Big & beautiful - Military Movies - Military Times

Big & beautiful

When Hollywood people talk about writer-director James “King of the World” Cameron, the words most often heard are usually along the lines of arrogant, egomaniacal, tyrannical, caustic, ornery, difficult … and so on.

But whatever you want to say about Cameron, you have to give him this: He dreams big, swings big and delivers big. This hardly means his movies are flawless — but you rarely come away feeling like he didn’t splash everything he had in him up there on the screen.

He pushes the envelope once again with his much-hyped, $230 million, 3-D extravaganza “Avatar,” an astoundingly lush fantasy in which almost every one of its 160 minutes is stuffed with so much luminescent, rainbow-hued eye candy that often you can’t decide where to focus your gaze.

Cameron has dreamed up an entire new world — Pandora — and filled it with an unbelievable array of wild, weird, wonderful flora and fauna.

It’s a world of huge flowers with spiral, neon-orange blooms that contract into tiny bulbs when touched; of dyspeptic, hammer-headed rhinoceros-like creatures; of fierce avians that are a cross between a rabid pterodactyl and a screaming eagle; and much, much more.

And it’s the world of the Na’vi, a race of blue, 9-foot-tall, whip-tailed, pointy-eared, peaceful hunter/gatherers who worship their planet-mother and respect all living things in the teeming landscape around them.

Of course, humankind has arrived from Earth to screw it all up, for the usual reasons — mindless corporate greed in pursuit of a mother lode of an extremely rare, ultravaluable mineral called unobtainium.

Unfortunately, the biggest vein sits right beneath the Mothertree, a huge, vast, centuries-old tree in which one of the most prominent Na’vi clans has made its home for eons.

The corporate interests thus far have been willing to let their anthropologists, led by Dr. Grace Augustine (Sigourney Weaver), use diplomacy to try to persuade the Na’vi to move.

At the forefront of this effort is the “avatar” program, using Na’vi clones infused with human genes that are grown to be physiologically and mentally linked to a specific human. When the human host sleeps, the avatar is awake, mingling with the Na’vi, learning their culture and hopefully gaining their trust. When the human host is awake, the avatar sleeps.

The program’s newest recruit is Jake Sully (Sam Worthington), a former Marine who lost the use of his legs in battle and positively revels in the physical prowess of his new alter-ego. He insinuates himself into the Na’vi clan, learning their ways at the side of the young Na’vi female Neytiri (Zoe Saldana), whose beauty is matched by her skills and ferocity.

But the diplomacy effort is bogging down and the corporate honcho, the oily Selfridge (Giovanni Ribisi), is growing impatient — especially when his military commander, Col. Quaritch (Stephen Lang), keeps whispering in his ear for permission to unleash his army of grungy mercs and their high-tech weaponry to show the stubborn natives just which race made famous the phrase “manifest destiny.”

Jake gets caught in the middle and must decide where his true loyalties lie. And if you have doubts about which way he ends up going, you clearly don’t get out to the movies much.

The story won’t win any awards for depth or originality; it’s not difficult to discern an eclectic hodgepodge of retread influences ranging from “Star Wars” to “The Lion King” to “Dances With Wolves” to “Aliens.” And Cameron hardly helps his cause by portraying his designated villains, Selfridge and Quaritch, as ridiculously exaggerated cartoons.

Still, the time-tested “good vs. evil” template retains its emotional pull. And frankly, the story plays a supporting role when it’s set amid this kind of nonstop torrent of stunningly detailed and incredibly gorgeous visual images and sequences. Highlights include dizzying aerial scenes that will practically have your eyes watering from the wind shear and a climactic battle that you’ll feel in your bones.

The studio hype machine would have you believe this film will “change the way you watch movies.” That’s going overboard. But I’ll tell you this: “Avatar” is one of the coolest, most mind-blowing sensory rushes I’ve ever had at the octoplex.

Rated PG-13 for violence. Got a rant or rave about the movies? E-mail cvinch@atpco.com.