Beauty = Skin Deep

Rating: 6/10 (20 December 2010)

It was a great looking film.
Aliens were tall and regal.
Alien plants exotic and luminescent. Alien wild life, a strange mutation of creatures we have on earth, except much more dangerous and spectacularly primal.
Thus ends the good review portion of this write up.
The rest of the film however... was less than stunning.
We have a hero without much personality - wheelchair bound - unemotional, and demonstrates this when he doesn't even mourn the death of his twin brother for one second. Yes. This is literal not metaphorical. Try counting the moments where this hero actually has real emotions for his own flesh and blood.
And yet later in the film, he is supposed to be in touch with the planet he now inhabits.
As a cheat, the film suggests his rivers run deep. Telling us he is some kind of deeply spiritual being. All this is well and good, however he has very little empathy for others around him. He is wide eyed and naive at best and at his worst is simply unintelligent and reactive. Not exactly the picture of enlightenment he is purported to being.
What is insulting to the intelligence is how our human hero goes on to being the savior of the native aliens towards the end of the film. Somehow, he is the one chosen to deliver these already intuitive and spiritual beings from their own naivety and lack of combat strategy skills. On top of which, he gets the biggest dragon too. So all in all, the film shows us he becomes the best alien, when only half an hour ago he was a lumbering clumsy buffoon. Miraculously he masters their language in record time, is more agile than his other human colleagues who have been training for years. In other words, he was born to be an alien.
So, let's say we the audience buy into this. Other contradictions appear to destroy the illusion of a perfect transformation from human soul to alien spirit. This comes in the form of connection.
When the chief of the alien tribe is killed... he continues his insensitive ways and does not shed a single tear. This, coming from the most connected alien in the whole bunch.
The final insult of course comes in the form of his superiority over them all when he single handedly tames the biggest dragon in the sky. This preadolescent fantasy of bigger is better, and that "I'm more enlightened than everyone and I don't even know how I did it" is not an act of profundity, it's an act of suspending disbelief to the extent that we must be numb in the brain to not see this person is a callous immature person who does not deserve such high praises. A young unwise boy trapped in the body of an adult, trapped in a machine sending neural impulses to a electro-chemically remote controlled alien body trapped in a plot line involving mineral mining espionage which included a cigar chomping mercenary commanding officer and greedy corporate middle management stereotype.
At its centre, the story is the imaginings of a child, stumbling around thinking he's a man, having sex with exotic beings and fighting and having fun with violence and explosions and crazy visually stunning landscapes. A perfect film for anyone with a mental age of 12 or below.
Emotionally hollow, I can understand the fascination with this much hyped visual feast. Essentially it shows, we are superficial as a collective, unable to go past the eye's delight and can be manipulated into feeling something that isn't there if the images are able to tap into our subconscious yearnings.
(We yearn to be thin, tall and agile; good looking and strong; we want to have sex with the alpha male or female and ride flying dragons; we want to be deeply connected to our environment without having to do any studying, reading and personal observation; and most of all we want to be loved by everyone, including creatures great and small who respect and even obey us.
I remember having some of these very same fantasies at age 8. And before anyone thinks I have something against staying youthful, I don't.
Being 8 is great, but at some stage, other people's feelings become important too. And if this film suffers from any one dilemma of a child's perspective, it is the flaw of being ultimately self centred and self serving.
There is only one winner and it is that naive, good looking human who wanted to be respected and loved by everyone.)
That said, I commend all the artists who worked on this film. They did an outstanding job at creating some of the most eye catching big screen images in recent years.