This review originally appeared in issue one of the short-lived W. Magazine for Woking College. It is reproduced here, finally, in its entirety, with a few minor edits for clarity.

James Cameron’s Avatar seems to be a movie with multiple personality disorder. Is it a visual effects showcase? Is it a heartwarming fable with environmental and humanitarian undertones? Is it blow-em-up military sci-fi? It seems the film can’t even decide itself.

Let’s get this out of the way to start with: it’s very pretty, but not game-changing. The visual effects are certainly no more impressive than those in Star Trek or District 9. The mapping of the facial expressions from real to CGI faces is an improvement on what came before, but all the other stuff–real and CG characters touching, 3D stereoscopy, photorealistic environments–has been done before, and in better movies.

Avatar stars relatively unknown Australian actor Sam Worthington as Jake Sully, a paraplegic military grunt assigned to a scientific project on the alien world Pandora, inhabited by conveniently humanoid ten-foot reptilian Smurfs called “Na’vi.” The scientific project in question involves trying to make friends with the locals by “driving” cloned Na’vi bodies, the process of which seems to involve clambering into something that can’t make its mind up whether it’s a sickbed from the starship Enterprise or a very unhealthy-sounding washing machine.

Let’s get this out of the way: it’s very pretty, but not game-changing

Being the idiot grunt he is, Sully’s avatar soon gets lost and caught up with a real (and conveniently beautiful) Smurf, played by Zoë Saldaña, who the rest of you will know for her excellent performance as Uhura in 2009′s impossibly good reboot of Star Trek. Hence begins some intense cultural immersion, accompanied by the standard transition from ignorant cretin to classic hero as Sully fights to save the Na’vi from eviction by human miners.

This part is where Cameron’s world-building quickly begins to disintegrate: the Na’vi, allegedly an alien race, have a culture that is an uncomfortable amalgamation of new-age-hippie nonsense and a DVD box set of Bruce Parry’s Tribe that’s been through the blender a couple of times. It’s simply not plausible, and destroys the suspension of disbelief that the visual effects have worked so hard to build up.

Aside from the main cast of three, the acting is nothing special: Stephen Lang phones in his performance as “badass colonel with tram lines,” and a quietly understated performance from Michelle Rodriguez is hampered by the fact her character is a stock cliché. In addition, the other Na’vi are played by a variety of actors, including an apparent cameo from the late Peter Cushing as Saldaña’s mother. (Well, it looks like Peter Cushing.)

The Na’vi have a culture that is an amalgamation of new-age-hippie nonsense and a DVD box set of Bruce Parry’s Tribe

That said, the three headline stars do a great job, given the offal they had to work with. Zoë Saldaña is a tour de force, and Worthington’s performance is admirable too (albeit with a rather poor attempt at an American accent.) Their performances are made doubly impressive by the fact that most of the time, they were probably staring into a camera, in a latex bodysuit with white motion capture dodgers all over it, to be painted out and replaced by their digitally-Smurfified likenesses.

Sigourney Weaver is also excellent as the leader of the Avatar project, although again suffering from the fact that there’s about as much character development in there as there is intelligent exposé in Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus.

So, in essence, the film is a bastardisation of Pocahontas, Dancing with Wolves and Star Trek Insurrection. And somehow, it manages to be worse than all three of those films put together, because it’s astonishingly predictable, right down to the horrifically clichéd last scene which was so obvious you could’ve seen it coming from space.

This predictability kills tension throughout, and makes the final battle scene (a thirty-minute orgy of explosions and bullets, only stopping so the audience can have a quick perv at Saldaña’s digitally-recreated bosoms) a drawn-out mess, in which you are screaming “COME ON!” at the screen because you already know what’s going to happen.

It’s also completely humourless, taking itself with far too much gravitas at every turn. The funniest part of the whole movie is when Sully’s avatar falls off its horse (which isn’t a horse because it’s alien).

But what’s this? The mineral the humans are mining is called ‘unobtainium,’ a snide reference to the terrible science typically exhibited by Hollywood film-makers (Cameron included). And is that… Papyrus!?

This film expects us to take it seriously when its subtitles are set in Papyrus. I mean, come on… that’s like Hitchcock formatting the opening credits of Psycho in Comic Sans. And rescoring the shower scene to a mashup of Lady Gaga’s Poker Face and the Benny Hill theme. And inserting a scene in the middle in which Henry VIII gets run over by a freight train.

So is it a satire of both sci-fi and corporatism? Is it a military sci-fi action film based around blowing s**t up? Is it an environmental preaching soapbox with pandeistic undertones? Avatar tries to be all of these things, and I am sorry to report that it fails spectacularly at all of them.

I certainly wouldn’t blame you if you went to see it: however, don’t expect to be blown away. What the Avatards will tell you isn’t true.

Rating: 6/10