I promise I won’t do these one by one, folks, but some reviews are events onto themselves and Kenneth Turan’s LA Times review is
Cameron’s version, which he’s renamed “performance capture,” has been used to take the inhabitants of Pandora, 10-foot tall creatures with yellow cat’s eyes, long tails and blue translucent skin called the Na’vi, and make them appear as completely real as the film’s human characters. Perhaps the most surprising thing about Cameron’s visual accomplishments is that they are so powerful we’re barely troubled by the same weakness for flat dialogue and obvious characterization that put such a dent in “Titanic.”
Those qualities are here, all right, no mistake about that, but perhaps because of the power of the visuals, the strangeness of the science fiction world and the fact that many of the characters are Na’vi and not human it doesn’t feel like they matter as much. The film’s romantic protagonists paradoxically end up feeling more like creatures whose fates we care about than Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet on the boat.
That’s high praise — or maybe not so much since Turan notoriously hated Titanic.