Every article written about James Cameron's Avatar touts it to be the next best thing, the next Star Wars to be precise. It is not. The attention to detail is the same, but after a truckload of sci fi movies that have been dumped on us throughout the decade and before that, Avatar does not inspire the same awe and excitement that Star Wars initially did.
It is a great movie, it is a great story and it is path breaking but to the average joe on the ground, its just another great animated movie. I personally loved it. I had read about the attention to detail, including the animals anatomy (the breathings holes that provided direct flow to the lungs) the fact that every bolt and nut on the machines had to be explained, the colours inspired from the deep during his work on Titanic etc so I noticed and I admired. But what about people who had not read all this, they just saw a weird alien looking animal and some cool machines like any other sci fi/fantasy movie. The saving grace here was the visual appeal. Cameron managed to make us gasp and hold our breath at the beauty of Pandora. It took him 12 years to complete and in those 12 years the audience had grown jaded. We will love Avatar, but not with the same intensity that we did Star Wars.
There is another important point against Avatar. Though the story is great, the characters did not have many dimensions to them. In Star wars there was passion and politics and family and intrigue and sentiment and comedy and full on entertainment. With Avatar it gets overcome by the visuals. There is a linear story with mostly one dimensional characters. And with the amount of money spent on the animated characters the least they could have done was to hire a good dialogue writer to make those animated characters sound better and more relatable. Every cliched sentence has been used and abused in the movie.
After all the hype has died down, I wonder where we will place this movie, especially after the same technology spreads and is adapted for better scripts.
PS: I am anyways going to watch it again.
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