yet checked out a film in 3D, or you have but were underwhelmed, this is the one that will you go, 'Wow'.

You won't grow weary of Avatar's look and feel - even during the film's slower moments, you'll find yourself gazing around the screen in wonder, and at the emotion-filled faces of alien species the Na'vi - but over its 160-minute running time, you might get tired of the plot.

Avatar follows Jake Sully (played by the mostly excellent Sam Worthington), a wheelchair-bound marine who takes up his late brother's position on Pandora, which is full of untapped energy reserves being mined by a company called SecFor.

Sully takes control of an "avatar" - a body combining human and Na'vi elements that is controlled while in a deep sleep - in a bid to infiltrate the alien race and get them to move from their home, which sits on top of the biggest energy reserves on the planet.

Sully succeeds in joining the tribe, but things start going haywire when his relationship with his trainer Neytiri (a fiesty Zoe Saldana) grows into something more than it should, and he becomes too engrossed in his avatar life.

Hey, it's happened to plenty of other internet addicts. Anyone keen for a game of Sim Smurf?

As the lines start blurring between which side Sully is on and a human-alien war looms, you start to realise that the plot is pretty simple stuff.

It doesn't help that Giovanni Ribisi - as SecFor's unscrupulous boss Parker Selfridge - and Stephen Lang - war-mongering military leader Miles Quaritch - were given little wiggle room and forced into character cliches.

Even the usually excellent Sigorney Weaver, as botanist Dr Grace Augustine, is all over the place, switching between chain-smoking hothead and caring environmentalist willy nilly.

So you could criticise Cameron for not being more adventurous with Avatar - especially when it spends its last quarter blasting audiences into submission as a brutal and bludgeoning war film, with secondary characters being killed off, more mechanic endeavours than Transformers 2 and a final one-on-one showdown between the two protagonists.

But it seems churlish to complain when there's so much to like about Avatar. It might not be perfect - Cameron will have a chance to push things further with two rumoured sequels - but he's found a way to beat those pesky downloaders with a summer blockbuster that lives up to its hype and brings a sense of awe back to cinema.

That, in itself, is a titanic achievement.

* What did you think of Avatar? Post your comments below.

- © Fairfax NZ News