Thundersmurfs are blow

[freckles_and_doubt]

So, Avatar. The current Big Thing. The guilty pleasure that everyone is raving about because, yes, well, script not up to much, but gosh is it pretty and also groundbreaking 3-D and motion-capture technology yadda yadda. I went into this expecting a lousy script but a lot of pretty - I was perfectly open to being seduced, hell, I swallowed the shiny blue roofies all starry-eyed and waited for the inevitable from the nice man with the big gun whispering all the sweet nothings about the size of his budget. Except...

I hated it. God, I hated this film. This is possibly the only big-screen experience I've ever had where I've sat there for the entire duration thinking "God, I hate this" at approximately ten-minute intervals, and I should tell you I've sat through George of the Jungle with a tolerable degree of amusement. Also, given that Avatar clocks in at over two and a half hours, that's a lot of ten-minute intervals. That was one truly god-awful sophomoronic script: I was outraged by the triteness of its clichés, offended beyond belief by its politics, nauseated by the fact that it dared to proffer itself as science fiction in any sense of the word given how very deeply unthinking it was. And not only did the world-building blow goats, I didn't even like the much-vaunted visuals. I am very deeply horrified by the fact that it's generating Oscar buzz.

Let's get the politics out of the way first. I've built a completely unsuccessful but bloody-mindedly satisfying academic career out of refusing to do postcolonial theory at any price, but apparently it's settled on me over the years, like dandruff. James Cameron seems to have brought it to attention, quivering. That, kiddiewinkles, was orientalism in action. That was the Noble Savage, that was. See their excitingly undeveloped civilisation! see how they live in tune with Nature, with a capital Nate. See how they need the Great White Hero to save them, because they're all tree-huggy, which is good! but means they can't save themselves! because technology is bad but ours and therefore good! and only knowledge of it will save them! They're all tree-huggy and anti-killing but of course they have to fight, because that's the only possible way to explore conflict and incidentally make a massively block-buster jingoistic scumwad film! See how they use their cute, exotic bows and arrows and flying reptile things, and die, like little doomed blue Smurfy rag dolls, when you throw all this exciting masculinist giant clunky technology at them. Kapow boom blood fire destruction of priceless habitats stylish shots of horse-things in flames, this is really evil but isn't it fun?!. Oh, and they're pretty and feline and exotic, if very, very primitive, and the Big White Hero gets to screw the native women, too. Did I mention I hated this film? Christ, I hated this film.

This is, of course, the plot of Pocahontas or Dances with Wolves or The Word for World is Forest: even the glowing reviews have noted how done the script is, how it's been told before, and better told by anyone I can think of off the top of my head. The lame and laboured rehash of any colonial bloodbath, past or present, has absolutely no validity unless it offers us some kind of new insight, new emotion, new lesson. Otherwise it's perilously close to self-satisfied wallowing. Gosh, look how we've improved, we almost never do that sort of thing any more, and we're properly horrified at all the naughty people who do! But it's OK! Your film doesn't have to have any more than 2-D heroes and villains (and, dear God, was that Colonel a giant great lumbering stereotype with an extra helping of trite) if it has 3-D visuals instead!

This was also not good science fiction. Giant elongated blue catwalk models with tails and Spock ears do not an alien nation make. I was expecting wonderful things of Pandora's landscape and creatures, and they were... pretty. In a sort of lame, expected way that was altogether too close to Earth. I mean, here's the result of a legendarily arse-busting, stupidly huge multi-million-dollar effects budget, and all I can think is that the film's a bit unimaginative? Primitive nature-worshipping natives, check. Floating mountains, check. Horse-analogues, check. Mystic Communication With The World, check, and hel-lo Sheri Tepper, you did it a lot better and more numinously. Dragonriders of Pern (thanks, smoczek), check, and oops, who the hell let them in here? Reptile things. Rhinoceros things. Star Trek aliens, i.e. humans a different colour and with odd freckles. Remember Alan Dean Foster's Flinx series? Try Mid-Flinx for a jungle planet with colour, weirdness, difference and a sense of genuine threat, which Pandora actually didn't have, being composed mostly of pretty floaty things, odd noises, bioluminescence and perfectly ordinary large-scale trees.

I don't actually have a problem with the particular brand of science fiction which abandons all real scientific coherence in favour of a good story: Doctor Who, for example, generally pulls that sort of thing off with aplomb. But in order to do that you need to focus on the emotional and conceptual implications of the story, which needs to be, you know, actually good in some ways. Avatar made a half-assed attempt at rationalising the Na'vi's interaction with their world (oooh giant planet-wide neural network!) but absolutely none at rationalising why they're basically people who've gone through a combination of Willy Wonka's blueberry de-juicer and gum-stretching machine. And in terms of any self-aware use of the classic sf tropes and themes he's plundering: gosh, no. Adaptation to the avatar is instant and satisfying, no exploration of the alien or alienation. No real attempt to grapple with Sully's paralysis and the implications it has for his embrace of the avatar. This was not about consciousness, culture or even colonialism, it was about creating a pretty world and setting fire to it, repeatedly and loudly.

And the 3-D? Non-event, in my book. I liked the little parasol floaty things, but they were a bit insubstantial to carry the film.

It's official, children: the human race has lost the cultural plot. We're doomed. We're at the stage where we're wallowing in our own bloody colonial history with the sadistic abandon of five-year-olds pulling the wings off bluebottles, and we accept it enthusiastically because it's in the name of more proficient tinkering with computer whizzbangs than ever before. This film made me cross and frustrated and nearly burst trying not to erupt out of the cinema in a shower of diss immediately thereafter, thereby wrecking everyone else's evening. I'm more than somewhat piqued that everyone else got the enchantment thing and I seriously didn't. I wanted that enchantment - I wanted to be able to submerge myself in the embrace of a wonderful world for a couple of hours. Guess not.