Witulant

From The Director of Titanic, and The Man Who Now Owns 73% of The World

In the beginning, there was the hype. James Cameron has a new movie idea, geeky blogs informed me. It’s gonna be epic, said some Hollywood execs. George Lucas is crapping himself, myself told myself. Well… I assumed he would, both because of the scope of Cameron’s inventiveness and because Lucas is a quadrogillionaire and can afford to crap his pants if he so chooses. He has hired people who will clean it up, and get paid enough to be happy while they’re doing it. I mean, Lucas must have magic diapers that us poor folks don’t even know about, made from a secret NASA fabric that absorbs and cushions and…anyway…

Then came the non-stop trailers, the bombardment of movie updates and news, and the *shudder* omnipresent Fox ads. It was everywhere, and honestly, I wasn’t all that stoked for the movie.

Let’s clear something up right here before we go any further. I’m not what you’d call a huge sci-fi/fantasy nerd. I enjoy the occasional spaced-out alien flick or massive nature quest, but for the most part I’m not a fan. I’ll watch for the sake of watching more often than for the sake of my quivering loins. Nothing wrong with them, I just don’t relate most of the time.

So anyway, yeah, not that excited. Then came the inundation of recommendations. It started with acquaintances at work. “Hey, have you seen Avatar? It’s amazing!” Ok, sure, but a lot of the peeps I work with tend to go for lowest common denominator schlock, so that didn’t tip off my awesome-movie radar. Then came some closer friends’ praise for the film. I got a text message that said, “Love it or hate it, you have to see Avatar in theatres!” Another friend said I’d loathe myself forever if I missed it. And these were people I trusted. The radar’s needle started to shake. And then, to cherry up my persuasion sundae, came the critical reviews. Now, I have a complicated love/hate relationship with critics; I’ve often misappropriated critical respect with personal taste and been burned many times by their musings of a certain film. But this was almost unanimous praise. In fact, a local reviewer who hardly ever gives movies positive ratings gave it four out of four stars, and said it was one of the best films he’d ever seen. In other words, this movie should be a slam dunk for me, right? *raspberry* Not exactly.

Saying my expectations were kind of high when I walked into that theatre would be like saying that Heidi Klum is kind of attractive. They were enormous, high enough to break through the ceiling, reach into the black sky and slap a Russian astronaut. They were so gigantic, in fact, that I began to think I was actually going to see something fantastic and original in the way of filmmaking, and not just a bunch of really-good CGI. Oh, the disappointment. Oh, the mediocrity. Oh…the boredom.

Yeah, boredom. The story was so underwhelming, the characters so drab, the dialogue so uninspired, I actually couldn’t bring myself to care what else was going on. The stunningly beautiful world I was promised was overshadowed with a futurized version of Disney’s Pocahontas and a preachy agenda. How was I supposed to concentrate on how breathtaking the landscapes were when I could literally predict each of the film’s next scenes? Uh-oh, paralyzed soldier guy is in the blue man group’s village. They’re skeptical of him, and naturally he develops a rival who doesn’t believe in him until the end battle. Ooh, soldier boy is hittin’ it off with that blue lady. I’ll bet they fall in love, get it a fight, and reunite in the end when he proves himself loyal to her tribe. That mean old army man doesn’t understand the villagers, he’s just concerned about profit and doesn’t care about nature. Oh-noes! Soldier boy’s secret is revealed! “Sure, it started as a cover, but I really have grown to love you and your people! It’s real now!” But the villagers and their chief don’t believe him? How shocking! (and so on, and so on)

"Geez I hate nature. Almost as much as I hate sharin' my feelings..."

Of course, once I calmed down and wiped the splattered high expectations off my face, I gave it fair critique. Visually, the film is cool. It’s done something that no film before it has ever done with CGI and special effects and is sure to be a catalyst for the future. But the vessel that’s used to get there is awfully shoddy. It’s, in affect, a movie with groundbreaking technical merit that completely overlooks the real artistry. Yes, creating a gorgeous jungle with imaginary creatures and a whole eco-system is wonderful, and artistic. But that’s like taking a brand-new Lamborghini and ripping off the tires. It might be pretty but it won’t get you anywhere. And this movie certainly didn’t get me anywhere.

Now I’m perfectly fine with all the money it’s taken in. It’s a theatre movie to beat all theatre movies. And it’s a popcorn-flick to boot, those always do well at the box office. I’m not bitter about its attention, success, or even it’s all-but-assured Oscar sweep. What I do take umbrage with is the fact that I can’t bring it up in mixed company and talk about points I didn’t like without people assuming I’m a hateful, Satan-worshiping garbage dumpster. To not like this movie is to not like your grandma. EVERYONE loves the movie, EVERYONE found it to be splendid, and EVERYONE thinks it’s worthy of a goldmine full of trophies. The friends I usually cling to for skeptical, harsh criticisms of bad movies wanted to spread Avatar on their toast every morning. The professional critics so used to crushing ambitious filmmakers with complaints of plot holes and bad acting accepted Avatar as their lord and savior and started attending its church every Sunday. The people who didn’t like Avatar, so few-and-far-between, might as well have been angry curmudgeons whose opinions and intelligence meant about as much as the dried-up gum stuck underneath the theatre seats of which they unworthingly sat. Exaggeration? Only slightly.

So while I wait for my pissed-off, Avatar-loving friends to make contact with me again, I’ll just say this. It’s nothing personal, Avatar. You didn’t poop in my bed or pour bleach in my mouth while I was sleeping. You did nothing to me, and I don’t hold it against you. But for the love of quantum mechanics, couldn’t you have at least thrown in a twist? Like Joel David Moore could have secretly been evil and plotting against the blue-skinned jungle babies, or Giovanni Ribisi could have shown up at the last moment and thrown a frickin’ spear. For crap’s sake, man, something like that. Whatever, I’m done. Have a good one, Avatar. Enjoy building that shelf for all your thirty-seven Oscars.