Avatar

Who knew it was so fucking hard to see a movie these days? Avatar was sold out at Imax and all the Gold Class sessions on the day we wanted to go. So we had to settle for a VMax session (i.e. bigger seats and a huge screen). It was still good.

The movie needs to be discussed in two parts. A) The Visual and B) The Story.

A) The visual is fucking amazing. Really. Stunning. Especially in 3D it is a beautifully imagined and drawn world. A feast for the senses. I enjoyed every minute of watching Avatar, even the last, unnecessary half hour or so when my frozen Coke filled bladder was screaming in agony.

B) The story is dull dull dull. The cookie cutter, regulation, miss-matched lovers, love story. Nothing new here. It always baffles me when people spend a gazillion dollars producing a huge movie that they can't spare a few thousand for a decent script writer, someone with - let's go out on a limb here - a bit of imagination, a bit of talent, some balls.

The thing that is most telling about how I think is that I was on the side of the "bad guys". I'm not a big fan of nature. It's OK but from a safe distance. Nature is full of things that bite you, sting you, give you a rash and/or spread disease. I prefer mine in a zoo or a postcard. If I was king I would probably just concrete everything and paint it green. Nice, neat, controllable.

So from this point of view I did not find Pandora such a great place. Sure the flowers were pretty but fuck, they were sitting on all that wonderful energy and I will take energy (to fire up my tv, my air conditioner, my hair straightener and all my other cool electric stuff) over pretty flowers and giant noisy flying lizards every single time. I knew I wasn't on the side of the angels when I was hoping for the cool nasty military robots to win the battle at the end. Also when I was day dreaming about how badly those damned Pandorians would be smashed when Earth sent up the next contingent - let's send up Rambo and Bruce Willis and see how well those tree huggers get on...

As you well know, there IS something wrong with me!