Well, it happens to the best of us.
James Cameron has run out of ideas.
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| Realizing that their presence puts the entire Na'vi clan in peril, Jake (Sam Worthington, far right) insists that his family — from left, Kiri (Sigourney Weaver), Neytiri (Zoe Saldaña), Neteyam (Jamie Flatters) and Lo'ak (Britain Dalton) — must leave their home, and move far away, to another part of Pandora. |
That said, sitting through this semi-slog a second time, won’t ever make my to-do list.
Writer/director Cameron, with a scripting assist from Rick Jaffa, Amanda Silver, Josh Friedman and Shane Salerno, has basically recycled the first film’s plot, along with — thanks to cloning — the exact same primary villain: Col. Miles Quaritch (Stephen Lang). He and his elite team of kill-crazy mercenaries have been transformed into “recombinants” : artificial 9-foot-tall avatars embedded with the memories of the humans whose DNA was used to create them.
The character template has broadened a bit, and the setting has shifted from the forest-dwelling Omatikaya Na’vi clan to the ocean realm of the Metkayina clan. But the conflict is identical: Earth’s nasty-ass Resources Development Administration (RDA) returns in force, this time determined to colonize all of Pandora, as the new home for humanity.
“Earth is about to become inhabitable,” RDA’s Gen. Francis Ardmore (Edie Falco, appropriately callous) intones, “so Pandora’s natives must be … tamed.”
And, as if this bit of déjà vu all over again weren’t enough, Cameron’s climactic third act includes a re-tread of Titanic’s ultimate fate … except, instead of a sinking ocean liner, our heroes wind up scrambling about the shifting decks of a 400-foot-long attack vessel, as it slowly slips beneath the sea. Heck, we even get the same “climb this way … now this way” scramble involving two key characters.
All that said, this still could have been a reasonably engaging 150-minute film … were it not expanded into an insufferably self-indulgent 192 minutes. Cameron clearly didn’t trust his three co-editors.
The second act, in particular, accomplishes little beyond filling time. So many tight close-ups of slow, thoughtful takes; so many half-baked lines delivered with measured, melodramatic intensity.
