Published January 29, 2010

Well, it’s a New Year, at least in the real world. Here it’s just a new semester, Part Two of the epic saga of Your Life. For me it’s sophomore year, Episode Two: Revenge of the Return of the Wrath of the Yeti’s Ghost (Rated PG-13 for mild language and intense battle sequences). The action figures should be coming out in March. Anyway, enough of my shenanigans. I’ll get to the point.

Avatar (2009):

Avatar is James Cameron’s latest behemoth, the first non-documentary movie he’s made since Titanic. For those of you who somehow dodged the hype, this movie was going to revolutionize special effects, since that’s kinda what Cameron does every decade or so. Well, it did. Basically, Avatar exists for the sole purpose of testing out/showing off all the cool stuff Cameron’s perfected and invented over the last eleven years.

That being the case, it’s no surprise that the visuals are amazing. Seriously. I was amazed. I normally look at 3D as nothing more than an obnoxious gimmick, but as a friend of mine so artfully put it: “Watching Avatar in 2D would be like watching a British comedy with the sound off.” Cameron uses the extra dimension to give depth to his landscapes and make things like aerial battles look even more totally bodacious than they already did.

The visuals are, as I said, amazing, and probably the only reason to see the movie, since the script is a pathetic Frankenstein-ien beast made of the corpses of Dances With Wolves (1990), Pocahontas (1995), and FernGully (1992), with a little bit of The Last of the Mohicans (1992) ripped off for good measure. James Cameron is obviously a talented director, but whoever told him that he could write is, to put it lightly, an idiot.

If you’ve seen any of the above movies or are in any way familiar with American culture, you’ll have a pretty good idea of Avatar’s plot. Still, I’m sure someone out there will expect me to actually explain it, so here goes: the movie is about Jake Sully (Sam Worthington), who is essentially John Smith in a wheelchair. He’s an American marine, because Americans are representative of the entire human race. In the future, by the way, marines are more like mercenaries than actual marines. These particular marines are employed by some big American corporation that wants to mine the planet Pandora for something cleverly nicknamed “unobtanium.” Why the human race needs this so desperately is never explained, but that’s ok because I’m sure it wouldn’t have added any extra dimensions to the story. Anyway, Jake works with some scientists and gets an “avatar,” which is an artificial Na’vi, one of the blue-skinned natives of Pandora, they’re basically Native Americans, all close to nature and whatnot. At first, he’s employed by the bad guy marine, a white guy with a Southern accent, who has to be the most original villain I’ve ever seen, to spy on the Smurfs and convince them to move their home so that the Americans can get to the oi- I mean, “unobtanium.” But soon he “goes native” and falls in love with the Pocahontas of aliens, and there’s some montages of them doing stuff and getting to know each other. Then the white guys decide to wage war on the “peaceful” aliens, and Jake has to choose between his own race and the alternative reality that he’s created for himself with the aliens. I’d hate to spoil anything, but I’m sure you can guess the rest. Let’s just say that the movie doesn’t go out of its way to defy convention.

To be fair, Avatar does have plenty to say, it’s wrong to kill people for their natural resources, nature is good, don’t lose touch with reality, these are all very good points. However, there is absolutely nothing in this film that hasn’t been said before, and better, by somebody else. It’s not that I don’t believe we should think about the issues Cameron talks about, it’s just that I wish he’d done some actual thinking instead of re-using a plot and characters that have been around since before people invented the toaster. These conventions weren’t original in the 90s, so waiting a decade or so doesn’t make them any more fresh.

Basically, don’t see this movie for an original plot and well-written, deep characters, at least not if you’ve watched anything more than The Matrix in the last twenty years. See it as James Cameron hopefully intended it to be seen: as a brilliant visual spectacle, and nothing more.