pocket lint

I just saw Avatar.

I admit, coming out of it I wanted to paint my body in day-glo and jump on the back of a bird.

That said, what an awful movie. Sorry.

Let it be known that corny blockbusters have a special place in my heart. I grew up on James Cameron films: Aliens, The Terminator, and Titanic were all pivotal cinematic experiences as a kid. But I also grew up listening to Destiny's Child. Point is, times change.

Watching Avatar was like re-watching Disney's Pocohantas, complete with all the bullshit, white, hetero-normative hegemony Disney is famous for. Not just Pocahontas, but the film it's commonly been juxtaposed with, Dances with Wolves, or gods, really ANY Hollywood film about colonization through the perspective of a white male. Which is very nearly every epic Hollywood film.

Annalee Newitz at i09 put it the best:

"Whites need to stop remaking the white guilt story, which is a sneaky way of turning every story about people of color into a story about being white. Speaking as a white person, I don’t need to hear more about my own racial experience. I’d like to watch some movies about people of color (ahem, aliens), from the perspective of that group, without injecting a random white (erm, human) character to explain everything to me. Science fiction is exciting because it promises to show the world and the universe from perspectives radically unlike what we’ve seen before. But until white people stop making movies like Avatar, I fear that I’m doomed to see the same old story again and again." (from Pajiba)

Simply put, the plot was boring. Why is the film industry still trying to alleviate my white guilt through overworked stereotypes and corny plot lines?



If you can get past all of that, the scenery is absolutely beautiful, and Cameron's imagined culture of the Na'vi is magnificent. But the film was an expose of these ideas, not an exploration of them, which would have been far more interesting and fulfilling to watch. The film raised no questions, technologically or otherwise. And so it fell flat.

Avatar is nothing new. If you still have to know what all the fuss is about, buy a ticket and some hip 3-D glasses, and wonder why blockbuster film content hasn't matured in over a decade.