Steven M. Finkelstein

Pop quiz: what do you get when you cross Pocahontas, Jurassic Park, Star Wars, Ferngully: The Last Rainforest, The Matrix, and Dances with Wolves? The answer is Avatar, the James Cameron runaway smash hit that’s made 650 million dollars gross, domestically, and counting. It’s even knocked off the record set by Cameron himself twelve years ago with Titanic. I wasn’t planning on seeing Avatar originally, but when movies set records like that, and become, more or less, cultural phenomenons, I feel the need to see what all the fuss is about. I’m obsessed with media, if no one has been able to tell from my blog yet. But I was feeling a little sceptical going into the experience, just because there were some people…a lot of people…who were talking about this movie like it was the best thing they’d ever seen, that it had redefined their lives, that it had changed the way they thought of movies, and their perception of the world. Roger Ebert said he felt about it the same way that he did the first time he saw Star Wars. That’s high praise.

And undeserved. Here’s the thing about Avatar. It’s gorgeous, visually, I’ll admit that. Stunning, really, at certain points, particularly in 3D. You’re really there, on Pandora, the lush, beatific planet where humans have traveled, 140 years in the future, mainly to rape this wonderland of its natural resources, particularly rocks that act as a good fuel source, or something. The lanky blue-skinned aliens of Pandora live at one with the plants and animals, and that makes them savages that must be eliminated for the good and the greed of humanity. And that’s where the plot becomes so jaw clenchingly predictable that I wanted to give James Cameron a lobotomy through the ocular nerve with a dull pencil. The movie is two hours and forty minutes long, and from about the thirty minute mark, I was able to predict each and every thing that was going to happen for the next two hours plus, while all the while I was hoping against hope that something other than what I knew was going to happen was going to happen. It didn’t. James Cameron absolutely refused to show any creative integrity, and I guess he just hoped no one would notice, or if they did, that they wouldn’t care because of the pretty colors. Sadly, he was right. The box office numbers prove it.

To make things as short and to the point as possible, the military is trying to infiltrate the creatures’ society, so they create avatars that look like the aliens but are under the control of humans that stay behind at the military compound in a sort of fugue state…kind of like the Matrix. Sam Worthington, an up-and-comer who was in Terminator: Salvation and will appear next in Clash of the Titans, is a crippled marine who is hand picked by the stock military-guy villain to get in good with the aliens and learn their ways. He agrees, then he and the princess fall in love, even while I was begging the whole time for it not to happen. Worthington goes native…kind of like Kevin Costner in Dances with Wolves. Or John Smith in Pocahontas, take your pick. Then the inevitable happens, as the military comes in to destroy the forests to get at the precious resources, and they must be taught a lesson about how naughty it is to mess with an ecosystem for their own selfish gain…kind of like Ferngully: The Last Rainforest. And the humans are defeated, of course, and Worthington, who has found a way to transfer himself from his crippled human body to his avatar one permanently, lives happily ever after with his blue alien chick.

All the while this was happening, as I said, I was looking for some kind of unexpected plot twist, something, anything. I really, really wanted the military to just obliterate the aliens, not because the humans were any more sympathetic, but because at least then something would have happened that I genuinely wasn’t expecting, and Cameron would have won my respect. But I knew it wasn’t going to happen. As far as Cameron goes, whatever credibility he ever had with me is gone, and I don’t care how well the movie does, or how much money it makes. There was not a shred of originality here. Each and every element of the plot was borrowed from elsewhere; there was just a fresh coat of paint slapped on it so it could be repackaged. I’m still giving this travesty a decent rating, because, like everybody else, I was watching the landscape, the animals, and the colors fly by with my jaw on the floor. But make no mistake, a movie can’t rise above mediocrity with sub-par dialogue and a story that was constructed from some of the other most successful movies of the past twenty years, no matter how pretty it is. James Cameron must think movie goers have shorter memories than goldfish, or maybe that we just won’t care about the plot when we’re gorging on eye candy. But when a movie would have been a whole lot better with the sound off, something is seriously wrong. This movie has been nominated for an Oscar for Best Picture of the Year, and I just pray that the Academy has more balls than Cameron, and doesn’t bow down to the Gods of special effects. I guess it’s still worth seeing, but, the same as a vacuous runway model, this one is only attractive till it opens its mouth.  My rating: 6/10.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 9th, 2010 at 10:25 pm and is filed under Movie Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.