Director: James Cameron
Stars: Sam Worthington, Zoe Saldaña, Sigourney Weaver, Stephen Lang

It’s also the sort of tale of little people trampled by big bad corporate interests that a rapacious Hollywood company loves to tell. Worthington, most recently seen in ‘Terminator Salvation’, is Jake Sully, an ex-marine who is now confined to a wheelchair. He is recruited to be part of an expedition (replacing his recently passed away brother) to the planet Pandora, where a corporation is mining a rare ore, Unobtainium (honest), which holds the key to Earth’s future. Sully is assigned to a science team who are studying the nine-foot-tall, blue, humanoid natives, the Na’vi, whom the humans have an uneasy truce with. The team is headed by liberal scientist Grace Augustine, played by Weaver, as a kind of intergalactic Dian Fossey. Jake has been asked to keep an eye on Grace’s team by hawkish soldier Colonel Miles Quaritch (Lang) who has promised him that the company will foot the bill for the costly operation to repair Jake’s legs if he plays ball. In order to breathe the Pandoran air, the team occupy or ‘drive’ avatars, genetically-bred human / Na’vi hybrids which they can control with their minds. Jake is thrilled that, when occupying his Avatar, he is able to walk again but on the team’s first away mission into the Pandoran forest he is separated from the party. Surrounded by vicious beasts he is rescued by beautiful Na’vi warrior woman Naytiri (Saldaña) who escorts him back to her settlement. After an uneasy first few days he is taken into the clan and starts to learn the ways of the Na’vi. Meanwhile back at base the company bigwigs are getting impatient and resolve to move the Na’vi settlement away from a huge ore deposit by any means necessary. As mooted Cameron delivers some stunning visuals, from floating mountain ranges, to a thrillingly vertiginous ride on a flying pterodactyl-style lizard, while the Pandoran rain forests are vividly realized (try and catch it in 3D, preferably stoned). The Na’vi themselves have been the subject of ridicule since the first trailers appeared; most notoriously spoofed by the ever-prescient ‘South Park’ boys’ ‘Dancing with Smurfs’ episode. They’re expressively rendered and detailed but never seem quite alien enough; their pantheistic new agey beliefs, a muddled conflation of the nice bits of Native American and Australian Aboriginal culture. Oh, and they communicate with plants and other Pandoran animals by plugging their ponytailed hair into handily located orifices. Worthington makes a pretty dull lead. Better is Saldaña who is able to invest Neytiri with a real personality beneath the CGI blue skin. The crushingly dull pseudo-mystical middle act, in which Jake explores Na’vi culture, will have even the most ecologically conscious viewers longing for the director to start wreaking some carnage ‘Aliens’-style. Thankfully Cameron delivers with a spectacular climactic battle in which hordes of Na’vi, do battle, on land and in the air, against a huge floating fortress and a fleet of helicopter gunships. So thrillingly executed is the battle in fact, that the leaden mumbo jumbo that immediately preceded it may well be forgotten.

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