Avatar

Avatar - the much hyped James Cameron epic adventure. It's finally here and we get to see what all the fuss is about!

My summation in one sentence - Fern Gully on steroids.

I don't want to come across so jaded.... would love to just be lost in the lushness and miss the obvious flaws, the rerun script, the big concepts that are really bad about this movie. I'd like to overlook the fact that it's like watching a video game, all eye candy and weak plot and weak dialogue. I'd like to just rave about the prettiness. It's almost like this movie needs two reviews. A visual review and an overall movie review.

Visually, it's beautiful and a new frontier in CG. Lush and rich and colorful, the actors have been melded with CG to produce realistic expressions. It's stunning and it IS a visual movie. On that level it gets a '5'.

The story is tired - here we have another Great White Hope - the one white American male who comes to a new land and saves all of the indigenous peoples. It is Dances With Wolves, Last Samurai, lots of movies you've seen time and time again. They are all lost and waiting for the White Man to save the day. Quite egotistical but a theme that is played and replayed and replayed.

The indigenous peoples in this one are a strange mix of pop culture, what American's perceive as attractive and figures and accessories that would make up an attractive toy line to be marketed conveniently right at Christmas, when the movie came out. Yes I know I'm wearing my jaded hat once again, but come on. The natives are clearly black people - black actor's voices, and have cool dreadlocks and braids, but are blue with tiny cat type ears and long, lean, young slim bodies. They are very, very spiritual and in tuned with the earth - a solid theme that's very popular right now - and they have neat vehicles and accessories that they plug into to 'bond' with. Then the big, bad military storms in to ruin everything.

Fern Gully is a 1992 cartoon that I guarantee James Cameron has seen. He lifted the script of it for Avatar, but stripped out the fun parts. Fern Gully starred the voices of Tim Curry, Robin Williams, Christian Slater, Cheech - it was funny and snappy. Go rent it if you've never seen it. The main character is named Zak - as opposed to our Jake in Avatar - and both young white males have alot in common as they go about trying to Save the Rainforest (Fern Gully) or Save Pandora (Avatar)

The movie runs long at 150 minutes, and in the middle you feel it drag. After the splash splash of the gorgeous graphics, and before the bang bang of the big (totally unbelievable) showdown, they don't have anything to do and it shows.

I have quite a few points that I thought were just wrong or just too silly in the plot but won't give anything away since I never do spoilers here. It's a big, blockbuster, holiday event that is very pretty and overall harmless. I give it a '3' for fun, a '5' for the original visuals but not at all for story. That seems to average out to a '4' overall.

Pueblo Tinseltown was working hard - it's holiday movie time and the crowds are much bigger so the staff is really working to keep up but they did a great job!