The Battle for Pocahontas

Rating: 8/10 (30 December 2009)

It's a "stonker", An animated classic (or largely animated/CGI anyway) Visually its Roger Dean meets Predator. Plot wise it's Battle for Terra or Pocahontas or Dances with wolves or any of those many other North American angst films where they make a film which canonizes a main character who see's the light in time to try manfully to stop the destruction of a harmonious existence in sympathy with the greatest and most spectacular environment in the world, for material gain. . .
Then having sat on their big fat American butts for over 2 hours, they all stream out to sink their identical bleached straightened teeth into burgers made from cattle reared on ex amazonian rain forest, the makers of which have more than likely invested in the movie.
Let's face it we couldn't make movies with plots like this 60 years ago because then it wasn't too late to save just a few of the aboriginal cultures who did live in harmony with their natural surroundings; And we would have felt uncomfortable watching it then going home and doing nothing. Now that we can't save 'em anyway. Every other film seems to have this same near identical theme and we can watch them all with a clear conscience, dream of better ways of life and wish they hadn't all been "civilized" and buried by our granddad's. Forgetting for a moment that most of those cultures who nearly froze to death every winter and almost starved if pests or disease destroyed their diet in the summer, were only too keen in the end to "track" their dinner down in Wal-Mart, grow a big fat butt and plant it on a comfy chair whilst someone not wearing a leopard headdress with a bone through their nose fitted a brace to their kids crooked teeth.
It's a lovely film beautifully created and whilst there isn't a single original element in the plot, those stolen elements have been put together beautifully and in a setting which may well take your mind right off it anyway. Was StarWars any the worse for combining "Lord of the Rings" with "633 Squadron" or Dambusters and when was the last truly original film you did see?
This is also the first largely CGI film in which I haven't found the motion of jumping and falling figures a giveaway. "Ironman" was good. Way better than "Spiderman 2"; but there were still some moments when you thought "that didn't seem quite natural". Avatar has little or non of that, and thats a massive achievement as the film has a far greater quantity of that kind of movement by a far greater number and variety of figures simultaneously than in either of the two previously mentioned movies. In that respect alone it should go down as a milestone in film evolution.