A golden opportunity missed

Rating: 6/10 (7 March 2010)

The creation of a brand-new, unique world in Avatar is nothing less than spectacular. Clearly the film should get Oscars for Visual Effects and Art Direction.
Unfortunately, the story is dry, trite and predictable. I spent the last 45 minutes checking the time and waiting impatiently for the number-one bad guy and the number-one good guy to fight it out (with the good guy winning, of course) and for our hero to get transferred into his Na'vi body. The dialogue was flat and and the acting painfully wooden. Hundreds of millions and they can't give us better writing and acting?
But the biggest disappointment for me was the plot. Once again we are told that the only answer to violence is more violence. If even the peaceful Na'vi can't find alternative responses to aggression, what hope do the rest of us have? What a golden opportunity to show a fresh, nonviolent response that could have inspired us all to find peaceful solutions in our own life. Of course, that wouldn't have appealed to the 12-year-old boys who have hijacked Hollywood films. Violence and big-budget battle scenes have become essential – money rules. We have become inured to violence in our world and see it as the only possible answer. But as Gandhi wrote, "An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind." Shouldn't film directors and writers take every opportunity to inspire as well as entertain? Even films made "just to entertain" inevitably instruct by the examples shown by their plot choices. So (yawn) once again we learn that the only response to violence is more violence. That we have myriad examples of this kind of response in life is no excuse. Peaceful solutions can only come about when we believe they are possible.