Avatar

I have seen Avatar numerous times, but it was not always named as such. It has been called Disney’s Pocahontas and Fern Gully, it has also gone by The Last Samurai, Dances With Wolves and The Last of the Mohicans. Avatar is the latest in a far too long line of “white guilt” movies which see our intrepid hero assimilate himself into a minority race, act as their savior, help defeat his old allies and join with them in the end. In this one, he can literally assimilate himself as a walking/talking faux-Native American…I mean Na’vi.

Wasn’t this supposed to revolutionize the way people thought of films? I guess coming up with a great storyline to go along with the visual was too much to ask for the same man who brought us some of the greatest science-fiction/action epics of recent years. Was asking for non-cringe inducing dialogue too much to ask? I would assume so given how badly scripted Titanic was. Long gone are the quotable in a good way days of Terminator and Aliens. James Cameron is the new George Lucas!

The day-glo fantasia of Pandora at night is intruiging at first but inappropriately hilarious after a while. Why trees light up where they step ala Michael Jackson’s “Billie Jean” music video is anyone’s guess. And the animals are phenomenal creations, even if evolutionarily speaking they get shaky. A lot of time and thought was put into the look of the film, if only more time was put into the script.

Our villains have no dimension, memorable character traits or anything distinctive from one another. They’re like Snidely Whiplash to Jake Sully’s Dudley Do-Right. If they had tied up Zoe Saldana’s character to the train tracks at some point and twirled their mustache I probably wouldn’t have batted an eye. For that matter there’s nothing distinctive about Jake Sully besides being a parapallegic. Which is an interesting twist, but little is done with it since so much of the film is with the avatars. I probably shouldn’t have laughed so hard when Jake and Netriyi held each other at the end, but seeing a large blue creature loving caress the tiny human was too outrageous and positively ridiculous for words. Unintentional laughter is my favorite kind.

Avatar is also two-and-half hours long. It feels like its five. Far too many indulgent sequences that could have been cut slow down the pace. Cameron needed some outside eyes to go over the script and give him some suggestions for improvement. Or, possibly, to just rewrite the damn thing and challenge him on some of his stupid decisions, such as the choice of “shock and awe” and “fighting terror with terror” as ham-fisted, subtle-free allusions to the present time. Pity they don’t hold water.

I didn’t hate Avatar completely. Visually it was quite pretty, even if I did get the I’m-playing-a-video-game-without-the-control feeling often. And I adored Sigourney Weaver, Joel David Moore and Zoe Saldana. But if I could have watched the film on mute I might have taken a huge sip of the kool-aid.