Reviewed by Hannes Schauer The latest movie from James Cameron, director of the multiple award-winning film “Titanic”, is the very critically acclaimed and visually stunning sci-fi picture he had dreamt of making since 1994, when he first wrote an 80-page script for “Avatar”. The movie’s theme is not new: white men go to a far away place and come across indigenous people who live in complete harmony with nature. Here, the white men are people from a nearly devastated twenty-second century Earth looking for an extremely high-priced mineral that can serve as a mega-energy source. Pandora, an Earth-like moon containing plenty of the so-called unobtanium, has already been settled by humans. They have built a military base and research facilities whose main mission is to exploit Pandora’s resources. However, there is one research team that focuses on studying the life and culture of the humanoids, called Na’vi, by logging their brains into the bodies of Na’vi avatars. It is the Marine Jake Sully who is to win the Na’vi’s trust, using his avatar to make them relocate from their “hometree”, a vast bio-botanical neural network. Not only does he genuinely experience the approaching threat from bulldozer attacks, but he is also fascinated by the Na’vi’s harmonic coexistence with the forest and its inhabitant creatures. It does not take much time before Jake falls in love with Neytiri, the patriarchs daughter. Eventually, he learns that there is not anything the humans can offer the Na’vi in exchange for their relocation. When Colonel Quaritch, Jake’s covert supervisor, watches Sully’s latest video report, he finds out that the soft method is not going to work. Quaritch sees his moment coming and immediately starts sending out a huge armada that destroys the “hometree”. Neytiri, deeply hurt and feeling betrayed by Jake, loses her father in the hopeless defensive fight, which renders her people without a leader. Yet, in the meantime, Jake is able to tame Toruk, a massive, dinosaur-like bird that only few Na’vi have tamed. By this means, he regains the humanoids’ trust. Together with the help of Neytiri and her brother Tsu’Tey he can lead the people of Pandora into combat against Quaritch’s army, who intend to destroy the Tree of Souls, the indigenous people’s center of spirit and religion. Neytiri is able to kill Quaritch and save Jake from being exposed too long to Pandora’s atmosphere which would otherwise leave him unconscious and finally kill him. Having been successful in the fight, the Na’vi expel the humans from their moon. Only Jake and his closest coworkers are chosen to stay. In the end, Jake’s consciousness is permanently transferred to his Na’vi avatar in a religious ritual leaving his dead human body behind. Jake and Neytiri reaffirm their love and the movie ends with a close-up on Jake wearing the insignia of the Na’vi leader. Unfortunately, exactly at that point “Avatar” ultimately reveals its flaw. On io9.com Annalee Newitz wants to know: “When Will White People Stop Making Movies Like ‘Avatar’”. She equates the Na’vi with the American Indians conquered and exterminated by white Europeans after they had discovered the New World, which might be the model for the magnificently pictured Pandora, the “beautiful land America could still be if white people hadn’t paved it over with concrete and strip malls”. She alludes to what she calls the “old white guilt fantasy” in which colonization is negatively connoted. However, it is still a story about colonization and race told from a white point of view, which embodies the “wish to lead people of color from the inside rather than from the (oppressive, white) outside”. What one sees in the closing scene is the perfect evidence: Cameron lets Jake become the leader of an indigenous tribe because he helped them defend themselves and consequently defeat his own people. Also, “Avatar” gives the audience too many predefined morsels of information about extraterrestrial life (or be it race) ready to be easily digested by a mass audience. For instance, Cameron misses the chance to create a fantastic world that really involves the moviegoers and forces them to think and imagine how aliens could look like, behave, and reproduce. In one scene there even is the necessary intercourse and a very human kiss between Jake’s avatar and Neytiri. Why would aliens show each other’s affection by a kiss if even our closest relative the chimpanzee does not? One might ask oneself: why go and see this flick? Because it is a pleasure for the eyes and ears! Cameron has used a new 3D technique for the first time in a movie enabling the viewer to wear rather comfortable polarized glasses while still enjoying the full three-dimensional experience. Furthermore, viewers see an astonishing fictional flora and fauna. The forest ground gently flashes whenever a Na’vi foot touches it. An undefined species jumps two meters into the air when alarmed by a footstep and immediately unfolds an illuminated flying apparatus resembling da Vinci’s helicopter. The outstanding visual effects along with James Horner’s overwhelming soundtrack partly compensate for the contextual weak spots. Thus, whether one considers “Avatar” a movie for a good theater night or expects something more behind it is unimportant. In any case, one should see it. In whatever way, be forewarned that its shallowness may not please you.

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