Technology cannot turn junk into jewels

Rating: 1/10 (8 August 2010)

AVATAR seems like a good film for a thirteen-year-old boy on LSD. In fact, it still might be too tedious. Wow, this was mindbogglingly tedious. It was SOOOOOO tedious that it was torture sitting through the first 1hr42 minutes so as to leave only one more hour of tedium for the second night, during which I had to take breaks every fifteen minutes just to survive. Did people actually sit in their seats in theaters for 2hr42min? I find that nearly impossible to believe.
And yet, it appears, people actually liked this! Who are the people who laud this film? (Do I know any of them?) This was so ridiculously lame, from the plagiarized plot(-not!) to the trite dialogue and rampant clichés, from the sappy sentimentalism to the hypocritical moral condescension and truly embarrassing attempt to educate the ignorant masses about the history of the American Indians and all of the other people victimized by the U.S. military. As a matter of fact, I am a lefty with strong anti-war, anti-military leanings who is appalled by the history of what my own government has done with my hard-earned federal tax dollars even within my lifetime, to say nothing of what went on before. But even I could not stomach this thinly veiled, heavy-handed moralistic critique aimed at--who, precisely? Honestly, what a pile of pablum!
As though the lack of any shred--or even the thinnest thread--of originality in the "plot" (apparently "penned"--er--plagiarized by Cameron in three weeks, which as a matter of fact seems awfully long, given the condition of the final product) were not fatal enough, the women of the victimized native tribe all happen to look like a cross between Cher Bono and Paris Hilton, and they all have yellow teeth and wear green cabochon chokers and hiss like cats! Oh, and they also do yoga and listen to new age music. I kid you not!!!
But I cannot waste another precious minute of my life on this piece of tripe. Suffice it instead to say that AVATAR is SOOOOO bad that if it was a blockbuster and people are truly vaunting it as a masterpiece, well, I can only say that this does not bode well for the future of Western civilization.