Avatar! WTH??

Gawd, I really wanted to like this movie. After hearing so much about it for weeks on end, I was waiting so that I could catch it in its best version, namely in IMAX 3-D. Well, finally I did get a chance over the new years weekend with my friends in Mumbai. If this is what the best version had to offer, I can imagine how much I may have disliked it in normal 2-D.

First of all, I do like good big budget actioners, which also have fresh characters and credibility of plot. The Dark Knight or the recent Star Trek are recent movies which I really liked. However, I have never been able to enjoy or like a movie which just has exorbitant special effects and no screenplay, dialogue or character development. This is probably why I actually managed to sleep through some time of the mayhem that was the second half of the first Transformers movie, and didn’t bother to watch the second one. However, I did expect James Cameron to not just make a showpiece of a movie. One of my all time favorites, T2 was done by him. You never felt in that movie that he was compromising on script, characters, dialogues or intensity for effects. I even liked Titanic quite a bit. But this one was plain disappointing. Credit has to be given where due. The idea and beauty of Pandora, and the basic premise was amazingly interesting. But the screenplay left a lot to be desired. Some of the lines uttered by Sully’s and Neytiri’s Na’vi characters are so cheesy and clichéd that you feel even the most run of the mill romantic comedies do it better. On top of that, the various scenes look like they had been picked up from a collection of good movies over the years (like the brilliant LOTR trilogy). And what in the world was all that sudden spirituality thrown in at the end? It just did not fit in credibly with the story till then.

But I guess these days, most of these movies do well. Which would explain why Transformers 2 and Avatar are among the biggest hits of the year, and Avatar will probably challenge Titanic for all time Box Office earnings. And why something beautiful and complex like Watchmen was probably not watched by half as many people as who saw Avatar. Sad though. I never thought I’ll be disappointed with Cameron.