The World According to Cameron

Let me get a few things off my chest before I start talking about "Avatar". First of all, it's practically the only film I didn't get in the mail this year and of course it's like almost three hours long. Fine. I suppose I should see it on a big screen anyway. Next James Cameron has a rep as a megalomaniac and a bit of a tool. Okay, I don't know the man so I don't judge. He probably gives to charity and is nice to puppies. And finally, no film, absolutely no film should cost 400 mill to produce. Every fiber of my being screams that this is just wrong. I will address this issue later.
Okay I saw it, all two hours and forty minutes of it and it is, quite frankly, a sight to behold. This is a world that looked like it took a decade to realize. The money is on the screen in every way except perhaps in the screenplay, which is a little lazy. It ranks with the great fantasy worlds that are created so rarely in film or literature. The Lord of the Rings (both literature and film), Dune, Star Wars, The Wizard of Oz, Pern. Cameron borrows liberally and obviously from all of these, especially Dune and Pern.
The great thing about the world is not just the look (which is spectacular) but how both the humans and the indigenous people, the Navi, exist in it. There is a sense that the Navi actually live on Pandora. They move through it as if they are a part of the whole, which is the whole point. People and their environment are part of the same life. It's a philosophy held in our own world by native Americans and those parallels are played up. It is of course not held by the white Americans of European ancestry who seek to destroy their environment rather than live in harmony with it. Jesus, white men just suck. Anyway, the world and people of Pandora are fully realized and just amazing to watch. The beauty of the production design is just jaw dropping. This is not CGI for its own sake, but used as it should be used, to enhance instead of overpower the imagination. There are things that it seems no one but James Cameron can do well, like sinking the Titanic and creating Pandora.
Boats and blue people he owns.
Regular people, not so much. It's like Cameron is way more comfortable when he doesn't have to deal with real people. "Avatar" is no exception. His human characters have none of the subtlety and nuance of the Navi. The results of this shortcoming are cardboard antagonists, bad guys that are cartoony in their villainy. It ALMOST screws up the movie. The last forty minutes of this film we've seen a million times before. The first two hours we have never, ever seen. Now the last forty minutes are okay in a shoot-em up, bang-bang sort of way. Cameron knows his way around an action sequence. But it's like putting that crappy over-sweet icing on the world's most delicious cake. It spoils the effect, but not the flavor.
In the end, Pandora and the Navi, by way of James Cameron's imagination, are one of the coolest places to visit (on-screen) this year, or any other year for that matter. Too bad he has to shoot everything up in the end. White guys really suck.