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I'm blue da ba dee da ba die...

I really don’t want to review this movie. It's not that it's bad in anyway, but no matter what approach I take here, no one is going to be happy. But at this stage I really don’t care. I just sat through like 3 hours of movie.

James Cameron’s Avatar was about as expensive to make as a movie gets, somewhere in the vicinity of $300 million, and it’s not hard to see that most of that has gone into digital effects and some sweaty virgin with a distinct feline fetish and a MacBook Pro in a dank basement somewhere. Robert Rodriguez could have done this movie for $8.65 in change and a tin of blue paint. Lucky for Cameron this, along with that snore-fest ‘Titanic’, became the two highest grossing films of all time. That’s a lot of faith we have in someone who dresses like Steve Jobs.

Avatar went on to win a total of 31 awards, including 3 Oscars, and roughly 5000gb of internet praise and e-jizz, and it’s difficult to see why. It wasn’t a bad film, at least not by most standards, but it’s a far cry from wowing me in any sense. Certainly not as good as idiots are raving it to be. Yes, cinematically it was nothing less than a work of art, but this movie was about as original a concept as sex in the missionary position. Don’t get me wrong here; it’s certainly not a bad movie. It’s just not especially good. There is nothing that sets this movie apart other than the fact that it is about 90% computer generated, which places it somewhere next to The Lawnmower Man. You could play a game where you take a shot every time you see real footage in this film and stay dead sober. It relies far too heavily on this CG world to fill in the gaps for bad screen writing and terrible acting. Fuck, will people stop hiring Sam Worthington. He cannot do an American accent to save his fucking career.

The plot to this movie is anything short of original. He could have called it “James Cameron’s FernGully” and been just as accurate. It is set on the moon-planet of Pandora – a word which is about as heavily used as any word that begins with ‘Re’ these days – which is home to the Na’vi, who look as if someone bread Smurfet with Azrael and fed the spawn copious amounts of steroids. The Na’vi (hey, listen!) are massive hippies, believing their deity Eywa to be within every living thing in the universe - a bit presumptuous, but whatever. The premise for human habitation of this world is that scarce, and very valuable, mineral called ‘unobtainium’. Yes, that’s right. Unobtainium. Like they sat in the office asking, “What can we call this mineral that humans travelled a billion light years to harvest. Surely it must be unobtainable elsewhere otherwise... hey, that’s it!” So basically we decide to take their land because we want its natural resources. This is a recurring theme in human society, it seems. At least offer them guns in exchange for corn first. This movie is a racist. Really, you could have painted the Na’vi red and it would have been the American frontier all over again.

(Queue Iron Maiden's 'Run To The Hills')

The massive conglomerate (and it is always a greedy conglomerate) RDA corporation is mining the planet so that its shareholders might actually turn a profit. How dare they, the bastards. Leading this company is Giovanni Ribisi, who plays Administrator Parker Selfridge. Parker hires a private military force, called Sec-Ops (because Spec-Ops was taken, presumably) to protect his workers and his profits and to kill any blue people that stand in the way of a quick buck. Sam Worthington plays Jake Scully, a cripple who takes control of an Avatar - a laboratory grown Na’vi body - and uses it to be about a big a dickhead as is humanly possible in a non-human body. Long story short he falls in love with a Na’vi named Neytiri and decides he’d rather live as one of them than a human. This doesn’t sit well with Neytiri’s probably suitor, Tsu’tey, who looks like the Na’vi Mr. T, and he decides to push Jake’s initiation ceremony. But this only speeds up Jake’s acceptance into the clan, where he proceeds to bed Neytiri in what would be a furry’s wet dream. This doesn’t sit well with the military types, who decide they’ve been patient enough with the Na’vi and decide to blow up Pocahontas’ village. This evolves into an all out war for the planet and it’s very special Tree of Souls.

Pandora itself is a giant rave party. Everything that grows here is either an orgy of fluorescence or has six legs. Even the Na’vi have glowing dots over their face and body.

There are too many stereotypes to name in this film. There is the smarmy junior administration to a multi-million dollar business. There’s the evil grizzled military commander who hates nature and loves war, played by Stephen Lang who seems to always play this part. We also have the native beauty who wins the heart of the hero. Joel Moore, playing Joel Moore, is the pathetic yet lovable sidekick. Michelle Rodriguez plays the tough Hispanic chick, always a winner. There’s the strong female role played by Sigourney Weaver (surprise, surprise. James Cameron hires Sigourney Weaver... again). I could go on. And I will. The Indian scientist, the jealous native suitor, the wise oracle, the clan leader who is also the father of the Beauty, the macho military grunts. It’s all very cliché and uninspired.

This movie goes for 165 minutes. That’s 2 hours and 45 minutes. And not a single original thought occurs that whole time. I half expected to see Tim Curry come in as a villain at some point and sing about ‘toxic love’. This is another spiel in film form about how greedy humans are destroying worlds for their own gain, whether that world is their own or someone else’s. Blah blah blah. We’ve heard all this before.

Overall this was a watchable film. Nothing comes as a surprise, as the plot is predictable from about 0.4 seconds in, but it’s very well executed and just incredibly well done. The environment is beautiful and the wildlife is amazingly thought up and thought through. Things look and move as they should. There was obviously a lot of research that went in to making the world look as alive as possible, and it shows. It does however lose points for constantly hinting at blue tit while never actually showing blue tit. Fucking cocktease.

James Cameron is a brilliant man, and as creative as they come. He wrote and directed one of my favourite film franchises of all time – the Terminator series, by which I mean Terminator and Terminator 2 ONLY. He also wrote and directed Aliens, another incredible film. He seems to have been on the forefront of pushing film technology to its limits. Like George Lucas did with Star Wars and ILM, Cameron has redefined how things can, and probably - in future - will be, done. Terminator 2 will very shortly be celebrating its 20th birthday and it still looks amazing, even by today’s standards. I’ve seen far worse made far more recently. Though he does have a habit of using the same actors over and over again, much like Tim Burton overuses Johnny Depp. Pvt. Vasquez is John Connor’s adoptive mother. Bishop is Det. Hal Vukovich. Cpl. Dwayne Hicks is Kyle Reese. You get the gist of it.

If I had to describe this movie in one sentence, it would be this: FernGully meets Dances with Wolves. But since that isn’t very good (while being pretty accurate) I’ll steal Dave Price’s masterfully constructed thoughts:
“Riveting Rousseauian war-porn, set in a gorgeous hi-def Azerothian CGI landscape, ironically itself a gem of the technological civilization it decries.”

I’m worried now that I have a sexual appetite for 12 foot tall, blue cat-women.