Despite having several rooms of freshly emulsioned walls to watch I feel the need to comment on this film for these reasons; Avatar has been in development for an astonishing 16 years, which would suggest that the long awaited film set to top Cameron’s ‘Titanic’ would undoubtedly be somewhat of a masterpiece. Unfortunately Avatar failed greatly to accomplish this.

The film infers to modernity and the effects on nature and indigenous populations through the pursuit of money. The film hints at empire building in Africa and deforestation. However, this is done in a poor fashion. The inference is clichéd and unoriginal. I am bored of being preached at by wealthy hypocrites with their giant carbon footprints, elucidating the notion that the human race is destroying nature. Cameron is paying homage to ‘Jurrassic park’ type films, reinforcing the notion that we shouldn’t mess with nature. This is only tolerable in masterpieces such as ‘Frankenstein’ which took Mary Shelley only two years to write as opposed to Cameron’s sixteen and in which time she bore two children. Avatar carries a $300 million price tag which could have replenished an entire forest in South America. I wonder whether any of the proceeds went to such a cause.
It is becoming awfully tiresome, reading continuous reviews saying that a film about destroying foliage is tree-mendous!

The Computer-generated Imagery is aesthetically pleasing; however the appalling storyline makes this futile and pointless. The dialogue is infantile and cringe-worthy. An episode of the children’s show Teletubbies, contains more intellectual conversation than Avatar does. Although saying that, Avatar would have been acceptable had the demographic been children. In polite terms I have concluded that Avatar was; rather clichéd, a little predictable, lacking in substance and somewhat patronising. Wait, no, it was F**cking S**t!!! Oops!

… “From the trailers I’ve seen, this film is a piece of entertainment which, while pretending to be about a love-story is, instead, a subliminal work of self-referential pop-psychology in which we see the entertainment-media technology-culture glorify itself through its very favorite vehicles: dazzling and sanitized images of war, the presentation of nature and of non-High-technology cultures as idealist utopia, and, therefore, imaginary, unreal and impossibly vain hopes.
As usual, proponents and apologists of the dominant High-technology culture, as represented in this film, are seen and heard to say, “I need your help,” even as they are engaged in the systematic and violent destruction of an alien culture. But, instead of recognizing ourselves and feeling real shame for what is an everyday aspect of modern society, the film invites us to simply objectify all that and reduce it to a simplistic morality play while the more subliminal messages soften up viewers—who’d adamantly protest their being so susceptible—to an ever-growing alienation from all that is genuine and life-affirming.
My poster-blurb for this film would run:
‘A techno-warrior-glorification entertainment masquerading as a love-story and intended to mollify, distort and manipulate what’s left of the critical faculties of an infantilized mass-entertainment culture.’
The viewer probably watches this film, stuffing the coffers of a major film studio, and never suspects that it’s deeper irony is that it is he, the viewer, who is the object of a clever corporate act of dupery, and not the characters portrayed by actors, real or computer-generated, on the screen. This is Hollywood’s supreme specialty: subtly justifying itself and its attendant technology and the anti-social cultural forms which go with them while leaving the audience in a state of thumb-sucking satisfaction.”

It would be a mistake to suppose from my comment that I think the director, James Cameron, was trying to do harm with this film. He wasn’t trying to do harm—and that’s the case with most people as they go about their daily lives. That, however, doesn’t mean that the film’s messages and the social consequences to which it contributes are benign.