By Susan Brinkmann, OCDS
Staff Journalist

Calling the plotline bland and accusing it of “giving a wink toward” environmental fanaticism, Vatican news sources have given James Cameron’s 3-D techno-thriller, Avatar, less than favorable reviews.

According to London’s Telegraph, Vatican Radio accused the film of “being a wink towards the pseudo-doctrines which have made ecology the religion of the millennium” and said its many faults would prevent the film from making cinema history.

The story takes place in 2154 on the planet Pandora where a paraplegic ex-marine is sent to establish a human settlement. He is met with resistance from the planet’s native population, known as the Na’vi race, which sets the stage for the many epic special-effects confrontations between the two forces. 

“It has a great deal of enchanting, stunning technology, but few genuine or human emotions,” wrote the Holy See’s newspaper, L’Osservatore Romano.

“Its significance is in its visual impact rather than in the story, and in its messages, despite the fact that they are hardly new. Cameron, concentrating on the creation of the fantasy world of Pandora, chooses a bland approach. He tells the story without any profound exploration” and allows the plot to descend into sentimentality, the paper said.

In the Hindu religion, an avatar is believed to be a god who is incarnated on earth; however, in Cameron’s world, an Avatar is human-Na’vi hybrid created through genetic engineering.

He describes Avatars as “living, breathing bodies in the real world, controlled by a human driver who projects their consciousness via technology which links their mind to the Avatar body and lives through the body in a remote-control kind of way while the body is in a coma-like state.”

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