Avatar - Not Worth The Hype

Avatar. I heard this word from my brother first who, by the way, is freakishly up-to-date with all the movies that have ever been made, being made, will be made, were planned to be made but didn't get made, were made but didn't make it to the theatres, well you get the idea. I heard this word everyday for the past 60 days. My brother would say an assortment of the following dialogues, just to be true to his motto "Variety is the spice of life".


"Hey, did you know Lord Vishnu has 10 avatars? Speaking of avatar...."

"Man, DasAVATARam soooo did not need those many avatars!"

"I will do a submission move(Undertaker) on you if you don't take me to that movie..."

"Eh? What hour?"

and so on and so forth. But as luck would have it, I was destined to get that long overdue submission move, as I had decided to watch the movie with my friends in Aamchi Bombay(Yes, I still call it by its old name). Anyways, we waited with bated breath, clutching our 3-D glasses oh-so-tight as we entered the cinema hall. Glasses on our eyes, popcorn in our mouths, we were ready to embark on a journey of a lifetime - or so we thought.


The concept is fairly simple and I'm very lazy. Which is why I've copy-pasted it right from Wiki.

"Avatar is a 2009 American science fiction film written and directed by James Cameron, and starring Sam Worthington, Zoe Saldaña, Sigourney Weaver and Stephen Lang. The film is set in the year 2154 on Pandora, a fictional inhabited Earth-like moon in a distant planetary system. Humans are engaged in mining Pandora's reserves of a precious mineral, while the Na'vi — the sapient race of humanoids indigenous to the moon — resist the colonists' expansion, which threatens the continued existence of the Na'vi and the Pandoran ecosystem. The film's title refers to the remotely controlled, genetically engineered human-Na'vi bodies used by the film's human characters to interact with the natives."


Blah Blah Blah. Now, for the review. I liked this film in parts. The visuals were stunning. The story unfolded beautifully when coupled with the amazing graphics. Kudos to the whole team of Avatar. What I like most about James Cameron's story was it was brilliant to watch on screen. The beauty of the movie was the simplicity of the story. Ah, but this is where the movie fails, too. The narration was straight out of those magical books we used to read as kids. The story was so predictable. I mean, at every point of the movie I was like "DUH!". The actors were okay. They don't deserve more mention than that.


I loved the whole concept of the trees communicating as a network and I agree with Jake Sully when he says "I'm in love with your forest.". The forest is something out of this world...oh yeah it is actually out of this world :P
The trees, the Ikrans, the forest, Pandora....everything was nicely created. But the story, the actors, the irritating 3-D glasses just fell flat. Although I still would say that you should go for the movie, just for the graphics, but not expect much in terms of story, and don't get carried away by the hype!

P.S.: A very entertaining moment in the movie was when the name of a Na'vi "Tsu'tey" was modified by the gujju guys in the front row to "Su Chhe"-means "What you want?" in Gujrati :P