Not tone deaf

No more on this particular subject, except to say that in my view Denby gets it exactly right. For people who can still respond to movies as such, Avatar is the equivalent of an opera that has glorious music strapped to a silly libretto.

AVATAR
As James Cameron, working in 3-D, thrusts us into the picture frame, brushing past tree branches, coursing alongside foaming-jawed creatures, we may be overcome by an uncanny sense of emerging, becoming, transcending—a sustained mood of elation produced by vaulting into space. This is the most physically beautiful American film in years. It’s set on Pandora, a verdant moon, a hundred and fifty years from now, where the long-waisted, translucent-blue Na’vi live on turf that contains an energy-rich mineral that an American corporation, armed to the teeth with military contractors, wants to harvest. An ex-Marine (Sam Worthington) in the shape of a Na’vi—an avatar—is sent to spy, but he falls in love with a warrior princess (Zoë Saldana), and he winds up leading a defense of the Na’vi against the armed might of the military. It’s the old story of Pocahontas and John Smith, mixed, perhaps, with “Dances with Wolves.” The Na’vi, who are connected by neural networks to all living things, are meant to remind us of Native Americans; the military is meant to remind us of the shock-and-awe Bush Administration militarists. The story may be trite, but Cameron creates an entire world, including magnificent flying pterodactyls and a bright-red flying monster with jaws that could snap an oak. The movie is as much a vertical as a horizontal experience; its many parts cohere and flow together. With Sigourney Weaver as a high-minded biologist, Stephen Lang as a testosterone-pumped military leader, and Giovanni Ribisi as the cynical head of the corporate expedition.—David Denby (Reviewed in our issue of 1/4/10.) (In wide release.)