Why Avatar didn’t win “Best Picture”

by David Castle

People go to movies to be entertained. No matter what the story line is, they have to buy in to the premise to really enjoy their theatre experience. No matter how much hype, how much money they bring in, how famous the writer/director is, or how many special effects you have, you have to have a story that I can buy. James Cameron reportedly has been working on this project for many years…..and this is the story he came up with?

I love science fiction, fantasy, special effects and all that Hollywood has to offer. I have to, at the very least, believe that it could happen. So James Cameron wants to take me to his new world where we can link our brain to an “avatar” or body other than my own to go conquer the new world. They even reference the ultimate fantasy film of my generation with the tag line from The Wizard of Oz, “we’re not in Kansas anymore.” I bought the whole Wizard of Oz premise, but Mr. Cameron lost me from the start. We supposedly built these “avatar bodies”, but we send a paraplegic marine to link up with an avatar and tease him that we could actually fix him as well. Well, let’s just fix him before we send him to a new world.

So, Jake links up with his new body and heads out to meet the blue people who are living in the special tree where the goodies are. (I’m reminded of the Keebler Elves) He is supposed to infiltrate the natives and convince them to leave the cookie tree. He gets too close to them and is not taking over their cookie factory as quickly as the evil cookie thieves want him to, so the evil cookie thieves unleash an assault on Jake and the blue people. It is a quite colorful movie. I’ll give Mr. Cameron the first Academy Award for “Most Colorful Picture”.

The movie is so busy with plot twists on a plot that really never develops, it just wears me out. We have a character who has rocketed to a distant moon, exchanged his mind into a different body and he doesn’t have weapons to defend himself against the evil “Viperwolfs”. There is a “cosmic rodeo” scene where Jake has to catch and break his flying dragon so he can fit in with blue people. Peer pressure never leaves us, even on the moon of Pandora. The scientists are back in the highly sophisticated space station and Jake is playing Bronco Billy on a flying dragon, so he’ll have some way to get around.

Then we have the attack on Jake and the blue people so they can get The Blue Man Group out of the “Unobtanium” cookie tree. They attack with tri-rotor helicopters and these way cool transformer robot suits that you get in and you are invincible. Oops, whoever designed the suits forgot about those pesky blue people with bows and arrows, and flying dragons. At least, in the Wizard of Oz, Dorothy didn’t have a 50 caliber machine gun that wouldn’t work on the flying monkeys. We currently have windows for our military vehicles that can withstand a 50 caliber shot at point blank range, but the way cool transformer gizmos and the tri-rotor helicopters in Avatar cant’ take a shot from an arrow shot by The Blue Man Group. Maybe they used Kryptonite for their arrows……no wait, that’s Superman.

Then we finally see the end in sight. The evil colonel dies, Jake becomes a permanent member of The Blue Man Group and all the evil humans are sent back to Earth. In the end I realized that I had wasted $15 and lost 162 minutes of my life that I will never get back. The special effects and the new wave of animation were very impressive. I just wish they had used all that technology on a script worth viewing.

“Beam me up, Scotty.”