Dances with Smurfs in Ferngully

Rating: 3/10 (5 January 2010)

In Avatar, a bunch of marines in a big spacecraft (with a rotating segment - Aliens) are woken from hyper-sleep (Alien) and drop shipped to a new planet (Aliens) in a vehicle with a snub-nosed cockpit (Aliens). The planet is inhabited by ten-foot tall blue aliens (Battlefield Earth) who worship a big tree (Pochahontas) One of the marines is able to mix in with the natives (Ferngully) and comes to love them. The native culture glows as does their forest with a conveniently visible energy religion (Tron). Something meaningful is conveyed with the phrase "I SEE you!" (Joy Luck Club). In the end there is a war featuring man-shaped robot-exoskeletons (Mars Attacks, Transformers, Star Wars, Aliens, District 9, MIB, Robocop, Terminator). And a Latina Marine sacrifices herself (Aliens).
What surprising about Avatar is how shamelessly derivative it is, while 20-year olds ignorant of older movies tell you it's the most original, most important thing since glow-in-the-dark bread. I hope to never see another movie with the exoskeleton idea again. Because 20 years later, films have thoroughly exhausted the concept. There is some good stuff in Avatar. Chief among it, is a subversive viewer-identity concept that has you rooting against your own species/planet. It's perfectly appropriate that Cameron sees through the Iraq war and the moral bankruptcy of both corporations and the Right; but he dares to say five thousand marines with tunnel-vision being led by a hot-head who's never created anything, are NOT the pride of the nation. And he's right. It's very strange to be delighted when the humans finally get decimated. A strange moment to witness... and it's brought to you by the growing revulsion people feel for a misused army and for evil corporations in general, and the sickening cross-pollination of the two.
Two gigantic moral quandaries are never even addressed: Isn't it unethical to make living things that have no life until a person avatars them? And the marine is still selling out the natives waaaaaay after he's come to admire them ??? The movie is not really science fiction... it is fantasy, which is not really my cup of Q'thar. If you've seen one Native American documentary and two National Geographic specials, you've seen these ideas before. (Why do I keep buying the 3-D glasses? In every 3-D movie, the effect is interesting for exactly ten minutes.)