Avatar

James Cameron’s first full-length fictional endeavor in over a decade, Avatar tells the futuristic story of a paraplegic soldier (Sam Worthington’s Jake Scully) who agrees to enter the alien world of Pandora via a 10-foot-tall surrogate – with the film subsequently detailing the battle that ensues between Pandora’s natives (the blue-skinned Na’vi) and an American military force bent on acquiring a rare mineral known as Unobtanium. Cameron, who also wrote the film’s screenplay, offers up a propulsive opening hour that’s heightened by the novelty of the setting, as the completely computer-generated landscape of Pandora is as lush and impressive as one might’ve expected. There inevitably reaches a point, however, at which the familiarity of the movie’s storyline effectively begins to impede the viewer’s enjoyment, with the almost eye-rollingly predictable nature of the protagonist’s character arc exacerbated by a midsection that’s been suffused with overlong and flat-out needless sequences (eg Jake and several natives embark upon a rite-of-passage hunting trip). It’s worth noting that such problems are generally easy enough to overlook, as Cameron matches the jaw-dropping special effects with a uniformly impressive selection of performances – thus ensuring that the viewer’s investment in the ragtag heroes’ victory over the sinister soldiers grows considerably in the buildup to the action-packed final confrontation (with Stephen Lang’s enjoyably broad work as the movie’s cigar-chomping villain only heightening this vibe). The end result is a blockbuster that ultimately manages to transcend the inherent limitations of its genre to become an involving and sporadically gripping adventure, and it’s also worth noting that not even the needless (yet admittedly impressive) use of 3D can dampen one’s enthusiasm for the proceedings.

***1/2 out of ****