why steven ray morris is UTTERY WRONG!

steven's angry, incoherent rant against Avatar was INSANE! and WRONG!

alright he wasn't very angry or incoherent, but he was wrong. it doesnt suck bro. i must say no to you, and i'll give you my reasons.

for one thing, my 84 year old grandma seemed to like it quite a bit, and she only ever watches Hallmark channel movies stuffed up the ass with christian bourgeois values and wealthy white people learning life lessons about the evils of socialized medicine and islam or whatever. so my grandma endorses Avatar. that has nothing to do with anything really, i was just amazed at that and thought i'd share. anyway MOVING ON!

i'm one of them folks that values style as much as substance, and in order to appreciate a lot of movies, you have to realize that the importance of these two things is usually dependent on the type of film that's being made. the perfect film is probably an exact balance of both (Lawrence of Arabia comes to mind, WUDDUP EVAN!), where your eyeballs pop out of your fucking head AND your brain is thoroughly, maybe even erotically stimulated by the film's complex and challenging narrative, characters, ideology, or whatever you like. action films almost always drop an elbow from the sky on substance and put style on a pedestal, for better or worse.

if you're an Avatar fanboy like me, you've been following this movie since about 2005, read the first draft of the script the next year, and have been reading all of Cameron's self-promoting hype ever since. i knew almost exactly how this movie would look and play out from beginning to end since i read the script. i guess Cameron's a good visual writer, because when i first saw the trailer i thought "damn, this is exactly how i pictured Pandora." a few plot details and character names were switched around, but when i saw the film there were no surprises. it's such a predictable story that i don't think anyone was surprised at anything, regardless of whether they read the script.

Cameron has never been a remarkable storyteller. every one of his films have been very simple stories built around one (Titanic) or multiple huge action set pieces (all his other films). he's the kind of screenwriter who probably picked up The Screenwriter's Guide and made sure to hit every note and follow all the directions. he's never been one to rock the storytelling boat. but that's not what he's about. he's the Isaac Newton of action filmmaking. he puts almost everyone else to shame when it comes to groundbreaking special effects and memorable action set pieces (even after watching Avatar, i still don't think anyone's done a better effect than when the T1000 walks through the liquid nitrogen and starts to fall apart.)

when he started up the hype machine about two years ago with his outrageous quotes like "this is the greatest achievement since sound on film! NOW RUB MY FEET AND FEED ME GRAPES!" i admit i didn't doubt him. and after the film, i say he was absolutely right. in fact i'll go so far as to call Avatar the greatest technical achievement for film since Birth of a Nation. never before have i seen a humanoid CG character that was 100% believable (King Kong almost counts), not even for one second of screen time. Avatar doesn't quite reach 100% in every shot, but for the majority of them, and especially in all the close ups, i saw dozens of 10 foot tall blue aliens that may as well have been people in makeup. i don't know why that didn't blow everyone's minds. and let's not overlook the environments. with CG environments in films like Lord of the Rings and King Kong, they're certainly realistic, but it doesn't feel like you can step into the freaking screen and touch the leaves and shit. just imagining the time and number of calculations it took to render Pandora almost makes my head explode. a lot of people take digital effects for granted. "oh, we're on an alien world. looks like real life i guess. hmph, my ass itches." they don't really notice the difference or give a crap about these details, but i think these people are jaded and don't really appreciate the sensory experience of films.

the arguments about white guilt and a white man coming to save the day are overblown. i generally hate Ed Zwick's films for this reason, because he seems to only make films where white Americans save the savages from their own brutal natures or whatever. race is a complete non-issue in Avatar, and the ideas of the white man's burden only stand up when you compare it to films like Dances with Wolves or The Last Samurai. but Avatar is not those films, and the conflict here is between the human and the Other, not the White human and the Other human. it's more about the human affinity for greed and our inborn desire to torture, light on fire and exploit everything we're afraid and ignorant of. not that white people aren't fucked up. but i don't see that specific message in the film. and at the end of the day, Cameron clearly sides with the natives and against the evils of unbridled militaristic capitalism, so i think the film is at least headed in the right direction.

Avatar is something like the 5th most expensive film ever made, and it's unrealistic to expect such a huge studio films to take any risks. naturally they went with a simplistic and time-tested narrative formula. bummer. but did anyone really get in line for an awesome story? i don't know about yall, but i paid $12 to see blue people riding pterodactyls and throwing grenades at gunships, and goddammit, that's what i got.