Even the Vatican is fed up with Avatar's horseshit.
It added:"In the end it is just reduced to an anti imperialistic, anti militaristic parable which doesn't have the same cutting bite as other more committed films on the same theme."
FUCKING BRAVO.
This is an extremely concise summary of why Avatar failed to impress- it was such a shameless mish-mash of already used concepts that the value would have to have been entirely in the execution, and there it failed miserably.
1. The "all trees form a deity-like hivemind." I guess Cameron read Speaker for the Dead- in which a sentient AI actually uploads itself to such a network. Not to mention the parallels vis a vis a colony in tension with local natives, and a proper recognition of just how dramatic an effect the discovery of a sentient alien race would be.
2. Fern Gully. No, no, not just the outsider entering another world and lusting after some hot fair-folk tail- no, they even have the fucking mano-a-mano with the gigantic bulldozer the size of Montana.
3. Dances With Wolves. Not much to say there, except they both have a military man in isolation identifying more with the natives then with his command structure, and naturally every man who has ever worn military colors (besides the protaganist) is a knuckle-dragging kitten rapist who exists only to defile all that is good and pure.
4. The Word for World is forest. Originally a novella published in the 1972 sci-fi anthology Again, Dangerous Visions, and later turned into a novel by the same name, it has the exact same plot device where an exceptional leader unites all the "tribes" of a primitive world to strike at a resource-extraction operation. Except in this novel, this "god" who shows his people how to do something previously unknown to them (that is, kill and kick punk asses,) acknowledges that he's unleashed the idea of murder upon his people, whereas avatar's "Checkov's giant birdie" is just that- just another fucking blatant Checkov's gun, as if we didn't have enough of those.
So basically it' a perfect shitstorm of every fucking cliche this topic has ever seen.
Now the simple fact that this mother earth/gaia creed is extremely well beaten ground isn't in itself an instant condemnation- "nothing new under the sun" applies here as well, even if it's been under the sun so fucking long that it's the cinematic equivalent of a California raisin. What it does mean is that Avatar had to score all it's points in the execution; it couldn't just phone it in with a rubber-stamp plot and characterization and glide through on originality of theme.
So naturally it was the fucking ur-example of one-dimensional characters and rubber stamp plot.
And one last quibble- towards the end the protagonist kneels to commune with the godtree LAN and says "[humans] killed our mother." What the fuck, you miserable asshole? Yes, we did, we killed that miserable bitch before she could kill us. Or did you forget that Earth doesn't have a godlike sentient-tree network, asshole? It's a different planet all together, and Earth is one tough goddamn neighborhood. Even the ever-optimistic Christians preach that God kicked us out of Eden on our asses and said "good luck, chuckles." And WE didn't have any fucking automagical biological USB ports to just plug into various animals and haul ass. It only took us a thousand years or so of domestication and selective breeding to get those advantages, you know, the ones that were a crucial underpinning of even early civilization (try pulling a plow by hand sometime.)
I haven't actually seen James Cameron state in any interviews that he truly thinks his story moving, original, or of any sort of value, but this was his pet project for nigh fifteen years and his original draft was 200 pages long, so... fuck you, James Cameron. Fuck you.
FUCKING BRAVO.
This is an extremely concise summary of why Avatar failed to impress- it was such a shameless mish-mash of already used concepts that the value would have to have been entirely in the execution, and there it failed miserably.
1. The "all trees form a deity-like hivemind." I guess Cameron read Speaker for the Dead- in which a sentient AI actually uploads itself to such a network. Not to mention the parallels vis a vis a colony in tension with local natives, and a proper recognition of just how dramatic an effect the discovery of a sentient alien race would be.
2. Fern Gully. No, no, not just the outsider entering another world and lusting after some hot fair-folk tail- no, they even have the fucking mano-a-mano with the gigantic bulldozer the size of Montana.
3. Dances With Wolves. Not much to say there, except they both have a military man in isolation identifying more with the natives then with his command structure, and naturally every man who has ever worn military colors (besides the protaganist) is a knuckle-dragging kitten rapist who exists only to defile all that is good and pure.
4. The Word for World is forest. Originally a novella published in the 1972 sci-fi anthology Again, Dangerous Visions, and later turned into a novel by the same name, it has the exact same plot device where an exceptional leader unites all the "tribes" of a primitive world to strike at a resource-extraction operation. Except in this novel, this "god" who shows his people how to do something previously unknown to them (that is, kill and kick punk asses,) acknowledges that he's unleashed the idea of murder upon his people, whereas avatar's "Checkov's giant birdie" is just that- just another fucking blatant Checkov's gun, as if we didn't have enough of those.
So basically it' a perfect shitstorm of every fucking cliche this topic has ever seen.
Now the simple fact that this mother earth/gaia creed is extremely well beaten ground isn't in itself an instant condemnation- "nothing new under the sun" applies here as well, even if it's been under the sun so fucking long that it's the cinematic equivalent of a California raisin. What it does mean is that Avatar had to score all it's points in the execution; it couldn't just phone it in with a rubber-stamp plot and characterization and glide through on originality of theme.
So naturally it was the fucking ur-example of one-dimensional characters and rubber stamp plot.
And one last quibble- towards the end the protagonist kneels to commune with the godtree LAN and says "[humans] killed our mother." What the fuck, you miserable asshole? Yes, we did, we killed that miserable bitch before she could kill us. Or did you forget that Earth doesn't have a godlike sentient-tree network, asshole? It's a different planet all together, and Earth is one tough goddamn neighborhood. Even the ever-optimistic Christians preach that God kicked us out of Eden on our asses and said "good luck, chuckles." And WE didn't have any fucking automagical biological USB ports to just plug into various animals and haul ass. It only took us a thousand years or so of domestication and selective breeding to get those advantages, you know, the ones that were a crucial underpinning of even early civilization (try pulling a plow by hand sometime.)
I haven't actually seen James Cameron state in any interviews that he truly thinks his story moving, original, or of any sort of value, but this was his pet project for nigh fifteen years and his original draft was 200 pages long, so... fuck you, James Cameron. Fuck you.