Avatar is a unique movie in that you will get the exact same experience watching it normally as you would watching it with earplugs in. You see a guy in a wheelchair. Thanks to science, that guy becomes a big, blue, anthropomorphic cat. He gets lost in the jungle. He finds some other big, blue, anthropomorphic cats, except they're primitive and oooh boy, they don't like this guy. Apparently, whenever this guy goes to sleep, he's not a cat anymore. The guy talks with a man with gray hair and scars who is clearly a villain and cannot be up to anything good. Then the guy is a cat again. And hour and a half where nothing interesting happens. The guy who is clearly a villain attacks the primitive cats. The primitive cats have accepted the wheelchair guy as one of their own. They fight. They win. The wheelchair guy is a cat forever. The end.
This movie is not dialogue-driven. It's not story driven. It's hardly driven at all. The entire movie is so James Cameron can rub the special effects straight in your face. The worst part is, the movie isn't even subtle about it. Instead of James Cameron shyly unzipping the pants of cinema and giving you quick glimpses at his massive animation budget, he tears them off, straddles your face, and budget-slaps your repeatedly across the jaw. The movie is filled with scenes playing in slow motion for no reason, and you can practically hear James Cameron sitting in the seat behind you, prodding the back of your head, and shouting "Look at that! Look at it! I made that! Doesn't it look realistic?!"
And that's another problem with the movie. Though the special effects were designed to make you feel as if everything you're seeing is real, nothing looks particularly believable. Yes, I understand it takes place on a different planet, but giant blue cat monsters are not going to seem realistic, no matter how many individual frames you rendered just to make his nostrils flare like a real cat's.
Another big problem is the action sequences. For a movie that has a lot of focus on the beauty of its special effects, they seem to forget that to appreciate art, you have to be able to see it. Whenever one of the N'avii (that's the name of the cat monsters: very unsubtle stab at "Native American"? I think so) is fighting or hunting, the camera decides that everything else in the scene is more interesting than the action, and every thing is even more interesting than the last. When the main character's feline romantic interest is hunting, the camera immediately swings away from the stabbing to look at a leaf, then away from the leaf to look at the ground, then away from the ground to look at the sky, and away from the sky to look at some trees. It sometimes feels as if the cameraman was a small child with ADHD, but then you remember that everything is done in special effects, so the animators must have thought it was a good idea. I'm not sure how other people feel, but I'm not fond of motion-sickness during action sequences.
However, despite its flaws, Avatar is not a bad movie. That being said, it's not a great movie, either. It's an okay movie with stunning visual effects. The story is stolen directly from Dances with Wolves or Pocahontas, except with the N'avii instead of the Native Americans, but neither of those movies were bad movies, meaning that James Cameron couldn't go wrong with completely taking the exact plot from them. Still, Avatar is nothing extraordinary, and is misrepresented by its advertisements. As to whether or not I'd advise seeing it, well, that's up to you. It's a decent movie, but it's skippable. Rent Pocahontas and change the color contrast on your TV set so that everyone is blue, and you'll get basically the same experience, sans laser guns.
Overall Score: 6/10
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