Why Avatar is a bad movie

I've been meaning to write this for a couple of months, and with the Oscars coming up it's now or never. I'll say up front that I have pretty strict criteria when it comes to movies made for pure entertainment, so I don't have anything against people who enjoyed this. I also don't have that much against James Cameron for making it. I just think he's capable of making much better movies and I'm a little baffled that this is being billed as his masterpiece just because of its technological prowess (it isn't that hard to build a decent story around great effects—look at 2001 or Star Wars). 

As critics and audiences have noted ad nauseam, this movie has almost no story. No original story anyway. If you've seen a certain cowboys-and-indians flick whose name need not be repeated, you already know—almost scene for scene—what is coming next. And without a story, Avatar becomes a three-hour phantasmagoria; the only thing that keeps you awake are the Lucasian gimmicks, a fact that in and of itself should settle the magnum opus debate. Even if the acting and directing were good, the story is so hollow it overshadows any other talent in the film. I might be alone in this, but when a movie has that much money and work put into it and still can't drum up a decent plot, it shows such a contempt for its audience that the best acting and directing in the world can't convince me the story's worth following.

What's especially frustrating about this is that Cameron can make amazing movies. Aliens and T2 remain riveting precisely because their stories have a masterful command of suspended disbelief. There really could be a race of super insects deep in outer space somewhere that would wreak havoc on the humans who encounter them; there really could be a computerized weapons system that becomes self-aware and turns on its masters. Avatar asks us to belief far too much: Humans encounter a race of beings on a planet just like Earth who live, point-for-point, in a way totally opposite than us. They have a literal symbiosis with their environment that mirrors the religious symbiosis professed by human naturalists and Native Americans. The plundering humans have the crass mindset of nineteenth-century imperialists, despite that it's the future and, Iraq War conspiracies aside, corporations haven't used the Marines to facilitate land-grabbing for about seventy-five years. Oh, and rather than encounter this other species face-to-face, there's elaborate new technology that turns us into them. Which takes years to make. AAAND the new guy is a cripple so his avatar is like a new body. 

One god machine is usually too much for a top-tier movie. Avatar has a whole pantheon. Nothing about this story feels natural, even within the rather wide bounds of science fiction. It feels contrived to make a statement, which undercuts all of its grandeur.

To be fair to Mr. Cameron, Peter Jackson—with the help of Professor Tolkien—has ruined the sensibilities of most audiences. The Lord of the Rings movies have become the benchmark for epic fantasy on the big screen. But they're simply unbeatable if only because no one else in the last hundred years has told that kind of story quite so well as Tolkien. So directors get stuck mimicking him—or, in this case, just stealing another epic story and draping it over a new setting ... which would not be so horrible if any of it were reworked to fit the new setting.

This movie's gotten a lot of buzz—and nine nods—because James Cameron made it, but once the buzz has died away I can't imagine anyone going back to this in five or ten or fifteen years (there simply aren't any lasting qualities, just the rush of immediate spectacle). Here's hoping by then James Cameron will have bounced back with a film or two worth seeing. MWF