Avatar [2009]

Despite returning from a long hiatus – 12 years to be precise since he made Titanic, James Cameron has yet again shown his unsurpassed ability in making larger-than-life blockbusters with Avatar, a project that had been gestating for quite a long time. The movie is of epic proportions, and it screams to be seen (and preferably in 3-D), though it should not be taken as seriously as the director perhaps intended it to be. Cameron certainly hasn’t forgotten how to enrapture his audience, even though the visual extravaganza and technical virtuosity of the, well, preposterous end product, surpassed its intellectual or artistic merit or the pseudo-emotional content by a very long distance. This Matrix­-meets-Last of the Mohicans­-meets-Arthur Conan Doyle’s Lost World-meets-Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth, Avatar, which is about power-hungry plutocrats trying to colonize a far-off plant named Pandora and its indigenous inhabitants called the Na’vi, and which could easily be seen as a political allegory to George Bush’s annexing of Iraq for oil, albeit in the name of ‘war against terrorism’, is a stupendous spectacle that one will enjoy despite its wafer-thin plot and shallow script.








Director: James Cameron
Genre: Sci-Fi/Action/Fantasy
Language: English
Country: US