So despite a predictable childhood obsession with James Cameron’s Aliens and Terminator 2, I approached Avatar with a healthy dose of skepticism. With its maybe $300 million budget – and the swirling rumours of much, much more – I was afraid that no matter how good a film it might be, I’d be stuck staring at the price tag dangling invisibly from the corner of the screen and wondering if it was worth it.

But Avatar successfully stopped me thinking about its dollar signs. It’s a massive 160 minutes long and I didn’t once look at my watch. Yes, it trades in clichés – ‘naive scientists’, ‘evil corporations’, ‘noble savages at one with nature’, and (perhaps unfortunately) ‘white man saves the day’. Some are already complaining that the story’s too simple. Well, ‘complicated’ doesn’t equal ‘good’ – Matrix sequels anyone? – and Cameron’s simple story is masterfully told.

It’s far too deliberately paced for action fans, and barely a sci-fi at all. Cameron has little interest in exploring any ideas behind the projecting-human-minds-into-alien-bodies technology that provides the film’s title. It’s a deeply earnest and old-fashioned adventure story. If anything, Avatar is a conceptual, mirror-world sequel to his Aliens from 1986. Imagine if one of Aliens’ marines had a change of heart and decided to fight alongside the creatures with acid for blood. It even has a new Paul Reiseresque corporate stooge!

And here’s the ultimate compliment for Avatar’s special effects: they’re so good that I don’t feel much of a need to talk about them. Yes, the world of Pandora and its giant blue inhabitants is visually overwhelming at first. Too busy, too day-glow, too outdoor rave. Once you adjust, Avatar is completely immersive. The Uncanny Valley that turned films like The Polar Express into horrific parades of undead fleshbots is nowhere to be seen – thanks to being artfully subsumed into alien facial features.

I’m nervous about saying it in case Avatar completely falls apart on a second viewing, but there were brief flashes where I felt like a kid watching Star Wars for the first time.

All Avatar‘s above pleasures, however, depend on your ability to process this pair of facts: it’s about a noble indigenous population fighting corporate greed and American imperialism in defence of their world’s vibrant ecosystem… that also happens to be the most expensive film ever made.

As Alanis Morisette might say: that’s the black fly in your chardonnay.

Does the production of a film affect your enjoyment of it? Read this unmissable New Yorker piece about Cameron’s creative process on the set of Avatar, and wonder if we should dismiss all art made with money that could have been better spent. I think it’s only human to hear an obscene Hollywood budget like this and have a flicker of thought about starving third world children – but if you follow this logical path, it becomes increasingly difficult to justify the cost of any art at all.

Is the disjunction between Avatar’s moral message and its decadent production an unforgiveable hypocrisy? Or is the fact that Cameron convinced his backers to throw hundreds of millions at a film that’s so overtly anti-corporate and anti-America the ultimate act of insider subversion? Does it matter?

If it sounds like I’m making excuses, I don’t mean to be. It’s perfectly reasonable to think the amount of money spent of Avatar is repulsive, and avoid it for that reason alone. It’s to James Cameron’s credit, though, that I was so completely taken in by the movie that these questions didn’t even occur to me until after the credited rolled – and after the hideous Titanic-style ballad began.

First things first: the opening act of Neill Blomkamp’s District 9 is a thing of beauty. The faux-documentary talking heads, the alien refugees captured with 90s-news-video stylings, the alien ship that’s only half-visible, hanging silently over Johannesburg – these images put you inside the world of the film with startling economy. I settled back in my seat, ready to be wowed.

As the final credits rolled, though, I was lacking in wow. The question is: was that the film’s fault, or my own?

District 9 is a clever, well-done, and genuinely entertaining movie. It’s been described as “the world’s first autobiographical alien apartheid movie” by Chris Lee in the LA Times. Writer / director Blomkamp talks about growing up in Johannesburg with the white minority of the population in power, and how this inspired the movie:

“Blacks, for the most part, were kept separate from whites. And where there was overlap, there were very clearly delineated hierarchies of where people were allowed to go. [...] Those ideas wound up in every pixel in District 9.”

It was quotes like this that led me expect some kind of metaphor-laden, socio-political apartheid tale. District 9 provides exactly that for the first half an hour or so – until its fairly standard sci-fi plot cranks into motion. Afterwards, these more unusual elements just become high-concept hooks for all the usual stuff: everyman versus evil corporate machinations, a magic MacGuffin for the heroes to quest after, and kaboomy video game shooter sequences.

(These action scenes, however, are great. They’re excitingly comprehensible in a way that cinema’s current Emperor of Explosions, Michael Bay, has sadly long forgotten.)

The alien civilisation we see is disappointingly shallow: sure, we meet Christopher – the Good and Wise Alien – but the rest of the occupants seem to be the same brainless scavengers that the government propagandists say they are. I just wanted a smattering of hints to tell me that they have… community leaders? Religious meetings? Games that the children play? Anything?

As a film critic, you’re meant to be immune to hype; it’s your professional obligation to accept a movie for what it is and nothing more. Of course that’s a filthy, filthy lie. Critics absorb just as much pre-film expectation as anyone else, and the entering with the wrong expectations can destroy a movie. If you see one thing written on the label but find something else inside the box? It’s easy to feel disappointed.

Ang Lee’s underappreciated non-blockbuster Hulk (2003) is a good example of this. It was advertised as a Hulk-smash!-style extravaganza… and turned out to be a bizarre, visually experimental psychodrama about fathers, sons, and abuse. The 10-year-old Hulk fans in my screening were so angry that they would’ve turned green and trashed the cinema if they could, believe me.

But was my wow-lack in District 9 the equivalent of complaining that, say, James Joyce’s Ulysses sucked because it didn’t have any ninjas? Maybe it is. Ulysses was never going to have ninjas. District 9 was always going to be the film it is, and not the film I wanted it to be.

I have a feeling I’ll enjoy District 9 more the second time around with my expectations suitably reset. In the end, though, it feels less political than Paul Verhoven’s Starship Troopers (1997) – even though the latter’s bite was buried under all that soap opera beefcake and unflinching irony.

(A final admission: I’ve never read Ulysses, and man, I’m going to be so very embarrassed if it does have ninjas in it.)