Avatar

Genre: Sci-fi/ Action

Cast: Sam Worthington, Zoe Saldana, Sigourney Weaver, Stephen Lang, Michelle Rodriguez, Giovanni Ribisi, Joel David Moore, CCH Pounder, Wes Studi, Laz Alonso

Director: James Cameron

Being screened at theatres near you

Any lingering suspicions that James Cameron has become the Al Gore of Hollywood will be firmly extinguished by his new, monstrously-hyped creation. For a while, it looked as if he was giving us a reasonably sweet-natured blockbuster, suggesting the natural world has the power to heal us all ... or something. Then Cameron sends in the helicopter gunships and starts blowing shit up. Good way to undermine your own message.

Avatar is the first film in more than a decade from the man behind Titanic — still the all-time box-office champ. The success of that film presumably allowed Cameron to write his own cheques for this one, and it’s a project that’s been stewing on the back burner for at least as long. And whatever the truth behind the rumoured hundreds of millions spent on it, Cameron gives Hollywood a lot of bang for its buck.

Avatar, in all conscience, looks fantastic — a near-seamless melding of fantasy extraterrestrial landscapes and cutting edge computer-generated imagery, all inserted beautifully into high-testosterone camerawork.

But what is this highest-of-high-end image-making aimed at? Cameron has constructed a fable combining militaristic sci-fi, vacuous eco-waffle and an intra-species love story.

The central character is Jake Sully (Sam Worthington), a paraplegic marine assigned to a mining colony on the alien world of Pandora, where he joins a band of nerdy scientists trying to establish friendly relations with the locals; this they hope to achieve by fusing their brains with specially developed beings (the ‘avatars’) that are a blend of human and alien DNA. The locals turn out to be spindly blue 10-foot humanoids with distractingly twitchy ears. Sully quickly falls for the mystical rabbitings of the tribe, involving memory-harbouring trees, intimate relationships with flying lizards and other such prog-rock-influenced stylings.

Sully’s position is made considerably more tricky by the genocidal glee of his human military commander, who — in a plot move shamelessly similar to Cameron’s

earlier film, Aliens — is prepared to cause mass casualties in the

service of the sleazy mining-corporation executive.

There are heavy-handed attempts to implant contemporary references (at one point, the marines are

told to fight ‘terror with terror’), but there’s no mistaking what Avatar is taking aim at: the founding myth of America, and the incursions of European colonists into indigenous civilisations.

To his credit, Cameron is a skilful narrative organiser, and fairly soon he has you rooting for the aliens, not those pesky human invaders. This may not be the most tasteful approach, however, to use on an American audience that still doesn’t appear to feel especially guilty about what happened to the indigenous people on their own continent.

Be that as it may, Avatar tries to have it both ways, to be preachy and a thrill-ride at the same time. It doesn’t pull it off — it’s baggy and just not quick on its feet. Cameron used to be the tautest film-maker around, but he got slack.