Colorful. Action-packed. Trite. 100% Fanboy Approved.

Rating: 5/10 (25 December 2009)

"Avatar" is a colorful, action-packed, trite film. There's a lot of money up on the screen. With all that dough you could, oh, say, rescue the environment, if that was what you wanted to do. I can see, though, why James Cameron decided to devote all that cash to yet another special-effects bonanza and teen boy adventure story. The most repugnant aspect of this film is the false sense of moral righteousness it works to generate in its fanboy base. White, heterosexual, American Marines – bad. All the rest of the peace-loving world – good. Uh rah.
The Navi are the noble savages. Just curious – did Cameron get it that his noble savages' name was one letter away from "Nazi," and did he care? The Navi are meant to be just like Native Americans, traditional Africans, and Aborigines, that is, the Native Americans, etc, who exist in guilty white liberal imaginations. They're really in tune with nature, unlike the evil white male Marines. Now, see, the rest of us could be in tune with nature, too, if it were the nature of this movie. In "Avatar" nature is bright turquoise, lime green, and the dirt glows in the dark when you step on it. Vividly-patterned pterodactyls serve as natural airplanes the heroes ride through the sky. There's no sexism; women are warriors and chiefs. And they all have really high breasts and no fat on their stomachs. Who wouldn't prefer this nature to traffic jams and multiplexes? In real life, of course, nature produces not just pretty, turquoise-colored creatures, but also dirt that does not glow in the dark. In real indigenous tribes, gang rape and female infanticide are rampant, and females are not warriors who speak their minds boldly, but cowed servants who keep their eyes down around the men of the tribe. Children's bellies swell with intestinal worms. Famine, frost, flood, and plague are constant challenges.
In real life, indigenous people are warriors who make endless war on neighboring tribes, often subjecting captives to torture and slavery. And indigenous people have proved all too eager to adopt every poison that modernity churns out.
Avatar's ironies never seem to stop. Pandora is an invented world, and Cameron could have created a peaceful tribe that achieves its goals through diplomacy, charm, magic, or through superior intellect. But no. Even while bashing the US military, Cameron turns his heroes, the Navi, into warriors who drive off the US military with bows and arrows. Yeah, that's believable. Even if you suspend your disbelief, you can't get around the gross irony.
In real life, fanboys would burst into hysterical sobbing if they were forced to surrender their grip on their electronic toys and live close to any nature, even the glow-in-the-dark, more-Disney-than-Disney nature of this film.
And isn't anyone out there tired, yet, of all the trite bashing of white men, military men, Americans, and Western Civilization? Given the grosses of this film, I guess the answer is obviously no.