Avatar (2009)
By Athena Kugblenu
If you haven't seen Avatar yet, then you're probably in the minority. It's the first event movie we've had in a long time; a movie hyped excessively over the last quarter of 2009 so we would be gagging to see it in 2010.
I was gagging to see it too because I like films. I went expecting a lesson in ecology and commerce. I was expecting epic storytelling. James Cameron promised me too. “It’s about how greed and imperialism tend to destroy the environment,” he said in a recent interview. “It’s a way of looking back on ourselves from this other world.”
What I got was Dancing with Wolves in space. There's a bit of an Avatar backlash brewing online and I can completely understand it. It's not about how ‘greed and imperialism destroy the environment’ because the movie depicts those entities as weak in the face of bows and arrows.
It's more about how greed and imperialism make rubbish films.
Firstly, as with all blockbusters, the plot leaves something to be desired. In fact, it leaves everything to be desired. Just one surprise, one twist, one small piece of intelligence, insight or originality was all I wanted for my £13. There are probably hoards of second year film studies students flinging their fifth draft of their first movie in the bin because I imagine those amateurs to be relying on the same beginning, middle and end of this trite narrative.
It is a bit unfair to critique too harshly a blockbuster’s plot because movies of this kind have not had credible plots for years. So let’s critique the Na’vi. Call me a deviant but they are the most highly sexualised aliens I’ve ever seen, 6-packs and all. I don’t blame the main Bob Geldof type character, I mean, if I had an Avatar, I definitely would. The Na'vi live in a world without fat people, running around, tails wagging, in little loincloths and incy-wincey bras. I was strongly reminded of
a people on our planet who suffered (and still suffer) from the same funny ideas about their physicality.
