dances with wolves on acid

Rating: 1/10 (22 December 2009)

The colorful sometimes imaginative world of Avatar is firmly rooted in the Hollywood tradition of allowing white average people to play Indian or go native. Be it the Last Samurai, Lawerence of Arabia or Dances with Wolves there is a long tradition of films that fill the dual fantasy of leaving ones race. I say dual fantasy because they always come in with a new package but the end result is always the same. First a white person of little merit (Lawerence was a mild mannered clerk and hobby orientalist, Tom Cruise's samurai a drunk)and now our hero in Avatar bound to a wheel chair and by all accounts a moron.
Warning Spoiler!!!
Somehow however he manages to become chief of the blue people by the end of the big screen video game.
So we get the two pillars of the leaving your race sub-genre, pillar one, one can leave their race and be something other and exotic, and two any ole white guy given the chance can master another language, (though very few do in truth in America) an ancient complicated culture, and end up ruling or above the lowly natives. Makes one wonder which white supremacist enclave cranked this flimsy excuse for a script out in the first place.
Even if we can accept this tale as mere fantasy (though it seems heavy handed and more of a fable) One can not escape the fact that this film even in 3d imax can not fool us into thinking we have entered a realm of flesh and blood water and stone. It never rises above its computer generated nature, that is to say tricking us into asking, "wow how did they do that?" or "gosh that looks so real it must be some real place somewhere." Instead as folks were leaving the theater and being asked by those waiting in a snowy line, "how was it?" the comments were always the same "the graphics were great." Failure point blank, if that is all one can say of it then it is has failed in its efforts to transport the audience to another time and place where we are lost and go for a ride with the cast and crew. In truth I seldom even thought that the graphics were in fact great.
The technology and violence are filmed with such relish one might be confused as to the ultimate message of the film are we to enjoy or hate such violence and weaponry?
I suspect everyone who is giving this film an eight to ten rating and raving about it as the future of cinema, will be red faced when as it was with Titanic, they watch this steamy mess on video and realize, what clumsy, half baked and shallow film making Avatar really is.