brain stem entertainment at its finest

Rating: 6/10 (25 December 2009)

*** contains minor spoilers *** visually, WERA has pushed film further than i imagined possible since the first LOTR film debuted a decade ago. the action is pure Cameron - very entertaining and visceral. i didn't even mind the weak and hackneyed characters (many of which make a return from Cameron's "aliens" including the bad-ass Latino marine chick (she even goes out in a similar way) and especially Giovanni Ribisi's reprisal of Paul Reiser's greedy bastard: Carter Burke) what i found difficult was the film's recycled elements of Cameron's career, some mainstream science fiction, a couple of video game plots, all centered around a story we've watched/read/played so many times already we're totally numb to it.
the audience, root for the na'vi (all alien or fantasy races must have an apostrophe in their name, it would seem), completely ignore who the bad guys are.
we are asked to think it is the humans of some distant future, the heartless corporate machine that none of us have anything to do with.
oh really? that corporate machine is the very one that pumps out these "blockbusters" and all the associated merchandising. the real enemy is us. the now us. not a future, removed us. not some us that the current us are not responsible for just as we shun all responsibility for all the damage and evil our ancestors have done. the consumers who bends to the will of the corporation now and who leave the theater and go to the local burger king to eat cow (a once living sentient being the life of which a real na'vi would have respected (when was the last time you thanked a cow for providing you with a tasty burger made from its flesh?) and incidentally whose harvesting is the number one cause of deforestation of the planet earth which in the film is hinted to be devoid of green) and buy avatar toys made in china and of materials and via processes that simply add to the destruction of the planet (just as, in the ultimate irony, i once saw a box of no longer wanted wall-e toys discarded by a dumpster)...
if only Cameron had the guts to give some "humanity" to the humans, to make the conflict a little gray. to make the audience see - it is people like us, not single minded soldiers, who are killing the na'vi. and lets not make the na'vi so innocent either. like the European conquest of America and it's natives, no one was blameless...
it's pointless to lecture tho. in Cameron's world black is black and white is white and besides, he didn't make this film to make the audience think or pass on a moral lesson. he picked a premise from the extremely finite bucket of blockbuster formulas and made a film to sell tickets, push the technology, break box office records, entertain the brain stem and afterward bombard us with avatar merchandise.
but doesn't that make him one of the bad guys?