Film

An object lesson in how total creative freedom can leave a great director susceptible to his worst instincts, Avatar finds Cameron lost in his own obsessions. Twelve years after its release, Titanic still stands as the ultimate in contemporary Hollywood craftsmanship—the work of a perfectionist whose attention to detail extends to the trinkets and the matchbooks. None of that has changed: Avatar’s action is refreshingly clear, and the ballyhooed Na’vi world is a masterwork of eye-popping design and sweeping camera moves, with a degree of texture and dimensionality one wouldn’t have presumed possible.

As a demo reel, Avatar is phenomenal. But while Cameron has fussed over the glow of every tentacle and wing tip, the big-picture elements have gotten lost. The story, involving a phlegmatic Marine (Worthington) who intervenes in colonizing forces’ attempts to mine “unobtainium” on the distant moon Pandora, quickly devolves into a rehash of Dances with Wolves. Making Titanic’s corny but absorbing romance look Pulitzer-worthy, the script consists almost exclusively of dire boilerplate, while the cast members seem to be vying with each other in an ongoing blandness contest.

The human footage—which resembles nothing so much as the full-motion video games of the early ’90s—is distracting for its relative drabness. (There’s a sense of actors constrained by having to hit their marks, to make way for special effects.) And the various levels of allegory—in which the peace-loving, preservationist Na’vi are eventually equated with Iraqi insurgents—compete to the point of incoherence. Cameron once again proves he’s a visionary, but the mythmaker who gave us The Terminator remains MIA.