Avatar reviewed.

My problem with movie reviews is that either I don't think enough about them to say more than "Yeah, that was pretty cool/all right/a waste of $10," or I have so much to say that it would be the essay with footnotes. (The Dark Knight was like that.)

Avatar falls more into the latter camp, which I guess says something for it. Maybe. Unlike TDK, though, what I want to say is not "This film made me think about human nature and the nature of evil," it was "I found this movie obnoxious in ways I have a hard time stating concisely."

It does have its good points. Namely, that it is beautiful. And perhaps even more important, for movie purposes, when you have humans interacting with what I presume is computer animation, the eye just pans across the scene. No visual jar at all. This is not Who Framed Roger Rabbit?

So, there's that.

Just a few notes on the "story" side: the Na'vi are not really alien at all. They are tall blue humans with tails. It is hard to do "alien" effectively, of course, but here it seems to be done deliberately in a sort of psychological sleight-of-hand. We empathize immediately with the "aliens" because they are, in fact, human, which is important because we are supposed to root for the "aliens" and against the humans, and it would be much harder to bring that off if the aliens really were strange/uncanny/incomprehensible to the audience.

We are also supposed to root for the aliens because we never see an alien do anything that would lose our sympathy, whereas none of the humans not ultimately allied with the aliens do anything to gain our sympathy. Well, OK, this is a very slight exaggeration; one of the Na'vi gets the standard "truculent tribal alpha male displaced by hero" role, in which he says rude stuff, and the Marine colonel is intelligent, decisive, and physically brave...but, of course, he's also a warmonger, so all of those good qualities just end up making him worse. That's about it for the moral ambiguity.

So, fine, we are rooting for the aliens. (And Our Hero, who, in the finest pulp tradition, is the white guy swooping into the native society, assuming the leadership of the tribe, and poaching the most available of the ladies, who is also the tribal shaman-in-waiting, as if Edgar Rice Burroughs had written this part of the plot. Oh, and Our Hero's friends. We are rooting for them too.) And they win! Through the power of the coalition-building montage scene, and a lot of heroic self-sacrifice from the expected quarters, and the Mother Tree zapping all the Marines, or whatever they are.

And the humans are frog-marched to their waiting spaceship and forced to decamp to their "dead world". About three-quarters of the way through the movie we learn that humans have "killed their mother (meaning Earth)" and that there is "nothing green on the planet (Earth again)". If this is not just wild hyperbole, then one might think it would have come up at some point in the movie prior to this--say, when the corporate mucketymuck is explaining why humans are interested in Pandora. At the time he says it is to get "unobtainium", the utility of which is never even hinted at, but maybe it is to establish Pandora as a human colony because the Earth is rapidly becoming uninhabitable, and they just forgot to say so.

But if that's really the case, I have bad news, Na'vi: Human nature being what it is, the defeat of a few hundred Marines is not gonna stop us, and I doubt even Toruk-Makto will be effective against being bombed from orbit.