Beware: spoilers.
Avatar reviewed in ten words: Pretty pictures accompany trite new-age bollocks and highschool politics. Moronic.
Avatar reviewed in more than ten words:
Alright, so I really should have read more about this one before dragging myself to a cinema. I guess I fell rather for their marketing blitz, and ended up with the unfocused idea that this was supposed to be the best thing since baked goods came pre-divided. Whatever the cause, I exposed myself to three hours of a film which will now be taking a proud slot in my bottom ten of all time. Three hours I want back.
Avatar starts promisingly enough: man has adventured into the stars, as man is prone to do, and found himself an honest-to-goodness intelligent species on a lush earth-like planet. The humans have set up camp, and are engaged in a sometimes-fractious mixture of terratorial dispute and tentative exploration and diplomacy. You know, a bit like European explorers in the Americas.
The humans are represented on-planet by a mining firm looking to plunder Unobtanium (cringe now so you don't have to later!), occasionally referred to as The Company. You know, like the East India Company. And the planet's residents, whom I suppose we might as well call Natives, worship some kind of universal energy thing, and say words like spirit and nature and harmony a bunch without any clear overriding philosophy. You know, like the laziest parody of Native American religion man can muster.
Hmm. I believe we've identified Avatar's First Big Problem. So, you've got an alien race, eh? Great! Develop them with culture, and religion, and philosophy and politics! Make them a truly new thing, something quite other than humanity! Or, if you can't be arsed, just crib off half-remembered noble savage sort-of-mystical stuff you saw in 50s-era westerns. The Natives check all the lazy Red Indian Stereotype boxes: bows and arrows, feathered headdresses, warpaint, pre-industrial tribal lifestyle, close relationship with nature; they even sometimes chuck in a Red Indian warcry as performed in primary schools across the land, just in case the already-bloody-obvious had somehow evaded your grasp.
Not that there's anything wrong with making a Native American film, but if that's what they wanted to do, why blow $300m on a crapload of CGI when you could have actual Native American parody for the cost of a turkey and a few garden canes? Presumably the answer is that such a broad-brushed half-arsed attempt would've been considered derisory bordering on offensive, which perhaps ought to have been a portent to write something better.
Oh, and whilst we're on the topic, it's not just their culture that's a lazy crib; even their physical nature is nothing but humans plus a blue coat of paint, three feet of height and a prehensile tail. When they're happy, they laugh like humans. When they're sad, they cry like humans. When they love somebody, they kiss like humans, which frankly even for humans doesn't stand up to much thought. Come on guys, what was even the point of inventing an alien species if it's just humans again but harder to cast? Even the avatar concept (that the humans are able to telepathically control genetically engineered human/native hybrids) is completely pointless, as since all natives seem to know a human hybrid impostor at a glance, for all plot purposes they can be treated as regular flavour Man.
Plot-wise, there's nothing to write home about. Generic man X wanders amongst the natives, becomes one of them, and has a tediously run-of-the-mill PG-rated romance with a native princess. The humans task him with persuading them to shift away from a big stash of unobtanium sat underneath a sacred tree thing, but of course they don't want to move, as the noble savage shares not the crass desires of man. The humans decide to go blow it up anyway, because they are teh evilz. Man X fights for the natives, pitting serious war machinery against spears, birds of prey and sort of elephant-stroke-shark things, and the humans end up getting beaten up and shipped off world.
Really you could watch the first ten minutes then write your own from there; it's so staggeringly lazy, if you just do the most obvious thing at every opportunity you'll get fairly close to the shipped product.
Whilst broadly dull, the ending deviates into rampant stupidity: the humans, having had their tanks eaten by rhinos, go home? Sure, giant eagle.... things pelting choppers out of the sky was a neat surprise, but it's going to be a task standing up to the standard human plan B: nuke 'em from orbit.
So, boring characters, half-arsed-verging-on-no-arsed plot. So far, so mediocre. However, Mr Cameron wasn't satisfied with mediocre. He was determined to garnish that butter sandwhich with a tiny crowning poo. And that poo here takes the form of James Cameron's Big Political Message. And that Message is:
Bush. Is. Bad.
Well no fucking kidding Mr. C, if I may call you Mr. C. You'd almost think we'd had eight years of intense criticism of two wars to hammer that point home in every possible permutation of ways, but hey, why not throw some cringeworthily obvious commentary into your otherwise cringeworthy-in-a-different-way movie?
Our protagonist and his avatar buddies are said to be on a mission to win the hearts and minds of the natives (you know! Like the currently ongoing efforts often referred to by the same name!) US military types talk about "shock an awe." On learning the natives are planning a big operation, he shouts "let's fight terror with terror!" Even though it's a pitched battle, which isn't really the hallmark of terrorism. Mining company people talk about how corporate profits (the most evil kind of profits!) they'll be gaining from the big stash of oil unobtanium (see what I did there). They drop daisy cutters. Every time you've managed to forget the last cringe, bam, another piece of poorly thought out highschool politics comes and whacks you in the face.
On the plus side, it sure was pretty. I just wish I'd seen a 15-minute tech demo, instead of a three-hour sub-Micheal-Moore rant veering all the way from Americans-were-bad to Americans-are-bad, dressed up as a film.
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