'Avatar': Director James Cameron shows us the money

James Cameron's "Avatar" is a remarkable technical achievement; one that propels the craft of animated and 3-D filmmaking an enormous step forward. Its scenes are at times breathtaking in their sweep, their technical perfection, their remarkable animated rendering of human performance. It cost an enormous amount of money, somewhere between $200 million and $300 million depending on which source you consult, and you can see every dollar. And it left me colder than a hairless cat.

Cameron's "Titanic" (which also cost a fortune, and earned an even bigger one) worked because it followed a compelling story we all knew, and was performed by actors able to make us care about their inevitable fate. Though Cameron's lined up some good actors for "Avatar," the screenplay gives them nothing to play; this is all about spectacle, not story or soul. Everyone recites their lines, awkwardly laying out exposition, speaking their clunky dialogue. None of this is supposed to matter, because we're presumably busy marveling at all the money on display.

The rote plot, which gets stretched out past two-and-a-half hours, goes something like this: It's the year 2154, and disabled vet Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) has arrived at the moon Pandora to take part in the Avatar Program. This is a system by which human brains can be projected into remotely controlled creatures (avatars), by way of a lot of messing around with DNA, and move among the strangely blue, catlike Pandora natives in the hopes of obtaining the rare mineral unobtainium. Sully, thrilled at being able to run again in his new form, falls in love with a native Na'vi (Zoe Saldana) and learns to respect the native people, soon leading them in an epic battle or two. (Call him Dances With Na'vi.)

The scenes at the human compound are live action, with the sequences on the planet Pandora animated; all are in 3-D. (It's interesting that state-of-the-art live-action 3-D has the strange effect of making things look less realistic, not more.) A few of the animated scenes are quite beautiful, particularly some moments of floating mountains and of multihued blue-and-purple winged creatures soaring toward the Pandora sky. But "Avatar" soon gets repetitive, and you start wondering why the Na'vis' ears move when they chant, or why the Na'vi language wasn't thought out a little better. (A character, bent over the body of a dead loved one, says something that sounds exactly like "Wakey, wakey.")

And you wonder this because there's nothing else to do but stare; you don't feel anything watching "Avatar" other than a vague numbness. Cameron's filled the movie with action and spectacle, and thrown in plenty of references to his earlier work (the presence of Sigourney "Aliens" Weaver as a tough-as-nails scientist; a closing song that sounds suspiciously like "My Heart Will Go On"), but what he hasn't done is given us a reason to care. Recent animated movies like "Up" and "Coraline" have used 3-D as an elegant enhancement to a well-told story. Here, the technology is the story — it's all enhancement, and not much heart.

Moira Macdonald: 206-464-2725 or mmacdonald@seattletimes.com