Who's the Hottest Garbage of Them All?

Rating: 1/10 (9 January 2016)

As the pandering Frankenstein that is the new Star Wars "movie" steamrolls its way toward dethroning Avatar's (inexplicable) preeminence, I thought I'd finally get around to copping a squat on this most mind-bogglingly absurd success story.
As with The Force Awakens, people just couldn't hand over their money fast enough, and as with The Force Awakens, I have absolutely no idea why. Because I'll just never be on board with the one & only "argument" for this movie: "the effects are really great and it looks like a lifelike world to escape into". Or some variation of such.
But notice that *serious* components of story-telling don't get mentioned... stuff like story lines, acting... you know, crap like that. Instead, it would seem that this movie reached $2.7 billion because it's "pretty".
Okay, so it looks nice... right?
Nope. In fact, I was so overwhelmingly disappointed with ALL of the effects that I just could not reconcile myself with the fact that people became so obsessed with "Pandora" that many of them were seriously depressed when the movie ended. The blue people themselves were unusually inexcusable in this regard. What the hell were the masses smoking before going into theaters around the world?
This, incidentally, is one of those "life lesson" moments, especially for the 21st century: if you're so disconnected from the real world that you need shallow entertainment to break free of your own self-imposed mental prison, then...
GO OUTSIDE. Seriously.
There's a whole world out there! Sights! Sounds! Living things! Or just switch over to PBS once in a while. You'll see critters that don't look stupid! There really is life beyond James Cameron's (allegedly) plagiarized movie, folks.
And to address an amusingly secondary factor of the film-making process: the actual storyline. I remember back in "the old days" when I would hear about Director's Cuts, and how superior they must have been to the versions of movies that got past the studios, focus groups, etc. But boy, did this movie change that.
Avatar is a prime example of what happens when no one says NO. This whole thing just felt like a rough draft. From repeated lines to extraneous dialogue, it felt like a significant rush job (not least because the effects were so surprisingly weak as well).
One glaring example that stood out for me: the assessment of the dangers the military would be facing. Early in the movie, it was described as "worse than hell out there", and yet it's also shown that the worst the blue people could do was fire arrows into tires so massive that they didn't even have an impact.
And sure enough, the later onslaught was met with such flimsy resistance that The Bad Guy was calmly sipping coffee in a flying vehicle during a major firefight. "Worse than hell"? Why, because he risked his coffee cooling to room temperature?
I don't get it. I never will. The only high point of the movie, as far as I'm concerned, was Michelle Rodriguez's low neckline. I'll never get sick of seeing that woman with a gun.
But do a few shots of cleavage make up for two and a half hours of smurf puke? That, friends, is what we call a rhetorical question. Look it up.