Avatar
Hold up, hypothetical reader, I can read your thoughts, and can preemptively guess what is going through your mind right now: "Four and a half stars for Avatar? But it's just Dances With Wolves with blue cat people.". Why yes, yes it is. What an astonishingly witty, fresh, and perspicacious observation you have managed to make all entirely by yourself. I know you can't see it, mostly because you're a figment of my sleep-deprived imagination, o reader, but be assured that I'm writing this with one hand because the other one is busy holding my sides from splitting after bearing witness to this exemplary display of relentless hilarity you have just unleashed upon the Earth. Truly, you are a shining bastion of film criticism for pointing out that the film Avatar (2009) bears a striking resemblance to the film Dances With Wolves (1990), a conclusion nobody could have reached for themselves had it not being for this sterling piece of commentary you have oh so graciously provided us with. Since you're so clearly an intellectual giant amongst us mortals, here's a 2.9 billion dollar head-scratcher perhaps you can solve: if you're so clearly above James Cameron's game-changing sci-fi epic to end all sci-fi epics by virtue of it being way too cliche, formulaic, and cringe-inducing for your high and mighty standards, then where the Hell were you, your Majesty, when Dennis Villeneuve's Blade Runner 2049, a layered, subdued, thought-provoking film lost 80 million dollars due to its poor box office? I'll tell you where you were, you were at the cinema next door acting devastated at Thanos snapping Spider-Man away, play-pretending that anything in your dull, monotonous life as a MCU fanboy had even a tiniest smidgeon of purpose when everyone already knew everyone who got dusted would be coming back two movies from now.
The fucking balls on some people. Here is James Cameron, a rare singular anomaly in the entire history of cinema, an undisputed auteur who has somehow made the most financially successful movies of all time, and yet they remain overly expensive passion projects overflowing with care and attention from every available orifice, chiseling a jaw-dropping cinematic monument pixel by painstaking pixel to absolute perfection, and all you fuckwits have to say is "It's like Pocahontas in space, lol" (I bet most people saying that haven't even sat down to watch Pocahontas, because, had they done that, they'd have seen it rules and stopped complaining about Avatar being similar to it), before fucking off to watch something like the Mandalorian in droves, which is also incredibly generic and paint-by-numbers, except lacking the out-of-this world transcendent artistic mastery Avatar exudes in every picturesque frame, every lovingly detailed plant and creature that make this alien ecosystem beam with more energy and life than Ava's translucent neon roots, every jaw-dropping vista that pulls both you and Jake Sully further into the otherworldly beauty of Pandora, every note of James Horner's godly, penetrating soundtrack, every hernia-inducing eye-roll that occurs whenever the two cookie-cutter villains open their mouths to spout the most trite and cliche dialogue imaginable.
Okay, there's no way around it, Avatar's plot is indeed way too frought with contrivance, cliche, and some really clunky exposition, and Sam Worthington's Jake Sully isn't exactly Jack Sparrow in terms of being a compelling leading man, despite their names being similar sounding. That is as obvious a statement to make as the undisputed fact that some of the imagery in this movie will rock you to your core by offering you such spectacular beauty that has rarely been matched in the entire history of American blockbuster cinema, and certainly hasn't even come close to being topped from whatever CGI nightmares have spawned in the wake of this film's colossal footsteps.
See, the difference lies in the execution. It's one thing to be aware of Avatar as a movie, and being able to describe it to someone, and it's an entirely different thing actually watching Avatar, because there's this weird thing that happens James Cameron knows how to do better than anyone else, and it's this little something called immersion. The vivid, distinct, powerful art direction that only this most recent viewing has made me realize how fucking starved for creativity those heinous Star Wars deserts truly are, coupled with the unbelievable high-water benchmark visual effects that haven't aged a goddamn day construct a living and breathing world whose boundaries extend far beyond the four corners of the screen, and have infinitely more dimensions than the three everyone who went into cinemas in 2009 was so mesmerized by, a true spectacle for the ages, so grandiose that you don't even care anymore about Zoe Saldana cucking her betrothed man to instead have weird tail sex with Sam Worthington's fursona, so infinitesimally small in the frame as the larger-than-life landscape engulfs both them and the viewer. But okay, those are some mighty fine water and wind simulations and subsurface scatterings you have there, Jimmy, but that just makes it the most expensive and impressive technical demo of all time, movies need a story as well to balance them out.
