I Hate James Cameron, but I Love His Movies
Avatar Is FernGully Meets Space
AVATAR This is what James Cameron sees when he closes his eyes.
Tools
dir. James Cameron
Avatar 3D
dir. James Cameron
Avatar: An IMAX 3D Experience
dir. James Cameron
Okay. I think we can all agree that James Cameron is a deeply annoying blowhard: something about his face—like a smug, puffy kitten—and his Titanic and his enthusiasm for Bill Paxton and his propensity for announcing that he is like the Thomas Edison of fine wines of Fabergé eggs of filmmaking of the future. He is silly. He drives me crazy. I don't want James Cameron on my phone, or in my hot tub, or—god forbid—next to me on a plane (I would prefer a snake under all three circumstances!). I do, however, as it turns out, desperately want James Cameron in my movie theater. (Except for sometimes. But this is not one of those sometimes.)
I fully expected to dislike Avatar, because I make it a policy to dislike things that deeply annoying blowhards just won't fucking shut up about (see also: Jesus, kombucha, Tiger Woods). However, a curious thing happened when I sat down and actually watched it. That thing was called "THE BEST MOVIE ABOUT GIANT BLUE CAT PEOPLE EVER TO SHOOT INTO MY SKEPTICAL EYEBALLS." Cameron didn't lie: This movie rules.
Stranger Personals
Here's the situation. The story is as simple as it gets—Cameron really doesn't do subtlety. Avatar is FernGully meets space meets The Air Up There (these cat people totally reminded me of the really tall dude in Kevin Bacon's Africa-meets-sports classic The Air Up There—is that racist?). There's this alien jungle planet called Pandora, where a spunky space industrialist (Giovanni Ribisi) is mining for the world's valuablest nonsense mineral (called, for realsies, "unobtainium") with the help of the U.S. Army and Sigourney Weaver, Reluctant Scientist (and Terrible Actress). It's suuuper awkward, though, because the biggest unobtainium chunk EVAR is right underneath this really, really big tree where the aforementioned very tall magical blue cat people live! So what's a spunky space industrialist to do? Why, have Sigourney Weaver breed some hybrid human/cat-people avatars (called "avatars") to infiltrate the cat people and trick them into moving their entire civilization, of course! Because diplomacy is #1! (Gigantic bulldozers are #2.)
So. The main avatar is piloted (via science pod) by one Jake Sully (Sam Worthington, Hot Australian), a bewheelchaired marine who doesn't give much of a shit about cat people, but who REALLY gives a shit about getting his legs back (they can do that in the future—but apparently in the future, veterans still have shitty benefits). "There's no such thing as an ex-marine," he grumbles hotly. "Even if you're out, you've always got the attitude."
Jake Sully, in his big blue avatar body, goes to the cat people and he's all, "'Sup" (hot), and they're all, "Meow?" (not really), and he's all, "Yup, I'm the chosen one" (or something), and the great Earth Mother is all, "Jake Sully! 'Bout it, 'bout it!" (paraphrasing), and he goes through their complex warrior training and initiation (much like Kevin Bacon in The Air Up There!) and comes out the other side a fully certified cat-person jungle-parkour dino-wrangler. The cat people are all spiritually in tune with the environment and stuff, the human people are all greedy and bulldozey, and Jake Sully still wants his legs back—so what's a human turncoat in a blue cat body to do when the bulldozers come? Awesome stuff, as it turns out. Just a whole bunch of awesome, awesome stuff.
Make no mistake: Avatar is ridiculous. It's the kind of movie where people are always telling other people that they are "not in Kansas anymore" and saying splendidly cartoony things like "I was going to have to take it to a whole new level" and "If there is a hell, you might want to go there for R&R after a tour on Pandora." There's a slightly uncomfortable level of exotification going on—the cat people are your basic noble- savage earth worshippers with African accents and peaceful wisdom. And it's pretty clumsy in the Indictment of the Modern American Military department ("Our only security lies in preemptive attack," says the evil colonel with the 40-inch neck, "and we will fight terror with terror"; the words "shock and awe" are used). But I'm going to have to go ahead and say fuck all that, because of one thing: JAKE SULLY IS CONSTANTLY BEING CHASED BY A MONSTER.
Avatar—at almost three hours—is literally never not exciting. The creatures that inhabit Pandora's stunning glow-stick jungle (it's basically Blacklight Poster: The Movie) will blow your mind up: skinless dogs, dino-rhinos, lizard-lions, everything fast and alive and terrifying AND CHASING YOU. I had the adrenaline shakes for the whole ride home. And even if he's not much for complexity, Cameron knows how to structure a story. Avatar is a magnificent piece of entertainment. I might even allow him in my hot tub for this one. (But DON'T GET USED TO IT, CAMERON!) ![]()
This looks like the most high budget otherkin porn ever made.
That said, I will probably still watch it.
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Will I see Avatar based on the review? Mmm, probably not.
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Excellent movie, enough action to keep it good, enough romance to satisfy the teeny boppers (and they actually glow just like New Moon), plus a really over told story about greedy Humans and the depths to which they will sink to acquire things.
