Critics reviews

This film came out in 2009, on a political cusp: it couldn’t quite make its mind up about whether it was a gung-ho shock’n’awe action movie or not: a Dubya film that had entered the more caring world of Obama. Technical innovation in movies can quickly look not obsolete exactly, but less like an overwhelming reason to feel excited.

Cinema can also produce a world through artifice and animation. It is a boundless ground for fantasy. Avatar exploits or explores this potential without abandoning some basic commitments to the profilmic or the indexical. It's not even a good film. Its narrative and thematic content borrow even more than its imagery. Yet there is something there, some faint promise of a better world remains. It may have everything to do with the sensations of depth, line, and color.

The much-hyped sci-fi actioner Avatar is the perfect showcase for Cameron’s strengths…and his flaws... Although, in truth, it all looks artificial (half immersive videogame; half astonishingly animated giant Smurf epic), that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

Now we know James Cameron’s Avatar is not a brontosaurean folly but a mighty ode to Gigantism and Awesomeness. Yes, it’s also a populist crock: an attempt to rewrite (and reanimate) history with a barely disguised lefty parable of Native Americans versus capitalist imperialists who’d drive them from ancestral lands—aided by an imperialist (a marine) who has gone native.

Magnificent as Avatar often is, it comes across as kitsch, somewhat pious, and altogether a corporate production rather than one with any human personality: essentially, the CGI equivalent of Cirque du Soleil. What the film doesn't offer is any real imaginative leap.

"Avatar" would be great fun, if only Cameron - the picture's writer, director, producer and editor - had a sense of humor about himself, which he clearly doesn't. Instead Cameron - who is no longer just King of the World but Emperor of the Universe - has to make it clear he's addressing grand themes: Characters must prove their bravery, their humility as human beings and their sensitivity to indigenous peoples.

As an example of Hollywood product at its most bombastic - there's nothing like a few good explosions to transcend pesky language barriers and subtitles - "Avatar" may be the ultimate weapon of mass distraction.

Mr. Cameron might like to play with high-tech gadgets, but he’s an old-fashioned filmmaker at heart, and he wants us to get as lost in his fictional paradise as Jake eventually does.

Look past the New Age beauty of Cameron’s Pandora—and whenever the camera swoops through its verdant, psychedelic wonders, that isn’t easy to do—and Avatar is a weak patchwork of his other films... On a story level, Cameron has invested the bare minimum necessary to call Avatar into existence, and while there’s no doubting his meticulousness, the film is more demo than drama.

For most of the first hour, a good portion of the second, and even many of the 40 minutes left after that, Avatar is stupendously friggin’ rad. Like Peter Jackson’s adaptation of Lord of the Rings, it’s a conventional adventure story, but one that’s set in a world so richly and specifically imagined that it’s thrilling just to dwell inside it.

Avatar seamlessly synthesizes live action, animation, performance-capture, and CGI to create what is essentially a non-participatory computer game: Jurassic Park‘s menagerie running wild in The Matrix‘s double eXistenZ.

the director’s meticulous compositions have a vitality and richness that habitually draw one into the action even as the script works hard to call attention to its clunky self through trailer-ready one-liners and italicized loaded phrases.