The last film I saw was Avatar. In case you've heard of it.
So this is Mr. Cameron flaunting his prowess in spending lots of money on making a fairly mediocre film that manages to gross a fairly ridiculous amount, which is then usually used to fund his next, ever-so-slightly more ambitious project. After twenty years of this practice and a lot of time off spent being underwater and getting old, Cameron has come up with Avatar: now rated by Time magazine as the most ridiculously expensive thing in the world ever (paraphrased) and the absolute highest grossing movie about giant blue aliens with pointy sticks ever (also paraphrased. Expect me to use brackets a lot in this review.)
The reason it has, so far (It's still in the cinemas isn't it? How long has it been?), way passed the $1 billion mark is probably because 3D tickets are so f*cking expensive. You'd think gimmicky technology that started in the 50s (Don't tell Cameron that, "I'm doing everything in 3D now" he tells a journalist in 2003) would ease its way a bit more in to the mainstream by now. But no, I ended up settling for the normal ticket, begrudgingly as it was the one thing about the film that excited me.
Let's quickly now dash over the ugly little patch of slushy ice that is the story. So there's this crippled marine called Jake Sully (yes that is a fairly masculine action hero name isn't it?) who is sent to a nice planet called Pandora that is made entirely out of CGI. But of course we don't expect anything disastrous to happen on a planet called Pandora do we? Of course not. Jake Sully spends a lot of the time narrating the action in a voiceover which seems somewhat unnecessary as there's also segments of the film where crippled Jake narrates the action on whatever the extraterrestrial future military version of Skype is, and this fulfills the same basic narrative function. Anyway he plays puppet with on of the aforementioned giant blue aliens that bare a striking resemblance to the martians from Futurama.
There are other scenes where the simularities are definately there but Google Images can only do so much.
Meanwhile Sigourney Weaver also plays puppet alongside Jake with an alien that looks shockingly like Sigourney Weaver. Weird. So on a mission to a, err, well he's on an undercover mission that has something to do with the blue guys even though the marine folks plan to blow them all the way to Tatooine anyway for some kind of precious natural resource hidden under a magic tree. But Jake's an idiot and he gets seperated from creepy blue Sigourney Weaver and falls straight in to the hands of the blue apache folk's tribe. They don't seem to mind that he speaks in Italian American English and they soon take him as one of their own. After the training montage.
A training montage ensues.
So as we see from the training montage, loveable idiot Jakesully is now an honorary blue wierdo. But oh noes, something disastrous happens. Who'd have thought it? Honorary blue weirdo Jakesully falls in love with the sexy blue weirdo Neytiri. Which is kind of creepy. And the marines plan to blow up the blue guys magic tree with spaceships that are only occasionally resistant to fucking bows and arrows. Anyway yaddayaddayadda, explosions, kickass exoskeletons from the third Matrix film, man with scar becomes bad guy. I won't spoil it all.
Avatar is what idiots call 'a popcorn movie' and what pretentious idiots call 'a breathtakingly intense and visceral experience'. I thought it was a bit of fun. There's plenty of great action sequences and technical magicianry to keep you entertained, or if you're a grouchy sod like me you'll start thinking about the financial crisis and find the film as incongruously mocking as the Piers Morgan programmes 'Gawping at Foreign People Who Have Way Too Much Money Than They Really Need.' -which I suppose is mildly better than most celebrities option for a limited series of 'Tutting at Foreign People Who Have Bugger All.' Back to the film, wasn't 2007's
300 just as visually pleasing a skull-crushing action movie, if lacking in characters and narrative, and for hundreds of thousands of dollars less? Maybe I'm just being cynical again. Anyway, I'll leave you there. You might find more of these pretentious rants in the future if I don't have anything else to blog about.
So rating. I'm giving Avatar a genorous three out of five Arnies for reasons you probably already guessed.
And why I'm rating with Arnies? Because I can.
