Actually, the post title is just what was printed on my movie ticket, since I saw it in 3-D. But it also looks like I'm calling Avatar retarded. See what I did there? Mine is a wit for the ages.
To put it succinctly, I thought Avatar was an alright two and a half hours at the movies, an entertaining diversion, but—except where the visual effects and 3-D are concerned—nothing more. The story is just a retread of familiar (often painfully so) action/adventure beats from the '80s and '90s, in a setting taken out of Dune, Dances with Wolves, FernGully, The Last Samurai, etc. (i.e., an outsider is taken in by his "barbaric" enemies, is taught their ways, goes native, and leads them in battle against the world he's left behind). In terms of story and characters, we've seen it all a thousand times before, and in many cases much better. The story's predictable and unimaginative (some elements seem taken directly from Cameron's own films, like Ribisi's corporate scuzball basically being Burke from Aliens), the characters are one-dimensional (granted, a few, like Weaver's character, occasionally achieve two whole dimensions), and a good deal of the dialogue is so bad I would've been embarrassed to write it. On top of it all is a voiceover that removes any opportunity for thought, much less ambiguity, by explicitly stating everything that Jake thinks or feels. (If Star Wars—like Avatar a piece of popcorn entertainment but much better executed—had done that, we would've heard Luke thinking, "I knew I should leave Tatooine when I saw my aunt and uncle's charred bodies," "I was really upset when Vader killed Ben," etc.)
(Over at CHUD, Devin Faraci discusses a version of the story that Cameron wrote as a "scriptment" around 1995 called "Project 880," that has some pretty interesting differences from the film we got. He goes into some detail, so it's definitely worth checking out.)
Avatar's main attraction is its visual effects, and in that department it really is remarkable. The scenery porn is spectacular, with floating mountains, a variety of bizarre and beautiful flora and fauna, and lots of soaring through the sky and swinging from tree branches. The realism achieved in rendering the Na'vi is also a big step forward, especially since their faces are human enough that they're really skirting the edge of the uncanny valley; while they still have a ways to go in giving CG objects a real sense of volume and weight, the work in convincingly conveying facial expressions and emotions outdoes even Peter Jackson's Gollum (both were by Weta).
The area where I was especially impressed was Avatar's use of 3-D. Up to now I've been very skeptical of 3-D as anything more than a gimmick; some uses of it (Up) have been better than others (My Blood Valentine), but it's always just been a fad that waxes and wanes in popularity (first in the '50s, again in the '80s, and again today) without really adding any more to the medium than did Smell-O-Vision or Percepto. What Avatar achieves, however, is 3-D with a real sense of depth and space, not just some flat images at different distances from the audience like in a View-Master, or a series of money shots of things lunging at them. The fact that after the first ten or fifteen minutes I mostly stopped being aware of it, rather than constantly being made aware of it, was really surprising and speaks volumes about the sense of immersion that it created. 3-D will never make the kind of impact on cinema that sound or color did, and sadly I doubt that many future 3-D filmmakers will give it as much effort and care as Cameron did, but Avatar has brought me around on the potential of 3-D genuinely to add to the filmgoing experience.
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