Critics War Over Avatar

There’s an irony at the heart of Avatar, James Cameron’s first film since Titanic. “The movie is a song to the natural world that was largely produced with software,” critic Manohla Dargis writes in The New York Times. But what software! Dargis calls the film “glorious and goofy and blissfully deranged”—a compliment, we think. New York magazine’s David Edelstein is similarly pumped (“a mighty achievement”). There are holdouts: Armond White at the New York Press is not so tickled. “[Cameron’s] undeniably pretty Pandora—a phosphorescent Maxfield Parrish paradise with bird-like lizards, moving plant life and floating mountains—distracts from the inherent contradiction of a reported $300 million-$500 million Hollywood enterprise that casually berates America’s industrial complex.” The film, White says, is “basically a daft version of the Transformer movies’ sci-fi.”