Like the rest of the world, I went to see Avatar. Wow. As it happens, I've never had much luck with 3D movies. A bizarre golfing accident many years ago left me with considerably reduced vision in one eye, so whenever I put on those clunky old 3D glasses – the ones with a red lens and a green lens – everything looked basically red and nothing much by way of 3D happened.

So I was a little sceptical of the new 'process”. Well, knock me down with a feather, the world has changed. Within the first minute of Avatar it was completely overwhelmingly blindingly obvious that this is the future of cinema. Some day (budget allowing) all films will be made this way.
3D - a viewing revolution
No wonder Peter Jackson, Steven Spielberg and others now swear that they will only make movies in 3D. It must be the same feeling that people had when they saw a colour film after years of black and white, or the shock of first hearing Al Jolson's voice in what had previously been a silent medium. This is the future.
And it really is that good. The glasses are small and unobtrusive and the film is totally immersive, like those virtual reality simulators that appeared about 15 years ago and then disappeared just as quickly. It's like being in another world.
This surprise is probably greater since Tauranga's Bay City Cinema has only just had the new 3D projector installed and thus we missed out on the previous handful of animated 3D movies. But there is a difference between a 3D cartoon and a live action film and part of Avatar's strength is that it never uses its 3D as simply a gimmick: characters do not throw objects directly into the camera and things don't gratuitously shoot out over your head. It's just that this whole new world is three dimensional and you're right there in it.
And, having said all that, it's a pity to report that – aside from its brain-bogglingly good looks – Avatar is a pretty awful film. It's the story that's the problem, and the characters.
Dances with Aliens?
The story concerns a Big Mining Company which goes to an alien planet to mine gold (or whatever the priceless mineral of the future is). There are aliens on the planet who are a bit wary of newcomers, but our central hero slowly becomes part of the 'tribe”, so much so that he decides to help them when he finally realises that the Big Mining Company are nasty greedy types just after the gold.
Dances with Aliens, perhaps? The story is so bleedin' obvious and predictable it reminds one that director James Cameron's filmography contains only one fully original film, The Abyss. Terminator, his claim to fame, was based on an episode from The Twilight Zone. Terminator 2, Aliens and Piranha 2 were all sequels, True Lies and Titanic were both remakes.
Then there's Sam Worthington, leading man in Terminator: Salvation and now this. I'm sure he's a likeable bloke. He seems like a nice chap, but it's hard to see him as anything more than a bland Russell Crowe. Very bland. There are a couple of two dimensional villains and of course there are the Na'vi. They're the big blue aliens and play the role of the Indians, were this a frontier western. There's the cute one, the mean one, the wise one… in fact, they make the non-characters in those westerns look positively sophisticated.
And, as the film went on – and it does go on a bit – I found myself getting seriously annoyed by the amount of money and effort that had gone into making something so cripplingly banal. And at the detail necessary to give 'authenticity” to the whole thing.
Was it worth it?
I heard a New Zealand linguistics professor talking on national radio. He spent four year designing the Na'vi language, which was indeed rendered with subtitles. Well who cares? They never say anything other than dumb fortune cookie platitudes anyway – they might as well have been grunting. Was it really worth creating an entire language?
There are as many instances of unnecessary tiny detail as there are of glaring plot holes and blatant silliness; after 10 years in the making, perhaps this is the film that sums up the first decade of the new millennium. Amazing looks but nothing new to say.