We Came, We Saw, We Conquered, Felt Bad and Made a Movie about it

Rating: 2/10 (25 June 2010)

Some of the conservatives seem to think that Avatar is some kind of "extreme liberal, Anti American propaganda movie". It's not. Avatar is simply too stupid. For an Anti American propaganda movie it's incredibly tame. I could think of 100 different ways to turn this into a real Anti American propaganda movie. But what would be the point? Avatar tries to criticize Western Imperialism, but it's critique is incredibly dull and childish. It's like Disney trying to criticize consumer culture with Donald Duck.
But more than that, Avatar is not a movie. It is a mass consumer event. Spectacle. You don't watch avatar, because there is nothing to watch. There is nothing to think or discover here. Everything is easily accessible and require nothing from the audience. Once again people have to turn their brains off (maybe sometimes the masses should turn their brains on) to consume this mindless spectacle. Movies like Avatar are consumed. For the mass consumers Avatar is a special event to be consumed and then discarded like Michael Jacksons death.
The plot is mindbogglingly boring and clichéd. Everything in this movie is a derivative or lifted from thousand other movies. You have seen this movie before a hundred times. Except in Avatar everything is completely overblown. From the digital forests to the cgi characters, everything is too much. There is no room to breathe, to take in the scenery or to get properly orientated. Then again practically everything is CGI. It's ironic that the supposedly environmentalist movie has only digital forests and digital animals.
The final hour of the movie goes from silly and clichéd to downright insulting. The slap in the face happens when, once again the natives have to be rescued by a white man. Avatar becomes yet another childish fantasy. In movies we always correct our mistakes, side with the natives and exorcise the evil in us. It's completely self defeating and any message Avatar may have had implodes in the end. It's just another silly fantasy, just like the idea that we can save the environment by buying new "environmentally friendly" cars. We need to stop buying and driving cars. We can't consume our way out of this.
And of course Avatar itself took hundreds of millions to make. Lot's of energy has been consumed in producing this movie. Much of that energy comes from coal that adds to environmental problems. Everything in our culture turns into a mass consumer event. Avatar is simply another expression of this. What ever message it has is simply consumed.
In my mind they should have ended the movie with the Na-vi defeat. Na-vis should have been tortured, humiliated and forced to live in small reservations, depraved of their culture and land. The small number of survivors should have then been forced to accept and adapt to the invaders culture. -The End.
But of course Hollywood can't show us the true face of Imperialism, instead they give us silly fantasies.