Avatar ripped off Dinotopia!

So to counter the effects of Avatar's overblown scenery (seriously) I'm listening to Minutemen. Well not anymore, but they did provide a nice counterpoint. Double Nickels on the Dime was recorded for much less than Avatar's production and marketing budget. I would go so far as to say that DNotD could have been recorded at least a million times over on Avatar's budget.



But anyway that is immaterial.



What is material here is a serious discussion of how much Avatar disappointed while still staying somewhat of an enjoyable film. Sure the plot is flimsy, the imagery overwrought and the acting hammy but still somewhere beneath the mess lies at least the promise of an interesting movie.

Avatar isn't bad per se, it's just not very good. I'm not a huge Cameron fan, but he has his worth. His previous films have all shown that throwing a lot of money at a film doesn't have to necessarily mean it sucks, and I think that with time we'll view Avatar differently than we do now. Cameron halfheartedly tosses a bunch of themes (anti-war, environmentalism, orientalism) into a pot and boils them with a big helping of cgi nonsense, but he clearly does it with some kind of passion. Cameron wanted very badly to make this film good, but he just had too much on his plate to make it worth. For starters the film carries so much detail it almost requires a separate primer. The Na'vi society had the potential to be a very interesting account of a culture, and if the film had concentrated on one man's process of self-discovery in said culture it would have been a much better film. However Cameron has already established that the film's humans must antagonize the natives and rather than balance the two ideas equally Cameron fast forwards through the former and focuses intently on the latter. The idea of humans living on the frontier, especially one as supposedly harsh as Pandora, could have also made for an interesting film. The way humanity relates to its environment, both peacefully and forcefully, would have also provided an interesting (and much leaner) film.


Instead Cameron tries to shove both (and more) into 162 minutes of insincere lushness and mediocre acting. I've read that sequels are more than likely forthcoming, but really I don't see how the story has any place to go.


Oh and Avatar's theft from Dinotopia is totally real. If you really care you can ask me about it, I don't really feel like going into it here.