Boy lemme tell you how excited I was when the movie opened with a sequence that had a ship coasting silently through the depths of space as it approached a gas giant that bore a strong resemblance to our solar system's very own Jupiter. At first I thought I accidentally bought a ticket to 2001: A Space Odyssey: An IMAX 3D Experience and walked right in to the part of the movie where the Discovery One approaches the Jovian moon and Dave goes through the Star Gate. That tunnel of colorful light was going to be a real trip in IMAX 3D! Unfortunately it wasn't to be and instead we're introduced to our protagonist, a paraplegic Marine named Jake Sully who's really morose because he's the main character and we're supposed to empathize with him.
After a whole bunch of really uninteresting exposition that I won't get into here because fucking everyone knows the plot of the movie at this point, we're introduced to our two main bad guys. The first played by that Scientologist guy that was Phoebe's brother on Friends. He's a corporate bigwig and we know this because he wears nicer shirts than anyone else in the movie and he also putts golf balls into a coffee mug just like every other CEO in TV movies and commercials. And just like every other evil corporate dude, he's only after money. The other is a colonel that we know is a huge badass because he's introduced to us when we see him pumping iron and seems to love delivering lines of dialogue with his lips curled to emulate a growl. Both of them endlessly call the natives of Pandora "savages," thus making them making them irredeemably xenophobic and so comically one-dimensional that I was hoping that Clint Eastwood would show up from the set of Gran Torino and tell those aliens to get off his lawn.
Which of course leads us to the Na'vi, the big and blue inhabitants of Pandora that the majority of the film centers itself around. Here's where you probably expected I was going to rehash all the same arguments that joyless assholes like Armond White all decry the movie for being racist and basically the Smurfs version of Dances With Wolves. They're right though; the Na'vi are a race that exist in an extremely romanticized, sci-fi'd harmony with nature that we once believed every New World race existed in even though history and evidence shows otherwise. None of this really reaches a boiling point of absurdity except for a ceremony later on in the movie where they all sit around a tree arm-in-arm and sway back and forth and appear to be singing some Pandoran version of "Kumbaya," but that was more unintentionally hilarious than anything.
After a whole bunch of really uninteresting exposition that I won't get into here because fucking everyone knows the plot of the movie at this point, we're introduced to our two main bad guys. The first played by that Scientologist guy that was Phoebe's brother on Friends. He's a corporate bigwig and we know this because he wears nicer shirts than anyone else in the movie and he also putts golf balls into a coffee mug just like every other CEO in TV movies and commercials. And just like every other evil corporate dude, he's only after money. The other is a colonel that we know is a huge badass because he's introduced to us when we see him pumping iron and seems to love delivering lines of dialogue with his lips curled to emulate a growl. Both of them endlessly call the natives of Pandora "savages," thus making them making them irredeemably xenophobic and so comically one-dimensional that I was hoping that Clint Eastwood would show up from the set of Gran Torino and tell those aliens to get off his lawn.
Which of course leads us to the Na'vi, the big and blue inhabitants of Pandora that the majority of the film centers itself around. Here's where you probably expected I was going to rehash all the same arguments that joyless assholes like Armond White all decry the movie for being racist and basically the Smurfs version of Dances With Wolves. They're right though; the Na'vi are a race that exist in an extremely romanticized, sci-fi'd harmony with nature that we once believed every New World race existed in even though history and evidence shows otherwise. None of this really reaches a boiling point of absurdity except for a ceremony later on in the movie where they all sit around a tree arm-in-arm and sway back and forth and appear to be singing some Pandoran version of "Kumbaya," but that was more unintentionally hilarious than anything.
Oh right, and Jake (remember him?) is able to remotely control a genetically engineered Na'vi body, which then allows him assimilate with their tribe and catch the jungle fever with a bodacious blue babe whose breasts are obscured by a few convenient ornamental leaves even though there don't appear to be any nipples to hide. Somehow the film is able to captivate me for an hour and a half riding a flimsy plot and sometimes-impressive graphics. Much like James Cameron's previous film, Titanic, we're expected an enormous payoff in the final act when everything just goes absolutely bonkers. Unlike Titanic though, Avatar completely falls off the track and makes a turn for the worse when it needed it most.
Apparently three months have passed now, where the Jake was supposed to get the Na'vi to move off of the gigantic mineral deposit they are living on top of even though he never once mentions it to them until the bulldozers are at their doorstep. It's too late for negotiations and Disney songs to save everyone and it sets up for a really big battle where we watch the forces of peace and harmony confront a psychotic, military-industrial hivemind that would be just fine if it weren't for the fact that the characters are so poorly underwritten that I have mentally checked out at this point. In a big hoo-rah, rally the troops briefing, we see the colonel give a pep talk to a crowd of a few hundred ragtag soldiers of fortune that are too entranced by the boss' plan of, I shit you not, "shock and awe" (I wish Cameron had the dignity to not have used that phrase) to wipe the smirks off their faces. One-dimensional villains only work when they're robots sent from the future.
If you've been able to endure those above five paragraphs to have made it this far, you're probably thinking that I can't see the forest for the trees. It's supposed to be a brainless spectacle! Enjoy the show! Look, I don't need an action movie to be smart or clever to find it enjoyable, but I would like have had some half-decently written characters that would have allowed me to empathize with a side so I had some sort of emotional or even just mental attachment to the big battle. The forty minutes of explosions, guns, and knife-fighting robots (I wish I was kidding) were ultimately just all shock and no awe.
I wanted to like Avatar, I really did. I knew going into it how underwritten and brainless it'd be. I was aware of the stupid eco-new age overtones the movie would be having. But all it amounted to was just a big, dumb, loud movie that became unbearably unenjoyable. And I have nothing against big, dumb, loud movies; I really liked Star Trek.
Star Trek wasn't dumb, jerk.
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