I saw it in 3D and it was done well. None of the crappy flying in your face every few seconds like "Final Destination".
Cameron better hope that word of mouth works very well because this hog cost over $500 million dollars to make. It will take several weeks of blockbuster weekends to make that tidy sum up.
I wonder if he bought any Carbon Credits to offset all the computer processing power that went into this?
That Cameron doesn't miss a trick.
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If it somehow were biologically possible, I would ask you to have my children. Well, after marrying me, depending of course which state you live in.
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but If you really think its great maybe I'll check it out...
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Have you seen the trailer in the theater recently, like in the last 2 or 3 weeks? They re-cut the thing from the first trailer I saw, which made it look about 40% more awesome in my opinion.
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god I hate nerd jokes.....
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But I suspect you have a lot higher tolerance for terrible writing and gaping plot holes than I do.
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At least until the ship was well on its way towards sinking.
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Plot holes.
In AVATAR.
Ok so in tabletop gaming (best way to start a sentence ever?), there's a concept called: SUSPEND DISBELIEF. It's entirely self explanatory, and it enables fun-having.
Y'know. Fun?
BTW - just how much cocaine do you reckon has gone up Cameron's nose? He has that cokehead "my face is about to implode at any moment look" going on somethin' fierce.
And fuck the Lindy haters. I'm apparently not alone here in thinking that she's really fuckin' funny.
Now that we're all clear on this point, you can quit posting your nasty comments every time she posts a column or review.
@26 It's exactly that, but visually just incredibly, incredibly amazing.
@61 That sounds like an excellent plan.
Everyone go see it.
PS I love you Lindy.
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The problem lies in the fact that we keep giving blowjobs to all these twats who think having plot-holes is a valid/expected/acceptable characteristic to perform in any any storytelling. We need to stop it, its not a virtue to be admired or even tolerated....its just shitty storytelling...plain and simple....asking someone to "SUSPEND DISBELIEF" is asking them to become a thoughtless drone..... a shit vacuum..... a vomit sponge.
please, lets take a step forward in screenplays for once..... even shitty action films
Worse than that - what about the racism? Stop rewarding prejudiced moviemaking with your $$. Ditto Transformers 2.
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Remember in Titanic when that guy falls of the ship and his legs hit the propeller and he goes into a cart wheel on his descent to the freezing ocean.
That was AWESOME. I laughed.
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I mean, c'mon. What, you want Mudede to review everything instead?
To me a movie review should tell me why or why not I should watch a movie--whether it's entertaining or thought provoking. Otherwise, it would be a film school-style analysis of the technical aspects of the film that I couldn't give a rat's arse about.
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I just wish Cameron wasn't such a piss-ant primadonna that he can't recognize that his films would be THAT MUCH BETTER if he'd hand off the scripting to someone else. There were so many times that the dialogue had me chuckling in embarrassment (Could he really be serious? Is he having a laugh?). By the end I had a headache, but I wasn't sure if it was because of the 3D or all the eye-rolling I was doing. Surely $300M could've purchased a decent script? Jeez, I bet Harold Pinter would've risen from the dead and written it for that price.
And the critique: I'm not overly impressed by the review. I prefer being addressed as if I were an adult, most of the time.
@42 and @55: Prepare yourselves...all the subtitles are in Papyrus.
I thought Cameron must have read the same science fiction I did as a lad (strong Andre Norton flavor, with a dash of Poul Anderson).
It was pure S.F.
It was pure Art.
It was pure pro-ecology.
It was pure 3D.
But most of all, it was pure anti-imperialism.
Great flick.
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Awesome funny review, Lindy. I emailed it to some friends in the sticks who were hesitating seeing this psychedelic CGI-fest.
And the movie was totally awesome. Good news: the right-wing nut columnists at the NYT are already dissing the flick for its "heavy-handed enviro/pantheism message" (READ: Hollywood=devil worshipers). Any movie that pisses the Right off is worth seeing.
Lindy West's review is not very good. She trashes the only female actor (I guess she doesn't like competition). She is also troubled by the "clumsy indictment" of the army. Maybe she is just uncomfy knowing that her attraction to big powerful thugs is shallow and wants to believe said thugs are actually heroes. Yes somewhere buried underneath the thick neck of that evil general is a heart that can be tamed haha.
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I also don't get the animosity toward Sigourney Weaver (though her costuming in one segment was fairly ridiculous).
Also, it's weird that the majority of the chicks who are posting really, really like "Lindy" and the dudes who are posting are the most annoying hipster wanna-be critics that start every response to something you like by saying "yeah, but..." See the movie, like it or not and stop over analyzing everything! It's supposed to be over the top and fun. Remember that word, fun? You used to know it when you were a child until your dad beat it out of you.
Avatar's like the original Star Wars in terms of impact, at least it deserves to be. Even if it isn't, fuck you losers, I love it.
God, what a hopeless piece of crap.
The animation in "Fern Gully" was more believable than the aweful CG in "Avatar". Disgraceful.
Seriously, pull that guys directing license.
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