Kills Me Dead » Movies

1. I really loved the expansive world-building done for this movie. The plight of the Navi and many of their traditions are obviously not unfamiliar to anyone who has spent ten seconds reading about indigenous cultures, but the world itself that they’ve been placed in is pretty epicly constructed. Everything on Pandora (terrible name by the way, James Cameron) is practically luminescent — the plantlife glows from the inside and not just for the story’s plot-related purposes. The animals all have equivalents on planet Earth, but everything on Pandora is a lot more leathery or iridescent or multi-limbed (all mammals seem to have at least six legs). The floating mountains looked like something out of a Rene Magritte painting.
2. On the other hand, there’s some pretty cartoonish stuff in this, mostly related to the military industrial complex trying to rape the land for some valuable natural resource. Giovanni Ribisi was kind of amusing as the horrifically racist project leader, but his character doesn’t really develop past that until he feels appropriate guilt for bulldozing some sacred grounds of the Navi, and ultimately he ends up disappearing for the back half of the movie. The Colonel seemed to be going for Robert Duvall in Apocalypse Now but ended up with something much sillier, although in his defense it’s not his fault he had to climb into a giant robot suit and walk around in front of explosions more suited to a Michael Bay lingerie ad. There was something a little too Disney “circle of life” about the scenes where everyone literally connected with the planet to try and heal Grace.
3. Way back when, I saw an episode of C.S.I. where the investigation involved some kind of sex party held by furries. This was the first time I had ever encountered the concept of furries and naturally it scarred me for life. In the intervening years since I’ve been active on the internet, I have encountered furry art (thank you, fandom_wank) and while most of it can be hilarious pieces like this, there are also the far more sexually anthropomorphic ones that basically look like human beings with feline faces and bodies covered in a thin layer of fur, often complete with tails. When I first saw the trailer for Avatar, I died a little bit inside because I was pretty convinced that James Cameron had made his twelve-years-in-the-making pet project into a furry opus with the way the Navi concept designs looked. It was the tails that did me in, I think, and that they all looked like blue cats. But I’m happy to report that despite this causing me to have serious misgivings from the outset the Navi come across as actual characters, closer to Gollum than Jar Jar Binks.
   
   I also want to apologize for a) knowing way too much about furries, and b) sharing it with you.
4. If I were a Navi speaking my native tongue, I’d be pretty pissed that my English subtitles appeared in yellow Papyrus font. Holy crap, James Cameron.
5. I can’t tell if Sigourney Weaver was not good in this, or if her dialogue was just really, really terrible in places.
6. Sam Worthington, if you’re looking to have ten thousand babies, I’m your girl.
7. I did like that you could see each actor’s facial characteristics in their Navi bodies, although Sigourney Weaver’s looked too much like her and not enough like a Navi. Speaking of which, I thought it was ridiculous for the scientists to have to construct giant versions of Earth clothing to ensure that their avatars were “properly” dressed. WTF?
8. How is it possible that in the year 2154, there has been so little technological advancement for the wheelchair? Also, did they go out of their way to invent matches that could be lit on the non-oxygen surface of Pandora?
9. There’s a lot in this movie that feels like 1990s action movies, which I suppose makes sense given how long it’s taken Cameron to make this movie. When Jake starts making his William Wallace speech as the Sky People (seriously?) close in on their location, he says “This is… this is…” and I was 100% convinced he was going to say “This is… our INDEPENDENCE DAY!!!” Thank you, Bill Pullman.
10. The Navi have long nerve ending type things that they’re able to plug into other creatures and the planet itself in order to physically bond with whatever they’re connected to. Here’s a question: did the scientists spend time braiding the hair around these nerve endings as the genetically engineered avatars grew in their watery enclosures, or were the braids themselves also genetically engineered? It amused me that they emerged fully grown and with their hair done.
11. Apparently even in the future, Americans still don’t have any kind of socialized health care that would allow people who couldn’t otherwise afford medical treatment to receive that treatment.
12. I thought that in the grand scheme of how disabilities are depicted in movies, this movie did better than most. Jake is fully committed, both in action and in words, to proving all his doctors wrong about what he can and can’t do, and we even get to see his atrophied limbs once in a while, which is not something I think I’ve seen before on screen. On the other hand, the standard trope of paraplegic achieving the miracle of walking again is in full play, so.
13. What was nice about this movie is that they didn’t have any silly parts where sharp pointy things stuck out from the screen in order to draw attention to the 3D aspect, but after a while I stopped noticing the 3D because I’d gotten acclimatized to it. It feels less noticeable in a live action movie than it does in an animated film.
14. Kinda cheesy in places, but that’s to be expected of the man who wrote the line “I’m the king of the world!”

Tags: 3D, action, adventure, bad subtitles, giovanni ribisi, james cameron, sam worthington, science fiction, sigourney weaver, ten thousand babies, zoe saldana

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