Hi! I’m James Cameron, but you can call me Big Jimbo. You may remember me from such movies as Piranha II. I’d like to tell you about the dangers of climate change..and..erm..the plight of the Native American..or something..and I’d like to do t through the medium of animated nuclear explosions! Fuck Yeah!
Is there any movie on earth that couldn’t be perked up with a few exploding helicopters? Cameron has obviously been paying attention to the abortive foetus of his Terminator franchise and taking notes – unfortunately he was scribbling them in the back of a notebook at an Al Gore seminar, resulting in an unholy Robocop/Ferngully mashup that’s rolling under the weight of its own portent for most of the running time.
Underneath the astonishing technical displays and absolutely gob smacking visuals, Avatar is at heart a happy enough run of the mill kid’s film. With lots of added high voltage death dealing. Imagine a preacher on a roller coaster, or better yet, imagine a noodly old hippy in a moth eaten sweater strapped to a rocket powered laser cock, screaming “save the earth motherfucker!” and destroying any neo cons who don’t agree that we need climate action now.
Welcome dear reader to the world of Avatar, a movie so hyped that even the girls in my office know it exists, and unfortunately so cynical that they are actually looking forward to it. Cameron is a great storyteller, with spot on timing that’s cemented his place as Hollywoods go-to dude for..well, whatever it is he fancies making really – if you make several billion with a toy boat, you can generally afford to take time out to study deep sea exploration.
Unfortunately all that time underwater seems to have given big Jim a bubble in his brain, the only possible excuse for the vapid Cali-eco warriorisms faffing about on screen here. Sam Worthington starts things off as a marine, who’s attempts to ‘fight terror with terror…sigh… leave him paraplegic, so your sympathy button is already fired up when he’s plopped into the – it has to be said – piss poorly designed alien avatar, a cutesy boots lanky blue fella designed to mimic the Na’vi, indigenous to planet Pandora, and, in the opening scenes at least, ideal cannon fodder.
On the plus side, Avatar looks fucking astounding, go see it in 3D and I challenge you not to get a techno fetish hard-on as the beautiful dragonfly choppers blast overhead, rockets taking out great swathes of rain forest in some glorious destruction. Make no mistake, JC is a man who loves the smell of napalm in the morning, its just a pity he likes to balance it out with heaps of ‘hey, the Earth is like, totally our mother dude’ in the afternoon.
Add to this a badly thought out love story and the whole thing starts to teeter under the weight of its own pomp, it looks like a particularly well designed cut scene from a total emersion game, but..well, it’s a bit shit. Too syrupy and preachy for adults, too violent for the smaller children who’d enjoy the quasi dinosaurs and bright colours, Avatar is grab bag filmmaking that would benefit from having about an hour cut out – and of course more exploding helicopters.
Ultimately this is a technical triumph on a par with Jurassic Park or The Matrix in terms of raising the bar for what can be achieved in movies, but its unfocussed story telling means this can’t even rank as a magnificent failure. Note to JC – ditch the aliens, get back to killer robots!
One Comment
So, a hippie with a bazooka?
Kill Al Gore! Bring back Regan! More ’splode without politics!