Avatar Review

Judged as world building this is a landmark, and the landmark has held. Cameron waited years for performance capture and stereoscopic photography to catch up with what he wanted, then built a moon with its own ecology, biology and light, and shot it so that the depth is a property of the space rather than a trick thrown at the lens. The floating mountains, the bioluminescent forest at night, the banshee rookery, the first flight, these still work on a big screen in a way almost nothing since has matched.

The story is the problem and everyone noticed immediately. It is a settler narrative in which the natives require an outsider to lead them, with a mineral literally named unobtainium, a colonel drawn as a jarhead cartoon and dialogue that states each theme twice. Sam Worthington is a blank at the centre by design and stays one. Zoe Saldana is the only performance that survives the translation into blue. Astonishing to look at, thin to think about, and the box office record was not an accident.