Film review: Avatar

THERE is a moment in Avatar when I found myself mouthing out loud a plea to a character not to move out from behind a tree and face the hell being unleashed upon her.

When such a thing happens, you know you've reached a certain level of emotional engagement with a character.

Such is the pull of James' Cameron's vividly real alien world and civilisation.

I only read one review of this film before going to see it. I had intentionally avoided them, but I came across this one review by mistake and the headline and closing paragraphs caught my eye.

They suggested Avatar was visually stunning, but did not draw the viewer in from an emotional stand-point. In other words, it was pretty, but without depth.

So I headed for the cinema prepared for enjoyment, but nothing too taxing on the brain.

I should have made better preparations, because from the moment wheelchair-bound marine Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) steps into his Avatar body, this film has a firm clasp on your heart.

And the grip tightens from there on in.

Moving out from the security of mankind's base on the planet Pandora to the wild jungle, you are taken on an incredible journey which you are immersed in like never before thanks to the awesome new world of digital 3D.

To take a couple of steps back, Avatar is about mankind's (predominantly America's) arrival on an alien planet, called Pandora, which is actually a moon orbiting a gas giant.

They are there because of a mineral, worth billions back home, but there's a problem. The indigenous population, the Na'vi, a race of 9ft tall, blue skinned, nature-loving people, are sitting on one of the biggest concentrations of the mineral on the surface.

So the powers-that-be grow avatars from the DNA of the Na'vi and humans. Put your DNA-matched human in a special pod and they can transfer their thoughts in to the Na'vi body and head off to negotiate with the natives.

Of course, for Sully, having no use of his legs and being unable to afford the surgery that would help him walk again, living inside a Na'vi body is a revelation.

By accident, he ends up among the real Na'vi, but while scientist Dr Grace Augustine (Sigourney Weaver) would like him to study them and the moon they inhabit, Colonel Miles Quaritch wants him to spy on them, in return for a new set of legs back on Earth.

So Sully must decide between helping the Na'vi, or helping to destroy them.

Of course, there are too many parallels through history to mention, but time and again we have seen technologically primitive civilisations destroyed or diluted almost to extinction by the encroachment of more modern peoples.

For this reason, what happens in Avatar is not unexpected, but it is upsetting, particularly at one turning point moment which director James Cameron must surely have based around the destruction of the Twin Towers on 9/11.

Pandora is so incredibly beautiful, its people so complex and engaging, there is only one side you would find yourself fighting for.

The fighting is brilliantly realised, its intensity shocking, but it is the journey up to this point, made hand in hand with Na'vi princess Neytiri (Zoe Saldana) that makes it mean so much.

This is just a movie, of course. It may be the true herald of the new era of 3D cinema, it may be technically superb, but it's still just another great landmark film, like 2001: A Space Odyssey, like Star Wars, like Lord of the Rings.

If you watch it dispassionately, critically, almost from a third person perspective, then you perhaps won't be mouthing words to characters in the film like I was.

But if you forget it's just a movie and let cinema do what it's supposed to – transport you to other places, other worlds and other lives, then you'll find this film penetrating far deeper than the lenses of your 3D specs.

You'll feel angry, scared, maybe even in love, and you'll feel much better for the experience.

PT

PT watched Avatar at the Odeon in Parc Tawe, Swansea.