Turns out I have something else to say about Avatar...

I’ve decided that, contrary to my previous post, I DO feel the need to rehash Avatar’s inanities. The following are two emails I drafted to my parents shortly after those lost hours spent watching this travesty:

ME: I was cajoled into going to see Avatar over the weekend. I actually hated it even more than I thought I would. It was just unrelentingly retarded. It employed every worn-out Hollywood trope you can imagine. The "intense" scenes are in slow-motion with new age chanting music in the background, and the villains look like they just stepped out of a Bond movie, only they left the irony behind. Its pseudo-science is pseudo to the point of distraction. The action takes place on a planet with water whose atmosphere supports plant and animal life more or less identical to that found on earth, yet humans not only have trouble breathing the air, they can't breath it at all and die without oxygen masks. Plus, it was tedious and boring. Even if you're willing to suspend disbelief and just accept all of the stupidity on screen, it's a completely un-enjoyable movie experience. Do you remember that children's movie, Fern Gully from some time in the 90's? This is Fern Gully with profanity.

DAD: Who cajoled you into going?

ME: A friend of mine wanted to go and he had an extra free pass so I said I'd go since it would only cost me the $600 they charge for a barrel of Diet Coke. When I told my significant other that I was going, he and another friend jumped on board since they were willing to pay the price of the ticket. Anyway, my companions were pretty disappointed, and I only exacerbated their disappointment by rattling off the litany of problems I had with the movie as soon as we left the theater. In the previous email, I forgot to mention the ham-fisted attempts at social commentary. There were lines about how humans had destroyed the earth and had been reduced to mining for resources on other planets, there were lines about pre-emptive strikes against savages, and at one point someone actually uttered the line, "We have to fight terror with terror." Oh, and I forgot to mention that they were mining the planet in question for a resource called, and I swear this is true, UNOBTAINIUM! Part of me still thinks that has to be a joke, but it definitely wasn't presented as such and I was the only one in the theater who laughed.

Firstly, I now realize that UNOBTANIUM is such a stupid name that I can only accurately transcribe it using all caps. I would also like to amend my remarks about Fern Gully. Similar though they are, Fern Gully is neither the most apt nor the funniest imagined Avatar analogue. An episode of South Park later re-titled Avatar, calling it Dances with Smurfs, and this is right on. Indeed, it occurs to me now that the best thing about Avatar is that it didn’t star Kevin Costner.