Avatar blows.

January 13th, 2010

Twelve years after Titanic, the film that drooling DiCaprio fangirls paid almost $2 billion for, James Cameron pinched off Avatar, a thinly veiled two and a half hours of "four legs good, two legs bad."

The Premise: In the near future, a marine travels to the moon Pandora to harvest unobtanium for a colony called Hell's Gate. There, that sums up half of it right there. A marine going to a planet that reminds us of suffering to search for an ore implied to be impossible to find, for a colony that seems all about despair. Because God knows we couldn't have a moon with a normal name (Mike, for instance,) nor a rock with the implication of obtainability (diamonds in the shape of hamburgers, for example,) or a colony with an inviting name (Glenn Beck Doesn't Live Here.) That wouldn't be literary enough.

I can almost picture the first hour after our protagonist lands. After leaving the FUBAR-class shuttle on Pier 666, Jake passes under the gate emblazoned with "Abandon all hope, ye who enter here," and approaches the reception desk. The lady, whose name tag says Bloody Mary, points him to his barracks, which are located just past the Corridor of Despair. He can't miss the door, it's the one with "For the love of God, get me out of here" scratched into it.

Inset of our galaxy's Unhappy Quadrant.

Oh, and there was some stuff about people using alien mind-control dolls to interact with the local population. It's really more a side story than anything much like the whole boat sinking episode was a side story to the larger teenage love puddle in Titanic. Don't believe me? The whole Avatar project as depicted in the film was intended to assist in negotiating with the Na'vi. No idea why they couldn't just cut the pretense and roll out Henry Kissinger, saving money and the trust lost through deception, but nevermind. Ultimately, the McPlotdevice Corporation decides that they're just going to go ahead and make use of the missiles and tanks they had lying around, rending the whole diplomatic Avatar plot useless.

It's also apparently a future in which Hollywood activists and groups like Human Rights Watch don't exist anymore. One of two possible explanations exist for that spectacle: either Earth is now a dying wasteland in which hippies are forced to either grow up and get jobs or starve, or Cameron's script would otherwise be two pages long, primarily consisting of an NGO suing the corporation out of business. Remember, this is Hollywood where all corporations except Hollywood's are evil, and you must maintain consistency there.

In either case, we're left with the extrasolar bulk of humanity reduced to one-dimensional greed machines, who in Cameron's mind are hell-bent on wiping their collective ass with the untouched foliage of Pandora, the foliage which for one reason or another is electrochemically connected to every living creature on the moon and harvests their memories, according to the locals. Congratulations, James, you turned every Luddite's wet dream into a giant 4chan.

The scene where Jake Sully tells Miles Quaritch the Na'vi really aren't that evil. Courtesy of Chick Publications.

But I digress. Back to the Manichean character development. For a script that's been in development since 1994, one has to ask, "Why?" The answer should be as obvious as James Cameron's mountain of marriage and divorce papers: he has absolutely no faith in his fanbase. Somewhere between Terminator 2 and Titanic, something clicked in James that convinced him that his audience could not grasp the concept of moral gray areas, and therefore he had to take it upon himself to spoonfeed us the very concept of good and evil. I'll repeat: James Cameron thinks you're a moron. Even George Lucas, who makes it a habit of naming his villains after negative concepts like Grievous, Sidious, and Maul, at least sets aside two minutes to argue their case in Revenge of the Sith.

Footage of a cashier at Chick-Fil-A asking James what sauce he wants with his nuggets.

But FENRIS! What about the special effects? At least they were cool, right? I'll turn to Maddox for this one: in 2005, he made a point that Revenge of the Sith did not have any special effects in it. Sure, terabytes of CGI were there, but if every scene in the movie has the same effects applied, the CGI stops being special.

The same principle applies for Avatar, only a zillion times worse because Hayden Christensen doesn't get set on fire. By day, Pandora is crawling with polygonal puppetry that would make Jar Jar Binks feel right at home. At night, the setting turns into an orgy of bioluminescence which could only be matched by an explosion at a glowstick factory. And floating rocks. And giant robots that manipulate six-foot-long Bowie knives. In short, special effects don't exist because no effects are special anymore.

Don't you find it odd that no one gawps at the "special effects" in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Forrest Gump, and Babe? What, you say they're not that impressive? Well, then all three of those films should give back their Academy Awards for Best Visual Effects. No, it worked there because the directors were experts at hiding their work. In any given scene, you have to squint to spot the differences between live action and CGI. That's special effects, not a firehose full of college intern projects crammed into 150 minutes. Bite this.

The final mega-turnoff: Michael Moore endorsed it, in his finest lolcat speak.

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