"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.

"District 9" - it's Halo lite!

So I used to work on the inside track of the movie entertainment business. So far inside the track, I was at Ground Zero of the Halo movie imploding. It was amazing that the project got as far as it did. In 2005, CAA infamously dispatched a team of Master Chiefs with script in hand and tried to start a single-day bidding war between the major studios. It didn't work. Eventually, Fox and Universal teamed up to co-finance the picture for Peter Jackson to produce and unknown director Neill Blomkamp to helm. Even though I was never able to read the script, having played all three of the Halo games, which have about as much plot coherence as a season of Twin Peaks viewed backwards, I'm sure the script was not going to be up for the Best Adapted Screenplay nod. As it often does in Hollywood, money got in the way, and Halo died a quick and painful death, like getting tagged with a plasma grenade on your junk.

ANYHOW, producer Peter Jackson said director Neill Blomkamp's debut feature was born the day that Halo died, ironic inasmuch as District 9 only cost about $30 million, and the budget for Halo could have easily topped $250, and was almost certain to be a disaster.

District 9, on the other hand, is a hit. So much of a hit, in fact, it's currently #44 in the IMDB Top 250. According to the wise masses of the internet, this film was better than Alien, M, To Kill a Mockingbird, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, Chinatown, Raging Bull, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Heat, The Graduate, and Fargo.

Once again, clear proof that the masses are comprised of fucking idiots.

District 9 was a decent-enough film, some by-the-numbers action and chase sequences highlighted by Blomkamp's impressive ability to use computer graphics effectively. For anyone that has not seen them, I would recommend watching both his Halo live-action short and "Alive in Joburg", the short film that inspired District 9. Watching them, you'll get a good sense of his ability to create visceral images. At the end of both of these shorts, though, you may ask yourself what you were supposed to take from the films, and therein lies the weakness of District 9.

The first fifteen minutes or so of District 9 present a very interesting sci-fi dilemma - shipwrecked aliens in South Africa are becoming a growing nuisance. Documentary-style footage and interviews chronicle the events that led to this situation, and the parallels between the movie and Apartheid are both obvious and fascinating.

The interesting commentary stops when the conglomerate responsible for housing them in a slum in Johannesburg, Multi-National United, decides to relocate them to a settlement 25 miles outside of town. [Slate columnist Daniel Engber aptly described the name Multi-National United "lame", "obvious", and "witless"] In charge of the operation for MNU is Wikus [Engber: "an Afrikaner version of Michael Scott"] who inadvertently exposes himself to harmful alien technology, making himself quickly and bizarrely ill. Faced with the prospect of never seeing his wife again, Wikus teams up with the only alien who isn't a bloodthirsty sloth, who, for obvious reasons, is named "Chris".

Yes. The alien's name is "Chris". I'll just let that sink in for a minute. "Chris".

His name is fucking "Chris".

From here on out, the movie becomes a series of chases and battles where heads, limbs, and entire bodies comically explode like a marathon runner's blister. Wikus erratically double-crosses Chris, only to inexplicably come back in the fold and help him in the end. When all is said and done, we're not really sure what we're supposed to feel about what we've seen, and it's not a clever or purposeful ambiguity, it's the result of a movie that clearly was conceived of with a point in mind but completely fails to make it in the final product. What we're left with is a Faberge egg of a movie - ornate and expertly decorated, but ultimately hollow.

TOO MUCH: Exploding bodies, absurd plot holes, such as what the substance is and what it does to Wikus

COULD HAVE USED MORE: making a strong commentary on society, or the government, or prejudice, whichever it was that we were meant to think about

FILM SNOB NOTE: Lead actor Sharlto Copley was a producer on "Alive in Joburg"; his acting career started with a brief cameo in that short.

IHYFM RATING: TWO AND A HALFish out of FIVE MEHS.

IF YOU SAID THIS WAS YOUR FAVORITE MOVIE, I'D THINK: I want to kick you in the Wikus.