topherchris

or: I Tell You My True Feelings on a Little Movie Called Avatar.

It’s called unobtanium. The entire premise of the movie is that humans have travelled a great distance so they can dig up some material called unobtanium to save mankind. Jim Cameron thinks calling it unobtanium is clever. I think Jim Cameron is the Prince of Darkness.

Okay, so we have this tribe of tall blue monsters that seem to have a utopian society going on. My ass. I’ve never thought utopia could be so fucking boring. Where’s their art? The most exciting thing these creatures can do is fly their pet dragons around. Wow.

Is there any conflict in the world of the Na’vi? I can’t think of any. They have perfect unity and perfect understanding with their perfect surroundings. Why do they even bother to have tough-guy warriors? Other than to be dicks to Jake Sully in an obvious and trite plot point, I’m not sure what the hell they’re supposed to be doing.

EXT PANDORA - WIDE SHOT - DAY
  
The fucking mountains are floating in midair. Do you hear me?  
The. Fucking. Mountains. Are. Floating.

Do I have this right? Humanity needs something for survival that we somehow know is under a big-ass tree on an alien world, and in addition to sending out a mercenary army of soldiers, the company also sends a unit of super smart dudes who’ve cloned the aliens and allow humans to run around as said aliens and see everything from their vantage.

How does this make any sense?

How are these cloned freaks supposed to convince the Na’vi to do anything? True, it eventually turns out that Jake Sully made a great undercover operative, but that was merely an accident. I still don’t understand why they didn’t kill him. This corporation is sitting on some totally badass technology that would be better served in a different movie.

Pandora itself was my biggest disappointment. Okay, sure, it looked cool. It’s supposed to look cool. My biggest problem with the environment is that everything — every single thing we ever see — had a purpose that was made immediately clear to a dumbed-down audience. See some cool plants that look somewhat like drums? Well, what do you know: Jake hits them and they light up and look all cool. Flying jellyfish look all mystical? Every time they show up it means… something important and probably mystical!

All I’m saying is, when you’re creating an entire planet, it’d be okay to have some random stuff going on that makes no sense and that is never explained. The more you spoon feed it all to me, the less you’re letting me use my own imagination.

3D? Yeah, I’m not sold. The 2D footage I’ve seen in TV commercials looks more crisp and bright to me than what I saw in a theater. I don’t know if Jim Cameron was actually serious about trying to make digital 3D a mainstream format, but I cannot see how he succeeded. Personally, I think the entire emphasis on 3D projection was a shrewd PR move for an otherwise average movie.

Finally, those Mecha suits need to be shelved for a while. Apparently, human combat stopped evolving at Aliens.