Still waiting for the "Avatar" backlash

From AvatarSucks.com

I thought I knew the internet. I thought that it would be only a matter of time before message boards, blogs, and Youtubes were flooded with masses of disgruntled film fans blasting Cameron for the silly "Dances With Wolves" plot, terrible characters and dialogue, and worse-than-high-school-drama-club acting (don't believe me? Go to 2:48).

The internet has, along with the rest of the world, let me down. "Avatar" has grossed almost $400 million to date domestically, and when those numbers are added to the international box office returns, "Avatar" shoots to over $1 billion dollars earned. For the time being, it doesn't show any signs of slowing.

Collectively, we're about as artistically discerning as an infant being taunted with a dangling set of car keys.

What worries me the most about the success of "Avatar" isn't that people are going to see it - in its theatrical run roughly the same amount of domestic viewers saw "Transformers 2" - it's that the movie-going public seems to be hailing it as one of the best movies ever, and that the Hollywood establishment, in their infinite wisdom, will undoubtedly try to recapture financial lightning in the bottle with motion-capture CGI epics that don't pay much attention to story or characters but are still advertised as high art.

As I said in my original review, "Avatar" is pretty to look at, and the 3D experience is impressive, but it is ultimately a very shiny package for an empty box. The characters are of the most simplistic background and motivations, the plot is tired, predictable, and lacking in any substantial depth or emotional relevance.

Compare "Avatar" to Cameron's 1989 underwater epic "The Abyss". There are a lot of similarities - military aggression versus scientific research, alien species under threat of annihilation, and yes, unprecedented computer technology was used to bring the film to the screen. The difference between the two films is that the story and characters of "The Abyss" drive the movie. No, the characters are not richly developed, but they are certainly more fleshed-out than the absolute cookie-cutter stars of "Avatar". So far is the plot is concerned, there's a lot more going on in "The Abyss", especially in the excessively long yet superior director's cut. Even though both films have bleeding-heart messages (and both start with the letter "A"!), "The Abyss" works because it's focused on the two main characters repairing their marriage and in turn saving the world in the manner of Sodom. The story and characters of "Avatar" pale in comparison. Just as infuriatingly, "The Abyss" occasionally has a sense of humor about itself, whereas "Avatar" takes itself more seriously than does a teenage poet.

The other significant worry about the momentum of "Avatar" is this year's Academy Awards, where there will be ten contenders for the prestigious - and meaningless - award for Best Picture. There is a distinct possibility that "Avatar" and Cameron will be up against the fantastic "The Hurt Locker", directed by ex-wife Kathryn Bigelow (Cameron, though, has been a vocal supporter of Bigelow's drama all year). I am afraid there's a real chance that big-budget CGI will triumph over low-budget visceral character-driven action and drama when it comes time for the Oscars. This discussion has been ongoing this week at Slate's Movie Club, and as Roger Ebert stated, "should Avatar snatch that Oscar away, it will be because it grossed zillions of millions, not because it's better".

That is what is at the core of my curmudgeonly objections to "Avatar". Film is, as is the case with any art-form, subjective. I have long since come to terms with the fact that I am an unapologetic snob, and not everything that I appreciate will be accepted by the masses, and likewise what pleases the masses will not necessarily impress me. In this case, though, I feel like the case against the film is so clear, so obvious, yet the masses have had the wool pulled over their eyes by the incessant marketing and glimmering visuals, and are hailing this as one of the best movies ever made.

I've seen the emperor's new clothes for what they really are. I hope you do, too.

"Avatar": "FernGully", "Aliens", and "Dances With Wolves" had a circle-jerk

The internet is buzzing. The masses have spoken. According to the voting members of IMDB, James Cameron's return to the silver screen after a 12-year hiatus, Avatar (#21), is a better movie than Apocalypse Now (#36), Taxi Driver (#40), It's a Wonderful Life (#30), Sunset Blvd (#32), Lawrence of Arabia (#42), and Citizen Kane (#34).

The internet is filled with moronic addicts whose drug of choice is a bunch of tall slender blue women jumping around, making shit explode. Surprise, surprise: the masses are comprised of fucking idiots.

As I promised in my review of everything I had seen and still wanted to see from 2009, I begrudgingly packed my trusty Moleskine and a few cans of contraband soda into my jacket and braved a truly miserable Chicago afternoon to walk up to a ticket booth and say the phrase, "1 for 'Avatar', please".

I unwittingly timed my afternoon to attend a 3D screening, which even for a 3:20 showtime, cost me $14. Don't ever doubt I love my readers, folks.

