Avatar! Smurfahontas! Dances with Cat People! Ferngully The Last Litterbox! Now it would be easy to just go with the most obvious of complaints. Everything is blue, the script is a ripoff, blah blah blah. While those are some of my issues (the script anyway) it goes deeper then that. Lets take you back to when trailers first started showing for this film. I saw advertisement for this film ALL THE TIME. This was gonna be the movie event of a lifetime, James Cameron's big return to film making! I just didn't get it, I saw a bunch of CG characters jumping, swinging, and climbing all over the place with no real idea what the whole plot is. Outside of the technology being impressive nothing in this trailer did it for me. I swore this movie off as something I would never see. After the release of the film I was out with a few friends when one of them was defending and raving over Avatar. "It's really better then the trailers make it out to be, I was really entertained, I would go and see it again if you give it a chance" He pleaded his case until we all agreed we would see the film.
So we go to an 11am 3D showing prepped with our black glasses given to us at the ticket booth. The beginning of the film kept my attention, The main character being a twin and how his brother was killed and now he takes over the project. It's basic but it does it's job and I'm ok with it. Once we hit the planet Pandora is where the movie is slowly but surely taking me out of the experience. The moment I saw them meeting in the room with all the IT guys on their little computers and their digital 3D Star Trek map all I thought was "I feel like I am playing Command and Conquer" then they take you to the man running this whole facility and to describe to you why the humans are even here. A mineral, a high end mineral that is difficult to find but mind boggling profitable back on Earth called unobtainium. I paused for a minute when he said... unobtainium? OH I get it! Its a mineral on another planet, its rare and hard to OBTAIN. God dammit Cameron you're brilliant! So the whole point of the avatar program is to digitally transfer a human's consciousness into a lifeless body that is of the blue cat people to then go become friends with them and then tell them they have to move because they are on top of the largest deposit of UNOBTAINIUM in the galaxy. So... you have the technology to basically bring an entire army and bases and combat weapons to far distant planets. Science has moved forward so much that we can put your BRAIN in a body that WE MANUFACTURE, yet our big plan to get this mineral.. is basically knocking on the front door and saying "hey yeah.. we need you to move a few blocks down so we can do some renovations". You couldn't just bring drilling equipment to dig under them to mine this out and they would be none the wiser? They are tribes people! They don't have GPS or sonar! they use rocks and sticks and talk to trees! THEY ARE HIPPIES! Just give them some weed and a bag of Fritos!
So anyway Terminator some how gets his goofy ass into the tribe by basically getting lost and attacked by an alien Cheshire Cat, a blue and green triceratops, and glossy Hyenas that when they growl their SKIN RETRACTS UP THEIR SKULLS. and from here we start having scenes from Dances with Wolves where Terminator is taught the tribes ancient ways of horse back riding and dragon flying. To learn this he must "bond" with the creature, how does he do that you ask? With the USB port that is conveniently contained in his dreadlocks. Apparently they have these little tentacles hidden in their hair that is like a connection to all creatures because they are "one with the planet". I wonder if they have magic rings that summons a great champion to protect Pandora from toxic waste and noxious gases. So once this connection is made Jake Sully/Sam Worthington/Terminator makes a deal with the general of the human army to get them the unobtainium and he will get Sully his legs back... his real legs...
As he gets deeper and deeper undercover Sully starts to fall in love with his warrior princess and see that these aliens/aborigines should not be harmed! So he has secret plots to try and help the tribe from the evil tyrants of planet earth! He does this by attacking one of their vehicles that is EQUIPPED WITH A CAMERA with a ROCK. He smiles for the camera, gets caught, thrown in jail and Michelle Rodriguez busts them out to help plot a good ol revolution! In the meantime General Badguy uses his forces to level the tribe's home and send them packing! End of movie right? You got them to move, time to mine this shit and go. No? oh you wanna go and kill them instead and negate your whole purpose for being here? Riiiiggghhtt.....
So the Blue Africa tribe is convinced by Jake Sully and his newly upgraded Lexus model dragon to fight the humans! Equipped with spears, arrows, dragons, and other tribes we had no idea existed they manage to overcome great odds and defeat the army leaving the battle down to the General, Terminator, and Blue Uhura. General equipped with his Aliens exo suit stands his ground and is able to initially defeat the two in combat. With his great arsenal of weapons including a chainsaw bayonet and a mech sized Crocodile Dundee knife he is eventually defeated by Uhura and Sully and the Humans are sent off the planet. Our closing moments of the film show the tribe using their God Tree/Organic computer to download Jake Sully from his human body to his Avatar as if he were a hard drive.
As a film fan this movie insults me. Now you may say "But Smitty, films rip off films all the time, no script is truly original anymore" and you are right. The thing with Avatar is this film is 10 years in the making. James Cameron has had a team developing the story, the creatures, pitching ideas, designing characters FOR 10 YEARS! in 10 years time he mainly took the script of Dances With Wolves, deleted random words, replaced them, and titled it Avatar. After 10 years we got Horses with 2 extra legs, foating waterfalls, cat people, and everything is a different shade of blue. Its like he opened a crayola box and said "let's see... which color has the most variations...AH! BLUE! WE WILL MAKE EVERYTHING BLUE. You can tell Cameron didn't give a shit about the small details of this film, He just worked with the technology til it was to his liking and knew that as long as he was the first to use it and threw his name on it people would flock to it. Is the 3D impressive? Yes, the face and motion capturing technology astounding? absolutely, but that doesn't make up for an obvious lack of effort to make your story somewhat new.
The ideas he took are great ideas and are good foundations for a movie but slapping a new coat of paint on the actors isn't enough to call it different. This movie should of been vibrant with an array of colors that made you just sit there and go "...whoa.." and a story that doesn't have you go "hey I remember that from Last of the Mohicans/Dances with Wolves/Ferngully The Last Rain Forest" I shouldn't be doing that in the middle of the movie! It takes you completely out of the experience when you can blatantly identify what scene at what point in the film they are ripping off. Fuck you James Cameron! because of this we were robbed of more good Terminator films! We are plagued with a never ending supply of movies in 3D that DON'T NEED IT! Thank you for Resident Evil Afterlife, Yogi Bear, Gulliver's Travels, and any other unnecessary 3D movie since your debut.
Who's ready for Avatar 2: This Time It's Personal!?
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