avatar: PLEASE get me started

Avatar 3-D, directed by James Cameron

oh my god. being, underneath my crotchety exterior, a...what's the opposite of misanthropist? pro-antrhopist? at heart, i really enjoyed this movie for the first 35 minutes.

before, that is, i realized that i was watching ferngully 3-D. the thing is, you have to give a james cameron movie a chance, because there's always the possibility that you're watching aliens. but in the case of avatar, quasi-ironically, we're not watching aliens, moviegoers. we're watching titanic, but with even less emphasis on a tautly constructed plot.

i was the kid who walked out of titanic at age 14 or so going, "my god, did she have to get back on the boat and run around for another hour and a half?" and i am the adult who's walked out of avatar going, "my god, i didn't realize that a movie could fist itself. with itself." avatar constructed the manifold and then jammed itself up the manifold.

now, i liked the first 35 minutes precisely because the plot was being unobtrusive with itself. yes, the movie's premise for having scientists wearing alien bodies so that they could TALK to the locals for the sake of financial gain didn't, as my friend pointed out, make a ton of sense, but the acting was very good--the characterization was pretty cool--and the CGI world was so beautiful that one didn't even quite realize that sequences taking place in the forests of pandora were basically composites of the scenes underlying "can you feel the love tonight" in the lion king and "can you paint with all the colors of the wind" in pocahontas (if the pandora forest feels familiar, yes, this is why. "can you feel the love tonight," "can you paint with all the colors of the wind," and ferngully. in 3-d. also when the stormtroopers--that is, marines--come out at the end, it feels a lot like the marin headlands in the return of the jedi).

but when the plot started establishing its presence? no. just no. the fairly cool characterizations gave up the field without even a hint of a fight--they got whipped faster than a xanthian by a kiss-my-anthian. this wouldn't have been so bad if cameron hadn't gotten the actual plot of avatar out of something like a "complete idiot's guide to plotting a high-concept sci-fi/adventure film." but he did. and did he ever. there are highs; there are lows. aladdin; 300; tron; war games; braveheart...you name it, it's in there. oh, and ferngully. have i mentioned ferngully? in 3-d, no less.

this review was mean. and i had fun. it's possible that the target audience was intended to be younger than myself (which would explain the disney themesong at the end)...but then what was with the language? you know what it is? if cameron wants us to take his "ecological message" seriously, he needs to think with his head and heart and not make the blue people's dialogue sound like fake "noble savage" mid-nineties-speak. he needs to not kill off the man of color (yes, even within the blue person tribe, there is a black man, and yes, he does die--just like jazz, the black transformer, dies in michael bay's transformers). he needs to not grind his storyline out of an approach to plot that amounts to mcdonald's "whole cow" approach to all-beef patties.

in short, he needs to not remake ferngully on a 16 billion dollar budget. in 3-d!