As I found a seat in the back of the theater and donned my 3D glasses, adding me to the impromptu Rivers Cuomo lookalike convention, I reflected on everything I knew about "Avatar":

1. 20th Century Fox thought advertising a sci-fi action-adventure flick as "FROM THE DIRECTOR OF TITANIC" made sense.

2. Sam Worthington seems to be the go-to action movie hero of the moment, despite the fact his best acting trait seems to be "brood with strong jaw line".

3. I just paid $14 to watch what would happen if "Halo" and "FernGully" had a crack baby they beat mercilessly.

"Avatar" follows a paraplegic ex-Marine who travels to the planet Pandora to be a part of a private mining company. There's a very special mineral underneath Pandora's toxic atmosphere, "unobtainium", which, due to the protective native species of the Na'vi, is unobtainable. I hope you caught that subtlety, there.

Worthington's ex-Marine had a twin brother that was a pilot in the avatar program, which combines the DNA of a human and Na'vi into a remote-control humanoid. After his brother's untimely death, Worthington steps up to the plate to use the DNA-matched avatar, mainly so he can feel the sensation of running again. His mission is to gather information for the military contractors and try to embed himself with the natives, and see if he can convince them to allow their sacred lands to be mined.

The next two hours are essentially "Dances With Wolves" in space - Worthington falls in love with a tall blue lady (Zoe Saldana), and has a military-versus-science conflict straight out of "The Abyss" with Sigourney Weaver as Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio. Giovanni Ribisi plays Paul Reiser's role from "Aliens" as a mining exec that doesn't care about overrunning the natives to get his unobtanium, and Stephen Lang plays the hot-headed jarhead from any of Cameron's movies that just wants to kill. Worthington predictably grows to appreciate the native culture and vows to fight for its preservation.

The plot is as thin as the movie is long and the Na'vi are blue. The beats are predictable, and a few cheap screenwriting plants pay off in a way that will fool your average filmgoer into thinking there is a story beyond "boy turns into blue boy, falls for blue girl, fights with blue people against mean greedy white people".

How crass of me to desire an actual story and some characters to go along with my computer-generated wizardry. Call me old-fashioned.

The real star and draw of Avatar, namely, the CGI, is impressive. Using an incredibly detailed system of motion capture, from the actor's bodies to the movements of their facial muscles, Cameron has created the most expressive animated characters ever put on film.

Aside from the details of the facial movements and morphing the actor's facial features into their digital characters (Sigourney Weaver's avatar is the most striking in this regard), the graphics do not seem so ground-breaking. It's a video-game movie, albeit a very-well rendered one, but had I not been bombarded by news stories about the revolutionary graphics at play, I honestly do not think I would have been able to tell the difference. It's not a far cry from what we've seen in the latest "Star Wars" movies, "300", "The Lord of The Rings" trilogy, or any other effects-heavy film we've seen in the past decade, the main difference is that there is just so much of it.

Unintentionally seeing the film in 3D, I must admit, was a treat. Even though the plot was next to non-existent and the graphics mostly looked slightly better than a PS3 title, the gimmick of three dimensions made the viewing experience interesting inasmuch it was different. I didn't notice at first, but I found that throughout the movie I was periodically taking my glasses off momentarily to determine whether the film would be as stimulating without them. Aside from the obvious issue of double-vision, the answer was "no": without the extra "wow" factor from seeing the CGI rendered in 3D, the film would have seemed like just another CGI-heavy picture.

Watching "Avatar" was the cinematic version of eating a can of cake frosting: there's some guilty pleasure to be derived, but no nutritional value.

TOO MUCH: dependence on the graphics; hype; placing the subtitles at weird depths just because they could with 3D

COULD HAVE USED MORE: character development, plot... you know, those things that make movies interesting

FILM SNOB NOTE: I realize I sound as though I'm contradicting myself when I praise the rendered facial expressions of the avatars and Na'vi but pan the overall effect of the graphics. This is because I was always aware I was looking at CGI. One of the best CGI movies of the past few years - "Zodiac". You didn't even know that entire scenes were shot blue screen, for example:

Yes, I get that a period piece police procedural is not the same as a sci-fi popcorn flick, but to paraphrase Peter Griffin on "The Godfather", the CGI in "Avatar" insisted on itself. That pissed me off, because there was basically nothing beyond the imaging. Did you notice how I couldn't really hone in on anything to talk about when reviewing this movie? That's a problem if you can't say anything about something you spent two and a half hours watching.

IHYFM RATING: TWO out of FIVE MEHS. The amount of CGI in the film and the lengths Cameron went to get it is impressive, but there's nothing compelling about the story. All that glitters is not gold.

IF YOU SAID THIS WAS YOUR FAVORITE MOVIE, I'D THINK: Either you're being ironic, or you're just an idiot.