Well, it's weird for literally the most financially successful movie of all time to be treated as an underdog, but that's ten years of regurgitated online stupidity for you, but I would like to stand and defend Avatar's story. Not its plot, God no, that is about as tepid as Michelle Rodriguez's quote unquote "character arc", but its execution. Avatar isn't the first nor the last story to exploit well-worn out tropes, that's why they're called tropes in the first place, but it might as well represent a perfection of the form. After ten years of every movie being disingenuous MCU-style self-depricating clownery, lest you accidentally get emotionally invested at anything happening at once, it's so refreshingly shocking how seriously Avatar takes itself and its cliche story. I think this is the main cause of ridicule, as modern audiences are disillusioned Zoomer cretins so fucking insecure about being genuine, and prefer it when a movie acknowledges it's operating on the same level of resentment behind thinly veiled sarcasm as they do, but James Cameron isn't interested in doing that, he doesn't have time to do that. James Cameron is here because he has a story to fucking tell, and, as generic as it might be, by God he's going to tell the shit out of it. Avatar's plot is absolutely nothing. White saviour archetype does blue face but then he gets cancelled by the girl he was simping for, until he gets uncancelled when he tweets out against the trigger-happy right-wing Capitalists razing a forest (see how any movie can sound ridiculous when you apply the ironic Zoomer cunt talk to it? If you really think about it, Christ's story is about a guy who got nailed so hard, he woke up three days later in a cave), but its story couldn't care less about that, it's about exploring the world and basking in both its beauty and danger. After all, that's why the entire first half of the film, much like Cameron's Titanic, is mostly uneventful and conflictless, as it draws you in to the world before pulling the rug down from under you, why the goal of Jake IS to learn the way of the Na'vi and get integrated in their culture, why Cameron spent such a fortune rendering out this crystalized digital masterpiece for ten years, why this fucking thing was in 3D in the first place. But by shifting the focus to the sepctacular world as opposed to the characters inhabiting it, the boring archetypal characters become less of a bug and more of a feature, mere observers whose awe can only be matched by the audience's, thus enabling the film to function on an almost purely viscerally visual level.
And it is here where Cameron truly displays why he's the undisputed master of big-budget filmmaking, because you'd be hard-pressed to find a sequence more genuinely spine-chilling that the stupendous awe overtaking your senses when the Floating Mountains first get revealed, or a romantic scene more beautifully shot than Jake and Neytyri's ethereal neon-lit union, or a second act low point more devastatingly, hauntingly brutal than the deafening silence before the final bomb shatters the foundations of the Home Tree and the wooded giant is somberly toppled atop the Na'vi's entire livelihoods, as Jake's perfect dream world comes crashing down all around him.
(Oh yeah, right, there's this whole other theme about Pandora being an ethereal dream world that gradually reveals itself to us in stages, starting with mere glimpses during the introductory scene at the military base, to Jake's first mission showing the dangers the Evil Military Dude (TM) warned him about that slowly give way of Pandora's undiscovered luminescent beauty that is only made apparent at night, i.e. when you're usually asleep and dreaming, and the ethereal spirituality of the Na'vi is purposefully likened to the synapses of the human brain, and Jake muses several times in his audiologs that he feels like his human self is the dream while he's only truly "awake" when he is in his Avatar form, not to mention the whole concept of stepping into another person's body to live out your wildest fantasies while you lie motionless in a dark chamber being pretty similar to dreams, NOT TO MENTION how the movie literally ends with Jake opening his eyes in Avatar form, as if waking up for the first time, but, hey, I forgot, this is just the cringey environmentalist Ferngully with blue aliens film, so I assumed you already knew that, considering how thorough your deep reading of the movie's themes and visual motifs is, hence why I chose not to bring it up, seeing how I thought it was obvious.)
Avatar isn't about Native Americans against Colonialists. Avatar isn't about the Amazon rainforests. Avatar didn't make 3 fucking billion because of its plot, and we all damn well know that. Avatar isn't about Jake Sully discovering he's into catgirls. Hell, Avatar isn't even really about James Cameron flexing every single bit of his biblical budget till your eyes fly out from your skull from the barrage of gargantuan iconography flashing before your eyes. Avatar is about dreams, about losing yourself to an illusion so tactile and lifelike, that it challanges every conception you had about your life. Avatar is about the pursuit of the impossible, both in front of and behind the camera, of the fantastical made tangible, of the ethereal made concrete, of the final barrier of what is cinematically possible being shatttered with a loud crackling sound nearly 120 years after the Lumieres patented moving pictures. Avatar is the ultimate culmination of the dreams of cinema. Avatar is about anyone dreaming how to film the unfilmmable, and then waking up to film it. Avatar is about George Melies dreaming of shooting a man to the moon via a canon, and then doing it. Avatar is about George Lucas dreaming of a galaxy far far away, and then bringing it to Earth. Avatar is about Steven Spielberg dreaming of dinosaurs roaming the Earth again, and then achieving it. Avatar is about James Cameron dreaming of the most fully realized fantasy world ever put on film, and then waking up to film it.
Avatar is about a wheelchair bound man dreaming of walking again, and then discovering he could fly all along. And that's more powerful than 100,000 Iron Mans snapping put together.