Both Oars In Cameron’s $300 Million+ Folly

Dec 26, 2009

I like movies a lot. I like them so much that when we were barely making it in Chicago, I would walk to work to save on bus fare so I could afford to go to the cinema on the weekend.   In fact, I’d rather watch a movie than get much needed sleep or eat a really good dinner. But, I would still rather have my teeth drilled without Novocaine than see Avatar again.

James Cameron blew nearly half a billion dollars to make this FernGully-meets-Rambo debacle. In the process, he also managed to rip off Disney’s Pocahontas and Burnett’s Secret Garden as well. Don’t be misled by these comparisons. The movie has none of the heart, punch, depth or importance of these four films—it just steals from them so blatantly that it has to be mentioned. [For a clever take on this, go to http://movieblips.dailyradar.com/video/avatar-fern-gully-trailer-mash-up/.]

The most subtle—and again I am saying the most subtle—artistic point in the movie is the name given to the ore the company is after. It is called “Unobtainium”. One can only wonder how much Cameron paid the writer for that pearl of creativity. This ore sells at 20 million a kilo. Why not a pound or an ounce? Is Mr. Cameron prognosticating that the Europeans win the measurement war? Ouch! How avant-garde. As a reference, gold sells for about $40,000 a kilo today.

Why is this energy rich ore so expensive? Well, the world is out of energy of course.  Since the movie takes place on a planet six light years from earth, it appears that NASA engineers have succeeded where all other scientists have failed. Inexplicably, future generations are capable of traveling faster than the speed of light, but they have failed to find a way to keep the lights on at home. Now, that is an odd premise.  

What the movie lacks in subtleties, it makes up for in stereotypes. The corporate villain is shorter than average and weasel-like. The company he works for does not care about life—it has shareholders to please.  The fountainhead finally visited, the company also has its own ex-military security force to do its dirty work. Of course, the leader of the ex-military group is conveniently big, dumb, scarred inside and out, and morally myopic.  The scientists are all good guys. They are just there to learn.  How insightful.

Avatar is not just so politically bent to the left that it would make Ralph Nader blush; it’s completely pessimistic in regards to the human condition. By channeling Pocahontas in a movie depicting life another few hundred years out, Mr. Cameron suggests we never learn. Do we really act the same today as when Columbus landed in the New World? Did emancipation never occur? What about the Civil Rights movement? Is apartheid still going strong? Given Mr. Cameron’s limited belief in humanity and backward perspective, Pandora will most certainly emerge as an interstellar casino in Avatar II.

The same goes for corporate responsibility. There is no hope here, too. Avatar is no Christmas Carol. No one except for the predictable hero changes. The scrooges stay scrooges until the bitter end. Subsequently, Avatar’s Tiny Tim skips the blessing and sends the damnable aliens, aka the humans, back to the desolate energy drained hell they came from. After all, they are just humans, not mothers, brothers, and sisters like the indigenous people of Pandora.

What is really objectionable about this overtly ideologically driven movie is the insinuation that the ex-Marine paraplegic, who was wounded in battle, was denied treatment due to the cost. Later, he is promised “new legs” if he cooperates with the nefarious plans of the Company. I couldn’t get this slight out of my head. Fantasy or not, I cannot imagine a world in which the cure for spinal injuries would be available, yet to denied to soldiers who needed it.  That is just crap.  

No doubt, Mr. Cameron will prefer to listen to the wide acclaim by those blinded by his past successes than hear the critics honest enough to set him straight on this expensive folly.  But, rest assured there has never been an emperor so naked.