Movie Review: Avatar

Only two noncommercail movie showings to announce this time, as one would expect at this weekend of the year. This Saturday at 7:30, the Murdock Theatre at 536 North Broadway offers a movie everybody but me seems to love and admire and that I bite my tongue even to mention, Jean Luc Godard's Jules and Jim, with Jean Moreau as a woman I would run from like the swine flu germ but whom two purportedly normal men fall in love with; I call it two fools in pursuit of a whore, but there is no denying Jules and Jim's enormous influence in loosening up the movie form in ways that led to a lot of first-rate stuff like Pulp Fiction; I have to be grateful to it whether I like it or not. And come Sunday night, the Blank Page gallery at 917 West Douglas is showing an odd concoction of a Harry Potter movie dubbed with a sound track like Mystery Theatre, 7:30 Sunday. I don't know the actual title, if it has one, but the combination of Harry Potter and Mystery Theatre should offer something appropriate to the end of a year like this one.

And commercially, we have what may be the most expensive movie of all time, James Cameron's Avatar.

And what can you say about Avatar that we couldn't have safely predicted as soon as we heard about that budget? It was sage to say that the special effects would be breathtaking but that the script would be stock stuff and the acting beyond criticism because there would be no characterization to start with. And once we heard that Avatar was going to be a science-fiction movie, it would have been safe to predict that there would be numerous but not very meaningful allusions to current controversies like culture clashes and environmental degradation as well as a suggestion of sequels to come.

Well, all of that is pretty largely fulfilled in Avatar, though the script is good deal better than I had expected. It is made up largely of a noble hero with semi-amateur status and a Spencer Tracy-Katherine Hepburn relationship with an increasingly noble heroine, something much like a mad genius with a brutal thug of an assistant, assorted monsters mechanical and biological, numerous chases and rescues and impossible gymnastics, and a pretense of significance that fits ill with Saturday-matinee serial melodramatics.

Still, I have often said that the old stuff is still good if it is well handled, and I have to admit that Avatar does a better job of showing a really alien world than anything else I can recall. Time magazine said "Cameron's goal was shoot as if he were filming a documentary on another planet," and while he does a good deal more than that, he certainly does that. The idea of ten-foot-tall people living in trees seems fantastic until you see that the trees are roughly the size of Wichita and the people are as acrobatic as squirrels; the insect life includes what look like floating jellyfish and luminescent dandelion balloons, and there are luminescent plants both underfoot and hanging like weeping willows. Leaves are big enough to serve as hammocks, and they fold up so you can't fall out. The monsters suggest dogs and horses and pterodactyls and rhinoceroses, as well as hammerhead sharks, and the tree people are really quite attractive once you get used to the color blue and straight, broad noses.

Characters are pure stereotypes and only Zoe Saldana as the heroine can do much acting, but Avatar provides what you expect of its genre and deserves to be a hit.