This short review refers to the 2009 James Cameron film of the title Avatar.
Review
This review might be considered late; I wrote it roughly a week after seeing the film and so it might suffer in the accuracy stakes. It will also contain spoilers. One could level the further criticism that this has been said elsewhere, in much the same language. This is not because I have read other reviews before writing my own, but rather because the same awful points stick out in absolutely everyone's mind whilst watching this dire film.
First, let me say that Avatar was indeed visually sumptuous. The 3D effects, by and large, were not a gimmick which was thrashed for the full 160 minutes, and was used to add some visual depth to already attractive scenes. That said, I don't feel I would have enjoyed it any less if good ol' 2D had been used; I rather get the feeling that cinemas, realising that now films can be rendered quite nicely on televisions, laptops and the larger mobile phones, know that they are rightly facing the chop. These money-grubbing, large-room-owning fools are scrabbling around for something - /anything/ - that won't be as impressive in the home as in a large room filled with red seats and unpleasant strangers. Good luck to them!
A precis of the film: Mankind is evil, lands on planet with metal deposits, rapes natives. Natives discover magic inside themselves, win.
(Mankind. In an aside I shan't explore further, this film might be said to just barely pass the Bechdel test; we have a total of four main female characters and six, maybe-seven-if-you-count-the-third-scientist-but-he-was-rubbish-anyway, male characters. None of the women were on the side of evil - so, not really allowed to talk to one another but caricatured as... well, non-rapists. Grace and Trudy briefly interact over where to first land the ornithopter - sorry, helicopter, and Grace addresses an audience of people that include, for example, Moat. A good example of the lack of subtlety in this script is the way that there is no depiction of the internal power structure of the capitalist machine, just a guy shouting orders from a robot suit.)
Ornithopter is really the more correct term, if you've ever come across Dune. The helicopter gunships don't have wings that flap, but the rest of the film really feels like James Cameron went to himself "You know what audiences hate? Deserts. I bet I could take a recent movie flop* set in a desert and put it in a jungle and it would be hailed as excellent." and didn't stop to consider until he was stepping onto that red premier carpet and suddenly thinking "Shit.".
We have a Jake Sully, who was wanted only for his genetics, moved from one planet to another by the EVIL MINING HIERARCHY. He meets FEMALE ROLE MODEL HE SOON SURPASSES in the form of Reverend Mother Grace Augustine, as well as SUPPORTING MALE CAST in the form of Norm, nee Gurney. Jake-Paul Sully is separated from his usual trappings of western power and stumbles into the hiding place of the natives. Sully immediately meets the Neytiri-cum-Chani and - for no real reason, is accepted by Moat (the spiritual leader, or "Wild Reverend Mother" as I have been thinking of her) and Eytukan-and-Tsu'tey-cum-Stilgar.
So Paul Mua'dib learns the ways of the desert dwelling people for a few months, learning to ride their gigantic beasts as a symbol of how in touch they are with nature and learning about their ecosystem to underline how the oil wealth of Arabia is not exploited for the benefit of the civil population. Blah, blah, blah. This was cutting satire in 1965. It is thoroughly depressing that it hasn't needed to be updated at all in 44 years - and yes, I am aware of the numerous superficial differences between Avatar and Dune.
I take a break from my analogy to point out how much more terrifying it is that the Arabs, cast as an insane weirdo underclass by Frank Herbert, have now simply been cast as aliens. Huge, blue aliens. Is the message that we're supposed to take away here that their target audience is now less capable of relating to people from a different continent than telepathic blue giants?
Don't tell me it's an allegory. Allegories are supposed to have some degree of subtlety - supposed to make you realise that you'd always believed something without knowing it. Any allegorical aspirations were wrecked somewhere during the scene in which the pantomime villain Colonel looks straight at the camera, chomps on his non-Cuban cigar, and tells us "It's almost as fun as Afghanistan" whilst firebombing an alien structure signposted "Alien Mosque".
I'll admit that nothing during watching the film was particularly stylistically unpleasant, but there was one major change I would have liked to have made. About forty minutes before the end, the evil men of humanity, or the Western portion of humanity anyway, had blown up most of the natives' civilisation and displaced 20% of their population. There was a child in the audience crying** to see the long lines of refugees, newly homeless, walking away from a gigantic fire.
It should have ended there, with fire, tears, and the success of the unchecked western capitalist machine in vomiting all over an intelligent species. Instead, the magic planet brain summoned up giant, armour-plated rhinocerotes to stomp on the men with guns. You know, there's a difference between "straining for a happy ending which has some glimmer of relevance for the point you were trying to make about humanity" and saying "Fuck it. Suddenly, by magic or telepathy or whatever, there were so many rhinos, and they only stomped on the bad people".
I rate this film 2/5: "Would stuff DVD of film down murder victim's throat to throw police off scent."
*http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0142032/
**Not joking, not exaggerating.