January 6, 2010

My 19-year old nephew, Jon, and I went to see Avatar in 3-D today. It really wasn't bad, but I felt that I had seen this story before and it was called Dances with Wolves. There were a few new wrinkles: the hero in the story was a paraplegic, the indiginous people were really freaking tall and blue, and it ended much better for the indiginous people. The effects were pretty spectacular, too. On the downside, it was pretty long and Jon was feeling a little nauseous by the end of the movie. See, the 3-D effects were pretty clear for the focal point of the shot, but the background was blurry and, if you tried to focus on stuff in the background, it made your head hurt.

Here's where you'll want to stop reading if you don't like spoilers.

The story took place on a planet called Pandora that is pretty far away in the year 2154. The hero of the story, Jake Sully, is the ex-Marine, paraplegic twin brother of a scientist who was in training to work on this planet, but is killed in a robbery. In order to recoup some of the money that was already invested in creating a composite creature with the brother's DNA and DNA from the indiginous people. The mission is to mentally link with this creature created with your DNA and use it as an avatar. It works.

Jake goes on a mission on the planet and gets lost running from a terrifying animal. A chick from the tribe finds him and helps him survive because the spores from their holy tree land on Jake and she sees this as a sign. Long story, short: The tribe decides to try to teach him their ways to see if he can be "saved" while the Marine commander at the base asks Jake to gather intel on their homebase in case things deteriorate to violence. Of course, with a Marine commander at the base, things were pretty much guaranteed to deteriorate to violence. He's a total douchebag.

Jake, no surprise, learns the ways of the natives and learns to love and respect the culture and falls in love with the chick. Duh...totally saw that coming. The Marines attack and Jake has to save the blue people. And, eventually, he does. Did I give too much away there? He survives, his blue girlfriend survives, together they kill the douchebag Marine commander and they live happily ever after. Michelle Rodriguez, who plays a VERY attractive helicopter pilot that helps the blue people, is killed in the effort. That, my friends, is a very sad thing.

I guess the things I took from this movie were to respect other peoples’ cultures, to not just destroy things that are different from you, and that some Marines may be redeemable. But I wouldn’t count on that last one. It kinda makes the U.S. look bad because parallels could be drawn to the situation in Iraq. It’s okay, though, because we should look bad for that.

Overall, I enjoyed the movie. I’d say it got a solid B+ with effects and Michelle Rodriguez being on the plus side and tired plot being on the bad side. Go see it, in 3-D, but be sure to focus on the things in the center of the screen.