Avatar sucks.
I find it impossible to spoil a movie that essentially reveals itself in a 30-second trailer, but for the crybabies out there: spoilers follow.
If Cameron did one thing in this movie that is worth noting besides spend 300 million dollars on it that one thing would be that he has made the most realistic-looking cartoon to date.
That's it. It revolutionizes movies in no other way than the CGI is extremely well done, to the point of really fine-tuned interaction with actors and the human eye. But that's it. No original plot, no serious acting, no engrossing theme, no new points to share...nothing. It is Dances With Wolves mixed with a dash of The Smurfs. The movie so blatantly relies on Dances With Wolves Cameron should be getting sued for stealing someone's story...AGAIN.*
I cannot express enough how gut-wrenchingly predictable this movie is. The dialogue is stock. The character types are stock. The casting is stock. The story arcs are stock. You have seen this movie a dozen times in the last year. It may have taken Cameron ten years to "make" this film, but it only took him ten minutes to come up with the story. He just watched Dances With Wolves, cribbed some military styles from thirty year old anime, flipped through a few issues of Heavy Metal for design notes, and shit this story out. No one dies that you don't see coming in the first twenty minutes, no one says one surprising thing, and generally the movie comes off hackneyed and boring. I already know the female alien is going to fall for the human-pretending to be an alien and that she's going to be the princess of the tribe and that the human-pretending-to-be-an-alien is going to fight against the humans who come to run the docile Native Americans off of the their oil-rich plains. You get the idea. You had the idea before you even saw the commercial. The idea came rushing back to you when you saw the 30-second trailer. You farted this idea yesterday.
How evil is this movie? This movie is Tyra Banks: a perfectly-constructed beauty designed from the follicle to entice, only to discover that all of her insides are vapid and base and empty and downright stupid. And just like having to spend two months with Tyra might start off awesome (sexually anyway. I mean really, how else?), eventually you want more. And sitting through two hours and forty minutes - TWO HOURS AND FORTY MINUTES - of this movie is like sitting across a dinner table from Tyra Banks after a couple of weeks and realizing this woman doesn't read books, doesn't know anyone who would tell her no, and has been making you do all the work in the sack so she doesn't mess up her hair...and you have a month and a half to go. The movie is a mannequin. It's too long to be dumb fun, too predictable to be good, and too empty to watch more than once no matter how impressed you are by the effects. You could skip this film entirely and get everything you might like out of it when it's on DVD. You can even use it to judge the intelligence and value systems of your friends. In fact, I encourage you to do so; it might save you some money on Christmas gifts.
So skip it.
* - Any day-one nerd already knows what I'm referring to.
If Cameron did one thing in this movie that is worth noting besides spend 300 million dollars on it that one thing would be that he has made the most realistic-looking cartoon to date.
That's it. It revolutionizes movies in no other way than the CGI is extremely well done, to the point of really fine-tuned interaction with actors and the human eye. But that's it. No original plot, no serious acting, no engrossing theme, no new points to share...nothing. It is Dances With Wolves mixed with a dash of The Smurfs. The movie so blatantly relies on Dances With Wolves Cameron should be getting sued for stealing someone's story...AGAIN.*
I cannot express enough how gut-wrenchingly predictable this movie is. The dialogue is stock. The character types are stock. The casting is stock. The story arcs are stock. You have seen this movie a dozen times in the last year. It may have taken Cameron ten years to "make" this film, but it only took him ten minutes to come up with the story. He just watched Dances With Wolves, cribbed some military styles from thirty year old anime, flipped through a few issues of Heavy Metal for design notes, and shit this story out. No one dies that you don't see coming in the first twenty minutes, no one says one surprising thing, and generally the movie comes off hackneyed and boring. I already know the female alien is going to fall for the human-pretending to be an alien and that she's going to be the princess of the tribe and that the human-pretending-to-be-an-alien is going to fight against the humans who come to run the docile Native Americans off of the their oil-rich plains. You get the idea. You had the idea before you even saw the commercial. The idea came rushing back to you when you saw the 30-second trailer. You farted this idea yesterday.
How evil is this movie? This movie is Tyra Banks: a perfectly-constructed beauty designed from the follicle to entice, only to discover that all of her insides are vapid and base and empty and downright stupid. And just like having to spend two months with Tyra might start off awesome (sexually anyway. I mean really, how else?), eventually you want more. And sitting through two hours and forty minutes - TWO HOURS AND FORTY MINUTES - of this movie is like sitting across a dinner table from Tyra Banks after a couple of weeks and realizing this woman doesn't read books, doesn't know anyone who would tell her no, and has been making you do all the work in the sack so she doesn't mess up her hair...and you have a month and a half to go. The movie is a mannequin. It's too long to be dumb fun, too predictable to be good, and too empty to watch more than once no matter how impressed you are by the effects. You could skip this film entirely and get everything you might like out of it when it's on DVD. You can even use it to judge the intelligence and value systems of your friends. In fact, I encourage you to do so; it might save you some money on Christmas gifts.
So skip it.
* - Any day-one nerd already knows what I'm referring to.