P.S Patronising means to talk down to someone.
Dear James Cameron,
I find myself at a loss. Am I the only person in the world who didn't like Avatar? I appreciate that you probably couldn't care less either way, after all through the wash of critical praise you may only need to stop getting your dick sucked to re-inflate your head or burn money to keep yourself warm. I guess I've got to congratulate you on that one. You masturbated some gimmicky shiny things across cinema screens and the world lapped it up.
I'll come clean immediately. I watch a lot of shit films. I watch a lot of shit films because I watch a lot of films and in order to feel like the films I watch have any amount of worth, I need to also watch the shit films to help set baselines for what is good and what is bad. Also sometimes films that you think are going to be bad actually turn out to be awesome.
I'm mentioning this because never before in the history of ever, has a film made me so angry that I have wanted to walk out, demand my money back, demand my time back and then suckerpunch the teeth out of the ticket booth attendants head when he tells me that isn't actually possible to do. (In reality I think this anger would probably have been expressed in the more moderate way of taking off my dumb 3D glasses and hurling them at the screen. Take that James Cameron you bastard.)
'Where's the justification for this!?' I might hear you cry if you enjoyed Avatar, but I won't because I generally try to phase out the sound of other people talking. If you didn't enjoy Avatar by the way stop reading this rant and go and do something a little more interesting like, I don't know, maybe get a life.
Now under the assumption that anybody who has agreed with me so far has stopped reading and that anybody who disagrees with me probably lacks the ability to read I will continue raving uncompromisingly anyway.
"I basically sat down and put everything in this that I ever wanted to see in a movie – and that’s why it’s such a grab-bag of visual concepts."This is James Cameron himself speaking on Avatar. I've taken the liberty of translating this from Douchebag back into English.
"I basically stole a load of ideas from other mediums and glued them together with air regardless of whether it made contextual sense or not. That's why it's such a shit-bag of weak concepts."I don't know what a "grab-bag" is though, so I kind of improvised that bit.
“It came from all the science-fiction books I read when I was a kid and it just gestated over time.”Another unedited quote where Cameron basically reinforces his previous statement.
“We’re telling the story of what happens when a technologically superior culture comes into a place with a technologically inferior indigenous culture and there are resources there that they want,”If you haven't seen Avatar yet (don't) then you won't be aware that this is Cameron talking about the basic plot of the movie. Maybe the more astute reader might be able to draw some kind of relation to real world political events. In any other film this would be called a "subtext" but not in Avatar. That paragraph above is about as deep as it gets, and just in case we were too stupid to understand it, Cameron spends three entire hours driving the same nail home over and over again. Before the first hour is through you will quite probably be so annoyed by the incessant preaching that you too might throw your dumb 3D glasses at the screen.
Maybe it wouldn't be so bad for Cameron to patronise his own audience with this bland attempt at a storyline (after all they enjoyed it so far) if it wasn't a carbon copy of another shit film that not only came twenty years beforehand, but also managed to still, somehow, be better than Avatar.
What am I talking about? Okay let's take a look at a brief plot synopsis for the film "Dances with Wolves" from IMDB.
"Having been sent to a remote outpost in the wilderness of the Dakota territory during the American Civil War, Lieutenant John Dunbar encounters, and is eventually accepted into, the local Sioux tribe. He is known as "Dances with Wolves" to them and as time passes he becomes enamoured by the beautiful "Stands With a Fist". Not soon after, the frontier becomes the frontier no more, and as the army advances on the plains, John must make a decision that will not only affect him, but also the lives of the natives he now calls his people."Okay you got that? Now let's compare it to the plot synopsis for James Cameron's avatar.
"Having been sent to a remote outpost on the planet Pandora, ex-marine Jake Sully encounters, and is eventually accepted into, the local Na'avi tribe. As time passes he becomes enamoured by the beautiful Neytiri, a Na'avi princess. Not soon after, in search of resources, the army advances on the home of the Na'avi and Jake must make a decision that will not only affect him, but also the lives of the natives he now calls his people."If you didn't catch that, the brief of it is that a military guy winds up being accepted into this tribe, falls in love with one of them and then decides that he doesn't want to fight for the US anymore and will instead lead this tribe in a battle to fight back against the invading Americans. I've already forgotten which film I was describing... Did I say Dances with Wolves or was this Avatar? Who can tell anymore!
After leaving us with a plagiarised storyline, Avatar finishes it up nicely with poor character development that allows the relationship between the main character and the Na'avi princess to develop over the course of a montage. If you thought the storyline and character development in Avatar was "good" then you should be banned from watching films because you are funding this mindless shit and you're ruining it for the rest of us.
At least we have those "groundbreaking" special effects to look forward to. The ones that James Cameron didn't shut up about for years on end. Let's take a look at those shall we?
This is a mixture of motion capture technology and CGI. "Groundbreaking" as Cameron would call it, or it would be if it hadn't been done before a few years earlier in Beowulf and then even further back than that on Lord of the Rings with Gollum. Do you remember that guy? The truth is, it's not groundbreaking at all. It's the same shit that's been done before in countless movies and countless videogames, except this time it's backed up with the added gimmick of 3D. Even then however, Beowulf and others came first and did it just as well if not better.The 3D effects in avatar were shit, in fact I would go so far as to say they were practically nonexistant. The most impressive 3D aspect of the film were the subtitles and the previews beforehand. It made no difference to anything, it just gimmicked the film.
If people had balls they would boycott 3D and watch films with substance instead.
What's left? The acting was poor, the Na'avi were annoying as hell and let's be honest, they look fucking stupid. Oh yeah... and it got nine academy award nominations. If Best Picture doesn't go to Inglourious Basterds or one of the other nine far superior films then Avatar will have dealt a blow to cinema so heavy handed that we will be vomiting substance for a week, and when finally it's all out of our system we can watch in ignorant bliss as the next generation of 3D films rolls around and any sense of story or character is brushed aside by flashier and more elaborate gimmicks and we can giggle to ourselves and point at the glowing things as they drift in and out of the screen and yell "SHINY! SHINY!"
Fuck you James Cameron and fuck you everyone that paid to watch his shitty movie.
