Avatar is thinly disguised hippy propaganda

By now, you're probably sick of the Avatar media blitz. I can't turn around without seeing a billboard or an advertisement for this movie. The kids in my play group won't shut up about it. Adults are even worse, fawning over James Cameron and his "decade long labor of love" that is Avatar. Do these people not remember that James Cameron is the man behind that crapfest Titanic?

But I have to admit, it looked pretty cool. I didn't think for one second that it would live up to the hype, but I sort of hoped it would exceed my very minimal expectations. So I went into the the theater a bit conflicted.

The story takes place in a future where the human race is experiencing a major energy crisis. The answer may lie in substance known as Unobtanium, which about the stupidest name for an energy source that I've ever heard. You spend over 300 million dollars on a movie, and you can't take even ten minutes to think of a better name than "Unobtanium"? Anyway, "Unobtanium" can be found in large quantities on a planet with an equally ridiculous and heavy-handed name, Pandora. The problem is that the natives of Pandora -- large blue cat-looking things known as Na’vi – don’t want strangers messing with their eco-system or something. Which is totally unreasonable, by the way.

Sam Worthington plays Jake Sully, a crippled ex-marine sent to Pandora in a last-ditch effort to reach some kind of mutual agreement via the use of an avatar. Avatars are cross-breeds of Na’vi DNA and the DNA of whomever will be controlling them remotely. The Avatars look just like the Na'vi, which is a brilliant idea. We want to obtain the, er, Unobtanium, so what better way to do that than to infiltrate the Na'vi culture and bring it down from the inside?

At this point, I was sort of enjoying the movie, and I couldn't wait to see us humans wreak havoc on these completely unreasonable aliens. But then what does Jake Sully do? He goes native, and helps the Na'vi defend their world against its human invaders.

I started to see where this was going, and I didn't like it. The Na'vi are really just a bunch of blue-tinted hippies who sit around and worship nature and talk about how everything is, like, connected, man. Blah, blah, blah. I dozed off during this part because I knew what was going to happen. The Na'vi would drive off the human invaders, and the bovine audience filling the theater's seats would learn a valuable lesson of environmentalism or colonialism or something.

But then something completely awesome happened. Col. Miles Quaritch (played by Stephen Lang) gets together all of his warships and lays waste to Hometree, a gigantic tree that the Na'vi worship.

Needless to say, this bright spot is short-lived. Things play out pretty much as you'd expect.

So, did I hate the movie? No, I didn't. Visually, it was stunning. Pandora is without precedent in film history. Never have I seen a totally imagined world come to life in the way Pandora does in this movie. But the story just wasn't on par with the visuals. It wasn't a bad story, just an uninspired and forgettable one.

I award Avatar 6 rattles out of a possible 10.

On an unrelated note, I'm happy to report that this is my 100th post here at LEBSAB! So thank you to all who have been with me from the beginning and those who have jumped on the bandwagon along the way. I'm looking forward to the next 100, and I hope you are too. And how can you not love this face?