James's Weblog

I saw Avatar in 3-D on New Year’s Eve with a bunch of my cousins. Impressions (spoilers ahead):

• Avatar was visually stunning, and although I enjoyed the film, the plot was very formulaic. I went into the movie already knowing that it was Dances with Wolves but with aliens, but I still was hoping that Cameron would add some unique twist to be different. For example, instead of an epic fight at the end, how about a massive act of non-violent civil disobedience? (Admittedly it’d probably be less appealing to general moviegoers, but I think it would have given the film a more interesting message.) There were a couple of points that I thought foreshadowed that outcome, but I guess they were red herrings.
• Even though the protagonists won at the end of the film, the victory felt hollow. Come on, if you’re going to rip off Dances with Wolves, take some lessons from history about what happened to the Native Americans and know that winning one major battle doesn’t win the war. The humans are just going to return with an even larger military force. Maybe they’ll even nuke the site from orbit.
• What is it with James Cameron and climaxes with an alien pitted against a robotic exoskeleton? Or even more generally: organic humanoid pitted against robotic humanoid?
• I thought the neural network of the forest with the pretty, glowing fiber optic-like links between everything was neat. They slightly reminded me of the trees in Speaker for the Dead.