Having thought I’d start my writing career reviewing games that slipped through the “Synyster Graves” net, I can’t help but feel compelled to write about a film first: Avatar. This isn’t because I want to comply with every review already written and praise the film to high heaven, but because I want to protest about being robbed of 162 minutes of my life, of which I can never get back.

Alright, so I’ve probably lost about 99% of my audience already, but I’m not here to win a popularity contest. Hear me out though, the film is set in 2154 and starts with a very convincing Halo/Starship Troopers-esque ‘drop ship’ scene where we meet our protagonist, Jake Sully (played by Sam Worthington), who we quickly find out is on a hostile alien planet named Pandora – yes a cliché; the planet is a bit of an open “box” that the characters wished was closed, the overly macho Colonel even tells the Marines, “If there is a hell, you might want to go there for some R&R after a tour on Pandora“. Jake is there not as a serving Marine, but to take the place of his late brother in the humans’ science wing.

Jake can “plug” into a chair, in a very ‘Matrix’ looking way, to telekinetically take control of an alien body that has been grown from local alien DNA. You’ve all seen the trailers, the aliens look like lanky smurfs, if smurfs could ever enter an NBA team. To be honest the film still had me at this point, I mean the graphics weren’t exactly as amazing as I was promised, i.e. $237 million (£154 million) worth, however the aliens looked pretty realistic so I was relatively content.

But. Here start the flaws… The mineral that is the reason the humans are on this alien planet is called “Un-obtanium”… Un-obtanium! My 3 year old nephew could come up with a better name for a new element. ‘Elerium’ from the classic ’94 game, UFO: Enemy Unknown, being a prime example of better naming. Next, the native aliens (the Na’vi) live in a very special, mystical tree that they don’t want destroyed, but the humans want to cut down to mine for “Un-obtanium” (anyone seen Fern Gully?). Towards the end of the film our hero, Jake Sully, goes to all corners of the planet ‘Lord of the Rings’ style to recruit all the locals to fight against the “Sky People” (humans, called so because they have Terminator style hover planes and Mech Warrior style ‘BattleMechs’), there are also several big fantasy flight scenes where our hero dons a flying beast to roam around the world in much the same way as the big fluffy dog gets flown in “Never Ending Story”.

Random bits of the film just annoyed me, for example the director seems to have made a great deal of effort to drill into the viewer that the head scientist (Sigourney Weaver) is a chain smoker, so much so that you imagine this is some poignant hint that this is going to affect the outcome of the movie somehow (a.k.a the glasses of water left all over the house by Mel Gibons’ character’s daughter in ‘Signs’), but that consequence/reason never arises. Although to be honest I didn’t see the last 20 minutes of the film, so if it did pop up there I apologise, but Sigourney Weaver’s character had already died by then, so I doubt it did.

As I said, thankfully the disk I was watching the film on had a massive scratch on it so I missed out on the last 20 minutes, which meant I could go to bed just that little earlier and be spared at least a few minutes of torture. So to conclude, before I go on for too long, I think Starship Troopers, The Terminator, Lord of the Rings, The Matrix, and the Surfs are all amazing, but throwing them together into one story-less film just doesn’t work. Simply because the component parts are great (bar Fern Gully, which is plain rubbish) won’t make the resulting concoction any good. Chocolate, Marmite, carrots, and veal are all amazing on their own, but not even Gordon or Heston would throw them all in a blender to make an entirely new dish… that just wouldn’t work. I seem to have lost all respect for James Cameron, who made some of the greatest films known to man; The Terminator, Terminator 2: Judgment Day; True Lies; Aliens; The Abyss; and Terminator 3 to name but a few, but unfortunately I think he seems to have lost it on this one.

I give Avatar a prestigious 0 stars, as there wasn’t one redeeming feature I liked about the film.