Stick with FERNGULLY

Rating: 4/10 (25 July 2010)

Derivative sci-fi epic that is unbearably long for what it is and more of a cartoon than a bona fide movie. Borrows heavily from the old cartoon FERNGULLY and various Miyazaki cartoons. Plus Cameron filches from his own ALIENS and just about every Western ever made. Worse, it sends the wrong message to its primary audience, which consists of the very young and the impressionable of all ages. Basic plot: A crew of scientists and Marines is digging for a rare element (archly called "unobtanium") on an alien planet. The indigenous population consists of "large blue monkeys," which stand in for the American Indian here. These blue aborigines stand in the way of the mining. Guess where this is going. In case we don't immediately get the connection with the American Indian, Casmeron has the so-called blue monkeys living in harmony with and endlessly preaching about all living things, both fauna and flora. They ride their semi-horses bareback and fly on the backs of semi-dragons and communicate directly with the earth. They laugh and love and sing and dance -- they even engage in a MATRIX-style rave near the end. I almost expected Larry Fishburne to show up. This whole business gets embarrassing and tired very quickly, and yet it drags on and on. Worse yet, a Marine assigned to infiltrate the natives (don't ask how) himself goes native, and betrays his own people. Cameron makes this a good thing. Military bad, natives good. Ugh. It all comes to a head with an improbable, pretty graphic battle that should not have been in a kiddie flick. This movie is almost three hours long! It easily surpasses the dreadful A.I. for false endings. And like SPIDERMAN, if you were to remove most of the CGI crap and stay focused on the live action, you'd probably have a better movie for it. At least you'd have some sort of a movie, although I also must confess I was less than impressed by the film's leading man, the very bland Sam Worthington, who also narrates the damned thing. And again, no matter what one might do to this film, cut it or recast it, its message is about as left-leaning and tree-hugging as you can get. It is pure self-indulgence on Cameron's part, much like THE ABYSS, one of those it's-like-watching-a-train-wreck epics. God, I so wanted all those "blue monkeys" wiped off the face of the planet within the first five minutes of their appearance, I knew I had been duped that quickly. I am giving AVATAR a 4 instead of a 1 or 2 because of its box office take. Movie-making is a business, after all, and I used to be a professional film critic. You have to figure that there's an awful lot of impressionable people out there who were eager to be parted from their money. They all voted for Obama, too.