Dimensionality - and lack thereof.

On Thursday afternoon I went to see Avatar, the must-see movie of the moment, and I strongly recommend that anyone planning to see it should take advantage of the 3-D option if it's available in your area.  (I'm sorry, Dorothy, neither Trail nor Castlegar seem to be offering anything other than plain old vanilla 2-D.)

Avatar deals with the discovery of valuable mineral resources on Pandora, a distant moon which is inhabited by a native race called the Na'vi.  In order to more easily negotiate with the Na'vi in Pandora's unbreathable atmosphere, artificial life forms - the "avatars" of the title - are created from a combination of human and native DNA. The incredibly expensive avatars can only be linked with the contributors of their human DNA, so when one of the controllers dies in an accident, his twin brother, paraplegic ex-Marine Jake Sully, is invited to take his place.

After his avatar becomes lost in the jungle, Sully is reluctantly rescued by one of the ten-foot-tall blue natives, a female hunter named Neytiri.  Her father, the chief of the Omaticaya tribe, decides that Neytiri will train Sully to see if one of the "sky people" can be made to understand their ways.

During his apprenticeship with the tribe, Sully provides information about them to the military presence on the moon, but also falls in love with both Pandora and Neytiri.  When the military decides to forcibly remove the tribe from their home above a prime deposit of minerals, Sully is forced to choose between his divided loyalties, and goes to war for Pandora.

As well he should - after all, Pandora is the real star of Avatar.  Writer/director James Cameron hired botanists, physicists, linguists and archeologists to make his world a fully rounded and detailed creation. The resulting multicoloured, bioluminescent computer-generated biosphere with its neurally linked flora and fauna, its flying dragons and floating mountains, is a visual feast that has to be seen to be fully appreciated.  No written description would do it justice.  The 3-D element certainly adds to the experience of Pandora, but even without that bit of icing on the cake, the cake is very tasty. 

However, I have to be honest - don't go to Avatar looking for similar innovation in plot or character.  I was disappointed to see that no cliché was left unturned in the writing of the screenplay, and the inhabitants of Cameron's world don't benefit from the same creativity and brilliance used in the development of that world.

The soldier who goes from spying on the Na'vi to fighting for them; the heartless, profit-oriented corporate manager; the chieftain's daughter who goes from disdain for the alien interloper to love; the brutal military leader who views the deaths of women and children as just part of a good day's work - I kept waiting for one character, any character to do something unexpected!

The movie is utterly and completely predictable: no ambiguity, no subtext, no surprises.  Everything happens exactly as you expect it to - as an example, the second we were introduced to Tsu'Tey, the suspicious and unfriendly Na'vi hunter who is supposed to marry Neytiri, I knew he was as dead as if he had put on a red shirt and beamed down with Captain Kirk.

I don't want to suggest that Avatar is a bad movie, it's certainly very watchable and enjoyable, but I was disappointed to find it to be such a simple movie.  I admire James Cameron's exploration of the 3-D effect in Avatar - now if only he'd used a similar technique to keep the plot and characters from being quite so one-dimensional.

- Sid