South City Confidential

Avatar Sucks

This is why Avatar is bullshit: James Cameron spent $500 million dollars (sit on that number for a minute…) and couldn’t throw enough money towards the writing team to get more than an offensive collection of hackneyed cliches.He basically said, “Eh, forget the ’story’. I really want to make jellyfish-like things pop out from the screen. Can we get the guys from District 9, the Transformer-looking motherfuckers? No? Call Michael Bay and see if can help out.”  Not only did I accurately predict exactly what was going to happen (and no, I didn’t really read any reviews), but our crew of four visiting the Tivoli Sunday morning predicted entire lines of dialogue. It was that cliched.   I mean, ****SPOILER ALERT*** is probably unnecessary because the entire plot is predictable as McGuire being on steroids, but I digress.

More atrocities:

• The valuable mineral, indigenous only to a planet six years away from Earth, is called “unobtainium”. No, really, that is what it is called.  This is but one example, the other being the horrid exposition via film noir-ish narration, of this movie assuming their audience is really, really stupid and can’t figure anything out on their own.
• Michelle Rodriguez’s character is, essentially, Ana Lucia from Lost.  They should have just made it a crossover.  Even her lines could have been in Lost: “You’re not the only one with a gun, bitch”. And if you didn’t crack up laughing when she joined the “natives” and the put WAR PAINT on her helicopter, I don’t trust you.
• Of course, the boss of security guy is a ‘roided-out, bench-pressing meathead who actually says shit like “I wanna get home before dinner, boys.” And his ship is called Valkyrie. <eyeroll> I saw Apocalypse Now. There’s a thin line between homage in the form of subtle allusion and unoriginal ripoff, and James Cameron  hurdled far, far over that line with at least a dozen different films.
• Could the Sigourney Weaver avatar be any more desperate looking?  I mean this: if I age half as well as Sigourney Weaver, I’ll be doing fine.  Bitch is a fine-ass middle-aged woman. So why did they feel the need to make her character’s avatar a (Stanford!) cropped-tee wearing coed?

Don’t even get me started on the tired, brokedown, racist-ass storyline.  Actually, I already saw this movie, and it was called 10,000 BC, incidentally the previous winner of worst movie I’ve ever seen, and it involves white guy saving “natives”.  Really?  The Navi are so busted that a self-proclaimed “former grunt” can easily learn and assimilate to their culture through a series of training montages accented with bullshit love story? And then he somehow rides this creature that like only five other “natives” have ever ridden so he becomes the leader?  God, fuck off, that’s so ridiculous.  The problem with movie plots like this is twofold. First, they totally simplify imperialism into obviously-good and obviously-bad teams. Imperialism, while brutal, was and is more often a more nuanced, complex situation.  To suggest that any similar situations would be as overtly cut and dried totally diminishes actual corporate imperialist shenanigans going down right now. Mountaintop removal in Appalachia by coal companies comes to mind. Secondly, using the tired “natives who love nature” (hi, I saw Dances With Wolves) protagonists, and then having the source of all beliefs and actions (the mother-earth type deity) be totally mystical, instead of grounded in, you know, science, makes those of us who do think we need to live more in tune with nature look like crystal-worshipping lunatic treehuggers instead of rational thinkers who understand the limits of our current relationship with our natural environment. So there’s that.

Also, I don’t care if it’s “visually stunning”.  All that does is give James Cameron an excuse to totally neglect the entire plot and execution of the film and make a shit-ton of money.  So it was in 3-D.  BFD.  Did you see the previews for other 3-D movies?  Um, another Shrek shill, Toy Story 3, and some so-awful-I-thought-it-was-fake piranha horror movie?  Is there a law against making a decent “visually stunning” movie that assumes that it’s audience has a brain? So visually stunning that the Navi look like Jar Jar Binks?  It was cool, but not so cool that I can forgive the rest of the film’s asshattery.

FIVE HUNDRED MILLION, bitch, and that’s what they came up with?  You can praise the FX innovations all you want.  I don’t care if you made Janet Reno look like Sarah Palin blowing up the Taj Mahal on Mars with talking rats, if your story is garbage, your movie can’t be worth that much money.

Honestly, there’s probably thirty more completely inane, guffaw-inducing points to be made here, but I’m trying to forget I ever saw this movie, because it made I Got The Hookup look like Faulkner penned it. I’m off to read a book.

Tags: Avatar

KBO posted this article under pop culture on Sunday, January 17th, 2010 at 9:39 pm You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS feed. You can leave a comment or trackback from your own site.