Movie Review: Avatar

Avatar sucked. I don't know why this movie is doing so well or why the critics are falling all over themselves singing its praises. The story is so atrocious, no amount of pretty 3D effects are enough to rescue it. A shiny turd is still a turd.

Yes, the 3D effects are good. They're very good. And the CGI approaches photorealism. But who cares? The plot is extremely bad. Here, I can save you $12.95 and give you the entire plot in one sentence. It's Dances With Wolves with aliens. Very, very human-like aliens. We've seen this story a thousand times before. Some jaded white guy ends up living with the noble savages he wants to kill, but he becomes so enamored with their culture, he ends up opposing his own side. It might have taken James Cameron ten years to make this movie, but it looks like he spent ten minutes writing the script.

That's another thing; the aliens are extremely human-like. I've always hated Hollywood's lack of imagination when it comes to designing aliens. They always look just like humans, but with one or two slight changes. I thought last summer's magnificent District 9, with its grotesque, unsavory appearing aliens, had started a reversal of this trend, but boy was I wrong. Avatar takes this to an extreme. The aliens look like supermodels, but with blue skin, misshapen noses, and tails. That's it. It's like they weren't even trying.

It's hard to believe this movie is from the same director of Aliens and Terminator 2, but this is what Titanic has wrought. It's bad enough that that movie made so much money, but then the studios wrote Cameron a blank check to make whatever he wanted, and this is the result. One man's awful pet project.