Avatar

Highly hyped, grossing billions of dollars in ticket sales, this film is being touted as a breakthrough. We went to College Point Multiplex Cinema: it has twelve screens, and is enormous: wide, expansive lobby on the second floor with candy machines and a concession stand, a sitting area, and six screens on each side. Before the movie started we were subjected to commercials, then to an unending strem of trailers for coming releases. Animation, dragons and violence are recurring themes. Finally the film started.

Special effects are indeed impressive. The soundtrack compliments the action. Year 2154, cryonics, soldiers, outer space. Action moves along. Nothing equals watching a film on a big theater screen. The movie moves along, the story developed, action, special effects. Yet after a while it became apparent that it wasn't much of a film, really. Some of the dialogue was utterly inane. Characters are cliches or stereotypes, aren't fleshed out, and aside from three main humans, are two-dimensional cardboard cutouts. The Na'vi—a sentient humanoid species indigenous to Pandora, the blue beings, are grand. The story does move along, but it sputters, and, o my, that dialogue.

Rotten Tomatoes: It might be more impressive on a technical level than as a piece of storytelling, but Avatar reaffirms James Cameron's singular gift for imaginative, absorbing filmmaking. I agree, mostly: it is far more impressive technically than a story; it is imaginative; but absorbing is too strong a term. For me, anyway. Critics seem to like it: Roger Ebert gave it 4 stars and gushed about it, as did Manohla Dargis in the NY Times.