My Avatar Review: Dances with Wookies… and more!
posted at 11:31 pm on December 30, 2009 by directorblue
[ Hollywierd ]
Avatar in four words: Production: $183,000,000. Script: $14.25.
Cameron must have blown his entire budget on CGI, which was gorgeous, and forgotten to spend on the story. Cameron’s under-$15 script recycled a bunch of the old favorites:
Dances With Wolves: Dude goes native except he’s 9-feet tall and blue.
The natives even ride horsey-type creatures and use bows-and-arrows.
And they ride in packs and wear war paint and scream when they attack. Clever!
Aliens 2: the evil corporate boss with Giovanni whatever-his-name-is playing the Paul Reiser character.
Oh yeah — and they threw in Ripley for good measure.
Pocahantas – Native chick falls in love with the dude who goes native.
And is it weird that I was strangely attracted to a nine-foot tall blue chick?
Lion King – Let no Disney script go untapped! In this case Hakuna Matata…
I swear to you that I kept waiting for the cast to break out in a chorus of Circle of Life.
And, really, the whole Gaia versus the evil corporation meme rings a bit hollow, what with California shutting down a million acres of prime farmland to save a frickin’ two-inch river smelt.
Mr. Cameron: next time save a little budget for story development. It’ll definitely help.
Cross-posted at: Doug Ross @ Journal.
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lmao. Great review!
ramrocks on December 31, 2009 at 12:57 AM
Cameron isn’t noted for stories. You should know that, going in, a Cameron movie is going to be a visual feast, not a feast for the soul or the mind.
I mean, “Titanic”. All that money and the plot is so incredibly weak….
Or “Aliens”. It’s not a new plot, people. Oh, and to continue the above – Cameron cut some of the F/X budget to get even that story – compare the alien from “Alien” and “Aliens”…
Just sayin’, there’s some directors who are utterly predictable. Uwe Boll comes to mind…
Mew
acat on December 31, 2009 at 11:38 AM
That man is a German national treasure. Without him, hecklers everywhere would have to work slightly harder to make fun of movies.
TheUnrepentantGeek on December 31, 2009 at 12:40 PM
I thought of Tarzan. But instead of saving the day by ululating a bunch of jungle animals to overrun the bad guys, this guy just plugged in his cable. How hi-tech! The whole movie was kluged together from other plots. Moreover, the political ideas were hackneyed leftist propaganda. But I did come away from the movie with a useful idea. Since living close to nature is enobling, we should level America’s inner cities, plant forests (Detroit is mostly pasture and farms now anyway), and instead of handing out welfare checks, give each Democrat client a bow and arrow and instructions on how to get along with Gaia.
NNtrancer on December 31, 2009 at 12:54 PM
This reminds me of a short story that I read decades ago and shows that there is one more scene missing from the end of the movie. It is set on a space station as the real fleet picks up the defeated Earth forces. The dialogue consists of two people discussing what has happened. One says to the other
‘Now that they have kicked us off the planet, they won’t be able to go back to their lotus land. They should be able to develop an actual civilization and eventually meet us as equals in space.’
‘Do you think that they will realize who we are when they meet us?’
‘No, since they think that Earth is dying, their legends will say that all the enemy have died. When they meet us, they won’t connect us with the legendary “war against the demons” that gave them their start. They won’t realize that all the “dead” demons were really avatars and that every one dealing with them was conditioned to trigger the war.’
‘At least we can now restore the minds of the people so that they can resume their lives.’
‘Yes, we may have to provide “evidence” that Earth has been destroyed at some point and keep an eye on their development, but I think that in a few centuries we may be able to “discover” the planet and make “first contact”. They do have the potential to join us as equals now that they have been kicked out of their complacency.”
sabbahillel on December 31, 2009 at 4:07 PM
This about sums up my review as well. I think Cameron did well with Terminator, and to a lesser degree, Terminator 2, with respect to telling an actual story. As he’s acquired more and more nifty CGI tools, however, the story has been tossed aside in favor of a random smorgasbord of special effects. This was evident in Titanic and even more so in Avatar. It was pretty to look at, but I could do without the hackneyed storytelling and Church of Climatology prosthelytizing — I can get plenty of that for free just by turning on the news.
NoLeftTurn on December 31, 2009 at 9:13 PM