AVATAR

Every so often, a film comes to the cinema that dazzles your senses, that forces you against the back of your seat though you want to be sitting on its edge, that takes your skull and blow your mind and leaves your smoking boots on the auditorium floor.

AVATAR is not that film.

The 3D’s pretty, don’t get me wrong (delighted that he avoided any monster-coming-out-of-the-screen shit) – but if you take the story from The Abyss and the marines from Aliens, chuck in two scoops of Titanic tragedy and an eight-foot blue elf with tits that don’t quite show, then you end up with a flick that epitomises the phrase ‘style over substance’.

A grating script – cringeworthy in places, a predictable narrative, acting that was better done by cgi beastie than paid professional, and a environmental message that should have been a subtle suggestion and was more like something out of South Park (pause and breathe). I get spectacular, I really do, but the irony of the film having three dimensions while the characters barely managed two was not lost on me.

Oh, and WHY does every director ever born think you can use a longbow as a quarterstaff? Bugs me EVERY time!

Back to the point – it was spectacular. The cry that it has revolutionised the format is absolutely true – if any film is going to put a shot of shiny-elf-light into the fading arm of British Cinema, then this is the one, and as such I will forgive it all.

Though it does strike me: the reason you have to see it on the big screen?

Is because if you see it on a small one, it’ll be stripped – right down to the Emperor’s New Clothes.