Avatar (2009, USA/UK)

I don't know what it is about filmmakers like James Cameron and George Lucas, who match incredible visual sensibilities with a teenage boy's understanding of story and character. But at least we can be thankful for small favors - as bad as Avatar is, and it is quite bad, at least there's no Jar-Jar Binks. What there is, however, is over two and a half hours of Cameron playing with shiny toys, putting one of the blandest narratives possible into an incredibly lovely package. Nothing is the least bit interesting about this narrative, and even the aspects Cameron could have built a mythology around - how the avatars really work, the ecological connections on Pandora - are glossed over so quickly that they seem little more than inconveniences that have to be explained in order for Cameron to get back to 20-minute animated sequences.

I'd be remiss not to mention the thing that bothered me the most about Avatar (if you don't count the swaying and the chanting, though I guess those are somewhat related), which is how Cameron trots out the noble savage archetype, casting the all of the key Na'vi roles with Black and Native actors. The Na'vi, the indigenous people of Pandora, are hunter-gatherers with strong spiritual ties to the flora and fauna of their world, and function almost entirely as a vehicle for teaching white people a lesson about not killing trees. Oh, how I wish I were kidding. And here's the thing - if you're using CGI and motion capture for these sequences, so much so that Zoe Saldana and Sam Worthington (Worthington especially) are pretty much unrecognizable, why do you have to keep on going, casting C.C.H. Pounder (pretty sure that was only her voice) and Wes Studi? The power of film technology should render this kind of typecasting a moot point, but to add insult to injury, there's something kind of gross about the fact that all of the characters who use avatar bodies are white folk, playacting in the savage's world. Cameron, like Lucas, seems to be colorblind in the worst kind of way, using racial stereotypes without thought of the kind of traditions he's playing into.