Avatar - Cameron blows the budget once again

James Cameron has an amazing ability. I'm not talking about his ability to make huge blockbusters because let's face it; we know he can do that. I'm talking about his ability to take what should be an epic story with a big meaning and reducing it down to an underwritten, overly clichéd love story. I mean look at the film he did before Avatar, you know that one about some ship sinking. He took one of the most tragic, non wartime disasters and made it all about two people with some overly sentimental, Spielberg-esque bookmarks to really drive the nail in.

Twelve years later and he takes what could have been a powerful film about our attitudes towards other cultures and the environment and then smeared the same shitty love story that dominated Titanic all over it. I'm surprised he didn't add a side story to Aliens where Sigourney Weaver and Paul Reiser fall in love despite their different lifestyles. That's basically what both Titanic and Avatar are; two people from completely different worlds (Avatar literally, Titanic metaphorically) thrust violently together, with some heartstring pulling added in, while the story Cameron should have been telling is thrown to the side like a technophile's outdated iPad.

Now I know what you're all thinking. You're all thinking that I'm crazy. That Avatar can't have been that bad because it's the highest grossing film ever. That it looks so beautiful and that Cameron created whole new ways of filming to put his vision into action and that it got nominated for NINE Oscars.

I put it to you that Oscars do not always mean quality (and besides that it only won three of the fucking things, none of which are any representation of quality, more a representation of how it looks). Secondly, since Cameron had been working on this turgid, overlong cliché for nearly fifteen years you'd have thought he could a written a story that resembled something original, or at least could have thrown some of that 200 million at a screenwriter.

Style over substance might work for balls out action films, but when you're trying to make a point with your films you need a little more substance than boy-meets-girl...