Well, I finally, actually saw Avatar, kind of.

I have been a notorious Avatar nay-sayer, I hate to admit it. At first I just didn't have an interest in it. I saw the trailers, read many of the articles, but nothing I saw made it seem like a movie I wanted to see. For any other film that would be fine, not all films are for everyone after all, but all of a sudden a simple non-interest in Avatar became an affront. It got to a point where you couldn't just say "No, thank you". Everyone needed to know why. A simple "it's not my thing" was not enough. "But you love science fiction!", "It's James Cameron!", "You're an animator. How could you not want to see an animated movie?". Over time it became harder and harder to simply avoid the subject. The easiest solution was to just hate it. Now that Avatar has beaten The Dark Knight's domestic gross, put it's Papyrus font logo everywhere you turn, and created it's own form of depression that people are killing themselves because of, I absolutely can no longer avoid it. I went to see Avatar, and with an open mind.

There is a caveat, however. What I mean when I say I "saw" Avatar is that I went to see it in 3D and walked out an hour and a half into the film to vomit into the middle of Queens Blvd because I am prone to motion sickness. So in all fairness, I will try and speak only about what I saw. Let's just say, I actually feel guilt that I didn't finish the movie, and will see it again (in 2D this time). Now, that means something.

The main reason I didn't want to see Avatar was all the hype, mostly from James Cameron himself. He clearly was excited about his work, and I would be too, but he went a little far. He promised the best CG we've ever seen, for it to be so realistic we couldn't tell it apart from reality. Then the trailers and footage hit, and it was good, but nowhere near as fantastic as he said. He said that the plot and character development would be unlike anything we've seen, yet it was your regular run-of-the-mill sci-fi plot. It was District 9 with a coat of paint that looked remarkably like Fern Gully. We saw pictures of fantastic creatures and landscapes, then the movie's title is written in Papyrus, a default font in Word (at least Firefly and Serenity changed the "I" when they used that font). Plus "Unobtainium"? "Pandora"? "Na'vi"? Jesus, who let this guy pick words? It was just hyped so much, to levels that were impossible to attain, that all that was left was disappointment.

It also didn't help that Avatar beat out The Hurt Locker for a Golden Globe. That movie had the body bomb scene. A scene so visceral, so brutal and heart-wrenching, that I have recurring nightmares of it.

So this is the bad attitude I was up against.

Then I actually saw (half) the movie, and I was swept up in it. Nitpicking about the Papyrus subtitles and made up words just seems petty. The human tech was so cool looking, with it's holographic interfaces, neon blue avatar-growing tubes, and mech controlling metal gauntlets. Then Pandora itself was gorgeous, despite the artists just taking anemone and jellyfish from the bottom of the ocean and putting it into a jungle. The hammerhead-rhino was a truly a standout design. There was even a moment, when Grace's avatar stops playing basketball and smiles at Jake, when I swore they just pasted Sigourney Weaver's real face onto the avatar just to f**k with us. I sat there, completely taken over by the spectacle. I was bright eyed, gazing at what I thought was the most beautiful, amazing thing I had seen in a while. I didn't even care that "eat your eyes for Jujubees" makes no goddamned sense ("like Jujubees" or "as Jujubees". It's a proper noun). Every single gripe, nitpick, complaint that I had about the movie was gone. I was absolutely loving it.

And then Neytiri said "You have a good heart." My face hit my palm so hard I got whiplash. A line so ham-fisted I smelt bacon. The context: Jake kills a bunch of monster dogs, Neytiri kills more, even stabbing one in the throat to put it out of it's misery, then she chastises Jake for defending himself. He rightfully asks "Why did you save me?" She responds with "You have a good heart." Ugh.
The characterization of the Na'vi tribe then went down from there. Sure, I only saw half the film. Maybe as the film progressed they got better, but everything I saw, from their dialogue to their shaman woman made me embarrassed. The exact same type of embarrassment I felt watching Mudflap and Skids in Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. They felt like every bad Native American stereotype rolled into one.

This isn't going to stop me from seeing it in it's entirety. So let's end this post the same way they end every episode of Heroes.

To be continued...