Know this fact: director James Cameron has made better films than Avatar. This is not to say that Avatar is a failure; it is simply overhyped as Cameron’s return to filmmaking after he proclaimed himself King of the World over a decade ago. Avatar has an emptiness about it that cannot compensate for the lack of sufficient live motion scenes. While the planet of Pandora is vividly realised, it evokes cheerless memories of the world created by the Wachowski’s in latter films of The Matrix trilogy, one level above animation and every bit heavy laden with as much wall-to-wall CGI as your largest IMAX screen can contain.

The storyline is a mishmash of predictable plot mechanics — a little Dances with Wolves sprinkled with the meeting of the Colonial British with native Indians from Pocahontas or The New World. Where Cameron and crew really succeed is in creating a fully realised alien world, complete with flora and fauna that is as fascinating as it is original. Not since Jurassic Park has the incredible seemed so believable.

What isn’t so believable is the trite romance that takes centre stage in the film between Sam Worthington’s military grunt Jake Sully and Neytiri, a young and vibrant female of the Na’vi race indigenous to the planet. Scripting has never been Cameron’s forte, but making bold, engrossing, escapist entertainers has been, and while Avatar is certainly all of those things, it is also ridiculously sensationalized, especially in its third act that serves up a large scale war between the aliens and their human oppressors. Standard recurring Cameron motifs including the mistrust of the military-industrial complex and gutsy females ready to go into action exist here as well, but these are overshadowed by a messy message about mother natures fight for survival and some strange supernatural soul swapping at the end. Billed as a sci-fi action adventure, this is really the stuff of fantasy intertwined with the persona of a confused war film. Are we supposed to cheer when Jake, in the guise of a Na’vi (his avatar) attacks and kills fellow human beings because he feels disenchanted with his own race?

Much has been made of the technical wizardry used to make Avatar possible as a film that feels real and fresh, and it certainly does. The visuals are crisp and clear, though watching it through 3D glasses makes it seem darker that it originally is. Even the 3D scenes aren’t nearly as inventively used in aid of story or film as they have been in the films of fellow technophile director, Robert Zemeckis and despite everyone proclaiming Avatar to be the film that will change the face of cinema, it is really nothing more than just another Hollywood effects spectacle.

December of 2009 is a fantastic time for the release of Avatar, mainly because it has been a horrible year for big-budget mainstream films that everyone can gather around and love. The IMAX Dubai showing I went to had people applaud at the end, and while it is something I have always found a bit silly (it’s okay if the crew is at the showing, but otherwise…), it does show the enthusiasm of the general public. Avatar is a great cinematic experience.

I find that with large home televisions with all the current advances in home theater, going to the Cinemas is not that impressive anymore. Usually I’d just rather watch something at home, than go all the way to the movies and have my film mixed with people talking, phones ringing, lots of random coughs, and that irritating light from young teenage girl checking her Blackberry. But a film like Avatar makes it a pleasure to go to the cinema, and in an IMAX theater, it becomes such a unique visual experience that just cannot be replicated at home.

I like the 3D. Well, let’s take a step back. I’ve always liked 3D, even the shitty to average films from the last few years. I’m impressed by technological cinematic advances and it’s about damn time they get off their asses and do something new. And James Cameron has made a gorgeous alien world, and there were several times I felt lost into it.

But wait, let’s not get ahead of ourselves. People have thrown ‘realism’ at us, when it comes to CGI, ever since CGI was invented, but CGI still has that glossy, shiny, plastic feel to it. From a distance, the world looks real, that one hits the mark, so we can cross that out from our list. But characters and live creatures still have a decade to go before I can buy the ‘realistic CGI’ tag that they keep trying to attach to every film.

And the plot is a crowd pleaser and fun to watch, but if the technological marvel was not behind it, I would have rolled it into a ball and thrown it in a garbage. I did not watch the trailer for the film, but if I did, I could have probably outlined the exact story. It is the same stuff we always see: a mixture of white man guilt and ethnocentrism. The White are bad because they are oppressing the poor innocent natives. BUT also, it is only The White that can stand up for the poor innocent natives and save them. Being both the oppressor and the savior, to me, seems like the film is placing the rest of the world (and now universe) in a position unable to control their destiny. Their destruction or their survival rests on the White Man. Like most stories with similar plot, the film has an inability to be complex. The invaders are almost cartoon villains, with no moral compass and find great joy in killing; while the oppressed are all pure and good. It is easy for viewers to side in such situations. But it would have been more interesting to portray a situation with the bad guys spinning the war in such a way that makes it hard for the characters in the film and in the audience to know which side to support.

But this is not a subtle, political film, so there is no reason to do that. It is the year’s best cinematic, big-budget,  big-action, big-everything film and it is there that it succeeds.