A couple hours now after coming out of Avatar, I have to say I feel like the ‘masses’ on this one:  it was undeniably impressive, but didn’t completely grab me as a filmgoer.  The look of the film and the CGI aspects, I mean, WOW.   The legend is James Cameron waited for the technology to catch up to the story he wanted to tell, and I don’t think you need to see it in 3D to feel like it was worth the wait.  Depicting a ‘natural’ planet, everything (to my eyes at least) looked and felt ‘alive.’  The 3D aspect wasn’t blowing me out of my seat every five minutes, which from what I understand was also Cameron’s intention. 

‘Complaint’ is not the right word, but if I didn’t go all in with Avatar it’s because the story felt familiar.  Colonial power goes into the ‘jungle’, one of the colonialists falls for the ‘native girl’, fights against his own kind.  Cameron seems to acknowledge this when the main villain says at one point “You’re turning your back on your own race.”  At this stage of the game of course, every story and mythology has been told; the creative storytellers just find new ways to tweak it to get us (the audience) engaged.  I can’t even fault this movie for lack of character development if you think that’s where I’m going; there were defined arcs and I understood who everyone was and what everyone wanted, which I can tell you from first hand experience is HARD to do when you’re trying to tell an ‘epic’ story (and this fact may be Cameron’s greatest strength as a filmmaker).  I guess my one sentence synopsis is that the technology of the film was even ahead of the story itself, if that makes sense.  The best parallel I can make is a debate I have with a friend of mine of getting a great Superman movie with the technology we have now.  I think something along those lines is the next benchmark for cinematic storytellers.

Anyway to sum up, Avatar is not a bad film by any measure, but it’s not quite Titantic either.  How’s that?