Avatar – 6.5

Avatar the Experience was seamless: I never questioned whatever world it was the 3D glasses helped transport us to. Was it any more remarkable a cinematic experience than Lord of the Rings, though? Or, for that matter, The Wizard of Oz, which we watched on TV last week? (The flying enoks of Pandora seem to derive, in equal part, from African bee-eaters of the natural world and the Wicked Witch of the West’s monkey guard.) When it came down to other parts of the movie – i.e., plot and character – there was nothing novel, and director James Cameron almost seemed to embrace the cinematic clichés that abounded. As in so many movies, the intellectually interesting puzzles posed by the story devolved into a smash-mouth battle climax that reduced the value of human life to about zero and ended, as every such battle invariably does, with the superhero and the supervillain somehow finding each other, to face off mano-a-mano. I liked what I perceived as the anti-Iraq subtext (substitute “oil” for “unobtainium”), until my wife and other reviewers pointed out that almost every other war and territorial conquest fit the same bill. In the end, what will linger in my mind from Avatar the Experience is the haunting beauty of the Na’Vi, a blueskinned, 10-foot-tall, mink-like race, especially the one cloned from an actress with the appropriately exotic name of Zoe Soldana.