Hi John - A superbly written and well-argued piece, with which I mostly disagree.

I have never cared for Avatar. In fact, it is the first James Cameron film I didn't find satisfying. Yes, on a technical level it is superb, that I grant you (though I've never been a fan of 3D, but that's another discussion). However, I found the narrative - The Matrix meets Dances with Wolves on another planet - po-faced and dull, lacking the thrills of the former and the emotional heft of the latter. It has all the political credibility of a simplistic student polemic, and quite honestly it became so thuddingly on-the-nose with its reductive capitalism bad-environmentalism good preachiness that I wound up with the unfortunate urge to pick up a gun, strip-mine a third world country, and oppress some natives. Not the reaction Cameron was going for, I daresay.

If you're going to make the comparison, Dances with Wolves is the superior film in every way - shot on real South Dakota locations without a pixel of CGI. It looks staggeringly beautiful. Costner is great both as director and as star. Yes, all right, he's naturally wildly heroic, and you can make self-flagellatory right-on statements about white saviour narratives if you must, but personally I think that's counterproductive and unfair on a film that absolutely has its heart in the right place (I'll concede that Avatar does too, but it feels far more like a sermon). Besides, I've always viewed Dances with Wolves as a corrective to the way Hollywood treated Native Americans, not to history. On top of that, Dances with Wolves is a paean to diplomacy, a heartfelt romance, and at its most basic level a fantastic adventure story. I have never understood why anyone is cynical and snooty about this film. For one thing, it has something Avatar sorely lacks: A surprising amount of humour. That humour provides a wonderful contrast to the heartbreaking events of the finale, which - I'm not ashamed to admit - always leave me with at ear in my eye, and have ever since I first saw the film at the cinema.

If I were to defend a James Cameron film that often finds itself at the wrong end of snobby criticism, I'd pick Titanic. Yes, the characters are perhaps a bit one dimensional, and the film is arguably a blunt instrument, but it is nonetheless a hugely effective one. The romance tugs the heartstrings and the sinking is nothing less than satisfyingly spectacular. Overall, the film pushes all the right buttons and works really well. Sometimes a big canvas and broad brushtrokes are the right way to go, and Cameron did Titanic brilliantly (even if I still prefer A Night to Remember).

That said, I still think this is a terrific, well-argued piece. I just happen to disagree. :)