It’s amazing. Until earlier this year no one was talking about Avatar yet now with the long-awaited sequel only days away, it feels like 2009 all over again. Of course I had to rewatch the hugely successful but divisive original in preparation and viewing it again after so many years, I think that the first Avatar is a well-made and enjoyable sci-fi romp.

Overrated? That depends on who you ask.

Overhyped? Absolutely.

A good film? Mostly yes.

This space epic follows a paraplegic marine (Sam Worthington) on a mission on the planet Pandora. He’s tasked with infiltrating the ingenious population known as the Na’vi but when he learns their ways and is accepted as one of their own, he begins to doubt his allegiances.

The Characters

I read that James Cameron had first come up with Avatar in the early to mid-90s’. I’m sure he wrote it much later on but despite that possibility, Avatar does have the complexity of a 90s’ actioner.

This isn’t to say that it’s bad or not compelling, just that there isn’t a lot to it, especially the characters.

Our protagonist, Jake Sully, is comically dull. He’s nothing but a surrogate (or avatar you could say) for the audience to navigate through the world and mythology. There’s nothing wrong with that, it’s a great technique for fantasy stories, but as a character nothing much else can be said about Jake. His arc doesn’t seem really radical or significant. We can see he isn’t content in the human world hence when he joins the Na’vi world and falls in love with it, you can see where his story’s going almost hours in advance. He’s another generic ‘chosen one’ protagonist like those of Ready Player One and Artemis Fowl, if anyone remembers those films.

The other characters are not as bland, in fact they’re much more fun to watch. Neytiri (Zoe Saldana) is the Na’vi who teaches Jake the tribe’s philosophy and history. Her passion and protectiveness for her people is very admirable and hard not to like. When complications emerge later in the plot, you don’t really care about what they do to Jake but you know how devastating they’ll be for Neytiri. She’s probably one of the few characters you can legitimately get invested in.

Our antagonists include a corporate administrator (Giovanni Ribisi) who manages the mining operation on the planet and a colonel (Stephen Lang) who’s in charge of security and feels nothing but indifference for the Na’vi.

Ribisi’s businessman actually has some dimension in that while his biggest priority is profit, he doesn’t really want a conflict with the Na’vi. He’ll allow it if he has to but not with an ounce of glee. He’s a corporate pig who prefers a peaceful solution.

Lang’s colonel on the other hand is as one-dimensional as they come. He’s an angry, vicious racist who despises the Na’vi for no apparent reason but loves killing them. He’s fantastic!

The World

This should go without saying but twelve years later the people, creatures and lands of Pandora still hold up. The only time when the effects show any age is whenever a human has direct contact with a Na’vi, you can kind of tell that the human actor was green screened in with the Na’vi or they had to interact with a real prop whenever touching them.

A lot of the human technology is reminiscent of Cameron’s Aliens and as much as the effects in that film hold up, Avatar takes the mech-suits and gunships of Aliens and perfects them. The ships are a lot more agile and the suits much less rigid.

Yes a lot of Pandora is derivative of Dune with its natural resource, tribal populations, messianic religions and exotic wildlife. Then again, no story is made in a vacuum. Everything is either a homage or a rip-off of something else. I think Avatar would’ve been forgiven for its derivativeness if the characters were less shallow and the story had something deeper and more thoughtful to say than just ‘nature good, civilisation bad.’

Overall Avatar is an engaging, well-made sci-fi epic with bland but fun characters and a very thought-out world, which just happens to be the highest grossing film to date. Nothing more, nothing less.

I give Avatar a decent 8 out of 10.