To say that Avatar’s release back in 2009 was anything other than a phenomenon would be a massive understatement. The film was not only a huge box office success (Avengers: Endgame overtook it last year as the highest grossing film of all time, but that’s without taking inflation into account), it pushed the boundaries of what was possible on film, and promised to change the cinema-going experience forever. The post-Avatar thirst for 3D films even helped Tim Burton’s Alice and Wonderland gross over $1 billion worldwide – just think about that for a second. But it’s impact didn’t stop there; we all know at least five people who blued-up for Halloween 2010, and even today there is a website where you can learn to speak Na’vi. Perhaps strangest of all, at one point there was genuine fear that the film would cause a mental health crisis, as audiences became depressed and even suicidal at the prospect of returning to our mundane world after experiencing the beauty of Pandora. Given how ubiquitous this film once was, it’s strange to think how quickly it seemed to fade from the pop culture zeitgeist. So, with Avatar 2 set for release next year, how does the original hold up 11 years later?

We’ll spare you the suspense: the answer is it doesn’t. The visuals are still stunning, and CG environment is so convincing as to make you forget that all the exteriors were filmed on a green screen. However, the character animation is a little clunky during the some of the action scenes (for all the hype about how photo-real everything looked, we still think Disney did a better job with squid-face-Bill-Nighy in the Pirates movies), and key moments definitely lose there impact when you swap IMAX 3D for a 42″ Sony TV. But the real problem here is the script, which is essentially just a Pocahontas knockoff. We can only assume that James Cameron spent so much of his imagination concocting this verdant extraterrestrial paradise, that he had none left for the actual story.

Set in what the costumes and other cultural references would suggest is the the not-too-distant future (but what Wikipedia tells us is in fact the year 2154), Avatar presents us with a world in which Earth has run out of natural resources forcing humans to travel to the distant planet of Pandora to mine that most valuable of minerals, Unobtanium*. In order to ingratiate themselves with the local Na’vi people, scientists have found a way of transferring human consciousness in the synthesised body of one of these blue humanoids**. However, when one of the scientists set to pilot these Avatars dies, his identical twin is roped in as a last-minute replacement. Enter our hero, ex-marine Jake Sully (Sam Worthington). Sure it took his brother 3 years to train for this mission – not to mention several years of training before that to, ya know, become a scientist – but Jake shares his DNA, and that makes them drift compatible (sorry, wrong movie). “This is bullshit!” declares Sigourney Weaver’s no-nonsense™ Dr. Grace Augustine… she’s not wrong.

As luck would have it, Jake’s complete and utter incompetence is exactly what this team needed. Minutes into his first mission, this latter-day John Smith finds himself separated from the group and left for dead in the middle of the alien jungle, only to be rescued by Na’vi princess Neytiri (Zoe Saldana in her blue period). Cue a training montage of Jake learning the ways of the Na’vi, a large portion of which involves what we can only describe as follicular penetration with just about anything he can get his weird, prehensile ponytail on.

If you can’t see where this is all going, we’re afraid we can’t help you. There are literally no surprises here. Every character is a walking, talking cliché, from Giovanni Ribisi’s smarmy head of the mining corporation (when we meet him he’s practicing his putting in the middle of a control room, so we know he’s an arsehole), to Stephen Lang’s no-nonsense™, idiomatic Colonel Quarich, and Michelle Rodriguez’s no-nonsense™, bad-ass fighter pilot. We can’t help but wonder if this glut of no-nonsense characters is intended to distracts us from the surfeit of nonsense in the plot.

We could go on about about the plethora of movie tropes on display here – the almost comically protracted death of the main antagonist, the Saving Private Ryan-style slow-mo during the climatic battle, the eye-roll inducing use of the phrase “we are not in Kansas anymore” – but honestly, this film was 2hr 42mins long, and that’s already far too much time spent thinking about it. Do yourselves a favour and pop on Pocahontas instead, it’s exactly half as long and has the added benefit of some cracking Disney tunes.

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*We assume this was a placeholder name that somehow beat all the odds to make it into the final draft.

**If any of this get too confusion there is some handy voiceover (ahem, sorry, we meant ‘a vitally important and highly scientific video log’) to explain it all.