Posted by
Bill Crawford on Tuesday, December 22, 2009 12:45:45 PM
I was asked to check out this movie by a few friends, and pass my opinions along. Halfway through it, I realized what they saw.
It's an entertaining movie, and the special effects are worth the price of admission by themselves.
The story line is a dissappointment on a couple of levels. Cameron always presents a little simplicity in his story telling- sometimes it seems almost an excuse to move the visual presentation along. But I think he feel asleep in front of CNN a few too many times while he was writing this one.
I won't take down his tech advisors, James may have ignored them. The side effects of a low gravity planet were conveyed well- tall natives who did a lot of vertical jumping to do things where we would walk, etc. Maybe they told the Director that a medium sized moon would be have too unstable a surface for most life in close proximity to a Jupiter sized planet, maybe they didn't. But it presented a better visual, so who cares, right? Let him tell the story.
Then again, there was the simplistic eveil humans vs. the complex mystic natives. The evil high tech fighting the persistent natives with the bows and arrows. Worse yet, it wasn't the human race per se, we were represented by a corporation in partership with the military!
At least in Aliens, Cameron posed those two groups as a hostile partnership. No, here, the humans destroyed their world (Globla Warming Alert!), and were now looking to destroy another.
The political references were thick and fast. The cnetral figure was in a wheelchair, but the military would not pay to fix his spine (VA benefits). The military was looking to fight a "premptive war" against "terror", when terrorism had not been raised in concept at all in the plot. The climactic military campaign was presnted as "shock and awe", and was centered on a human bombing run against the core of the native's religious homeland.
Some of the tech presented was right out of his own Aliens movies, but who knows? Maybe they were both supposed to be 22nd century. Cameron obviously researched the 1981 movie, Brainstorm, because he not only incorporated some of it's concepts, but stole some of it's musical thematics wholesale for the tragic moments.
Does everything have to be politics? The original Terminator was such a dizzying logcal loop that it was fun to follow, even if you understood the true lack of paradox, or cause and effect, that follows time travel. Avatar was a New York Times editorial with world class special effects, nothing more.