Avatar: Even in Space, White People Will Be Dicks

When me and three of my friends walked into the Coral Ridge Mall to see Avatar, we were the last 4 people on Earth to do so. After we saw it, that was it, everyone's seen it now.

My one friend who sat through it twice referred to the film, as “the closest thing to a religious experience I’ve ever had.” Others told me aside from the stunning 3-D visuals, it was bad, bad, bad.

The visuals were stunning, maybe not God-inspiringly so, but engaging. And this kept me interested for about a half an hour of one of the most poorly written movies I’ve ever seen. This movie is Fern Gully: The Last Rain Forest, with multi-million dollar special effects and semi-offensive Space Native Americans who speak in broken syntax and ride 12-legged horses to synthesized tribal beats. The white people are money-hungry and ignorant. The avatar people are noble, connected, and exercise regularly. James Cameron had the balls to use the word “savages” in dialogue multiple times in reference to the Native population. Seen Pocahontas one or twice, Mr. Cameron?

Every single piece of dialogue is like a CSI Miami tagline. I don’t understand how trained professionals could create such bullshit, hokey exchanges without laughing aloud together. Some of my favorites are as follows.

1.As the camera fades away from the human avatar and his new real-world avatar wife Avatar-banging in a forest made of glow-sticks and fiber-optic tree branches, she says, “Now we are mated forever.”

I laughed out loud though no one else seemed to think that was funny. Children turned and asked their parents what was happening.

2.During the montage while the marine-turned-avatar-turned-native-God holds rallies gathering up the armies of his new noble Pandora-people to fight the ruthless white-man, the camera zooms in to show him on a ledge speaking to the multitudes, and just under the quasi-tribal soundtrack, the white-man-God, says to the cheering Pandoran crowd, “And your children’s children” and then the scene changes.

And your children’s children? High and stirring rhetoric there Mr. Cameron.

3.There is something called the “Flux Vortex.”
4.The mineral the white man wants is called “Unobtainium.”
5.There is something called the “Tree of Souls.”

6.The bad guy Marine General says, “Nice job ladies, first round’s on me tonight,” after the Army destroys the Pandorian “Home Tree” with their superior weapons and technology.

In the final showdown, the good guy says to the bad guy “It’s over” to which the bad guy responds “It’s not over. Not as long as I’m breathing” to which the good guy responds “I kinda hoped you would stay that.”

Pow! Bam! Whammy! Subtext there, “because I’m going to kill you.” Actually adding that subtext to the text would have taken this film to a whole other level.

Had one of my friends suggested we leave about an hour into Avatar, I would have. I saw what it looked like, which was all cool or whatever, and the movie was entirely and disgustingly worthless beyond that. Just more white people imperialistically looting and pillaging another great society, but this time in space, in 3-D, and on a set built out of the LED tropical paradise picture frames you’ll find on hanging on the walls in most single-wide trailers.