Having finally gotten around to watching The Number One Movie Of All Time, it's time for me to spew my vitriol, as per usual, in a review.
So.
Avatar.
I will, before I begin, note that I did not see this movie in 3D. On the one hand, everyone swears it made it "so much more awesome!"
On the other, I have actually seen 3D movies before. And all the requisite - though, admittedly, not as blatant as in most 3D movies - moments of "OMG something flying AT MY FACE" were there, as expected.
Now, the reason so many people have given me for thinking it was THE MOST AMAZING MOVIE OMG EVER is, in total honesty, the visuals.
And they are impressive.
But I want you to understand something about the people who have told me this: by and large, they are not science fiction fans.
For a lot of people, this is the first SF movie they've ever seen.
In that event, it looks damned impressive.
But for me? Honestly, I've seen all these visual tricks and the bits and bobs that make up Pandora before.
Because I DO watch science fiction.
Incidentally, this is also the reason so many people swear by Robert Jordan's hideous, ill-written "Wheel of Time" series of fantasy novels; it looks good if you've never, ever read fantasy in your whole life and found it in the airport bookstore while on layover in Duluth. But it just doesn't hold up when compared to real writers.
So, ok. The visuals are as pretty as any other nearly-100%-greenscreened movie.
Wahoo.
The problem is that in every sense, this movie is made up of tired cliches and tropes recycled slightly and given a sheen of science fiction to make them look shiny and new, but there's very little original material here.
The cripple given legs by technology.
Sigourney Weaver reprising her role in Gorillas In The Mist.
The entire plot of Dances With Wolves.
No, I'm not kidding; only the frame at the very beginning and end is actually original material; aside from the first few minutes and the Hollywood prerequisite happy ending, this is Dances With Wolves in space.
Kevin Costner did it better. And he did it first.
The setup is that a nearly magical mineral, named (in "homage" to the worst science fiction movie ever made, The Core,) "unobtanium," exists on a far-off planet named Pandora, which is filled with incredibly violent wildlife, including a sentient but pre-starfaring species known as the Na'vi, who are tall, skinny blue humans with cat noses.
I wish I was fucking kidding. Total Star Trek aliens, on a 400+ million dollar budget, with - continuing the setup - a perfectly good excuse to make the aliens look like any goddamn thing they wanted to.
See, the premise is that a grizzled space marine, Jake Sully - another trope - who happens to be crippled, is the identical twin of a scientist who was part of the Avatar project, which lets the scientists link their minds with cloned aliens, and then meet with and educate the Na'vi, in the hopes of convincing them to abandon their homelands and move away from the precious unobtanium that only exists directly under their exact cultural center, which will of course be totally destroyed by the mining operations.
The scientist gets killed, so the twin is quickly (five minutes of "while the credits run" give this information quickly) shoved into a spaceship and sent to Pandora, since as an identical twin he will of course be neurologically identical to his twin (which is bullshit, by the way,) and thus able to use his twin's otherwise useless and very expensive avatar. Which COULD be any kind of crazy-looking thing they could have created, since they're NOT HUMAN and humans don't have to pass for them, but instead look like absurdly tall and thin blue people with cat noses.
I'm sorry, I'm having trouble typing this with a straight face.
So he gets to Pandora, and with equally little in the way of preparation they stuff him into an isolation tank, and connect him to the avatar, which not only goes without a hitch, but he is almost instantly able to use it to its fullest capabilities despite its physical differences and his total lack of training.
They go out to explore, and he gets separated and left overnight, at which point he meets the (entirely computer-generated) female Na'vi who becomes his wife later on when the plot of Dances With Wolves progresses far enough. (I will admit that the cross-species sex was an original element, though; I don't recall Kevin Costner sleeping with Tatonka.)
He is supposed to learn from the Na'vi, so he does, eventually being adopted into their culture, at which point the Evil Corporate Drone (played by Giovanni Ribisi, who has never had a sympathetic role I know of,) sends in the marines to destroy the innocent and nature-attuned Na'vi to get them out of the way so they can drill for petroleum unobtanium.
The marines are coming, so the now-enlightened Sully delivers a warning to evacuate, which causes the entire Na'vi people to consider him a traitor, and tie him up. Then the bombs start going off, and after some chicanery he becomes a great warrior-leader to them, so they can fight (and, of course, beat) the Evil Human Corporate Minions and run them off.
Now, something I noticed while I was getting beaten in the face with environmentalism was that - as is typical for extremists of this type - they didn't even know any of the GOOD arguments to make in favor of their views.
One of the gimmicks played upon heavily in the movie is that the Na'vi have an almost magical ability to neurologically connect themselves to practically any other life form from their world; it seems to me that if we could figure out how to do that, the economic and commercial value of that would be FAR above and beyond the value of a single deposit of minerals, no matter how precious or massive.
But when the Evil Human Corporate Drone is going to send in the marines, the best the "good guys" can do is "destroying these people is just wrong!"
Next time maybe you'll try the far more effective "they could be worth trillions!"
At any rate, there were tons of inconsistencies, and maybe it's just my eye for detail that spots these little things.
But since the humans were all using open-turbine VTOLs to fly around, and the Na'vi had dragons, why didn't they just fly above the VTOLs and drop rocks in the turbines?
I'm not supposed to ask questions like that.
Or questions like, "if the Na'vi can permanently download people into their avatar bodies using their Magic Gaia Tree, why didn't they do that before the big battle so their big war leader didn't risk getting inopportunely disconnected?"
Or like, "unobtanium? Really, that's all you have?"
I want to stress here that this was NOT a bad movie. It's action packed, the special effects are all you could hope for from letting James Cameron have a PlayStation 3, and it's fun to watch, once you pick all the bark out of your teeth from getting slapped in the face repeatedly by the leafy branch of environmental evangelism.
But there has been so much hype surrounding this movie that I have to be perfectly honest: this movie does not deserve it.
It got exactly what it DID deserve, which was the Oscar for Best Visual Effects, which was roundly earned.
But Number One Movie Of All Time?
You have to be fucking kidding me.
