ETA: I swear, I wrote this entire below post without seeing
LJones41's, because I have him on Ignore. But, on this matter, I think he's got a hell of a point.
I do mean never heard anyone say they consider it to be a great movie. Nope. Mostly what I've heard is "Visually it is quite a treat, but story-wise it's nothing..." (Words to that affect).
And yet, all kinds of mediocre to garbage movies, including the
Harry Potter series, the DCEU (yes,
Wonder Woman included), the latest
Star Trek and
Star Wars, etc., regularly get called "great." If it's got spaceships and mech suits and aliens and shit, a sizeable portion of geekdom is liable to call it "great" and eat it up. Christopher Nolan vomited up a rehash of
2001 crossed with an M. Knight Shyamalan script, and
64% of BBSers rated it an "A-" or higher. And yet, despite huge international success, widespread acclaim (83 on Metacritic and RT) in the press and even
this very board (50% of BBS-ers rating it Excellent, with another 25% calling it Above Average), discussions of
Avatar always seem to revolve around the notion that "hey, what if it was a mediocre flick
all along?" Well,
most pop culture bang-bang/pew-pew movies are mediocre. So what? Why focus on
it?
Sure, maybe it's because
Avatar made
all the money, and Cameron has indeed been taking his sweet-ass time making
tons of sequels in spite of overwhelming cultural indifference. But, I think an overlooked, key part of the equation is:
it's a feel-bad movie. It's an environmentalist
scream, in which
we, as in, specifically
American consumers, are the bad guys. It challenges us and makes us feel uncomfortable in a way we embraced at the time, because it was
also a spectacular 3D novelty and an amazing theatrical experience, but, with the freshness gone, we're left with the CG that isn't as revelatory in 2D and the message, and we don't like to feel uncomfortable. So, we point and laugh at its very real flaws and shortcomings as the work of Great Art it never positioned itself as being - I'm looking at
you, Chris "Give my 70mm PG-13 World War II theme park ride a Best Picture, please!" Nolan - and we breathe a sigh of relief, and go back for another hit of the Feel-Good Pop Culture pipe.
Look, I enjoyed
Infinity War as much as the next MCU fan, but
there's a movie that makes its villain an environmentalist genocidal maniac, and challenges absolutely
nobody. (Where are all the accusations that it ripped its villain off of Dan Brown's
Inferno, or Tom Clancy's
Rainbow Six?) What blockbuster movies other than
Avatar really challenge us?
The Last Jedi, which briefly (seriously, blink and you'll miss it) suggests that both sides are profiting from the war? As in, the galactic war in which one side blows up multiple civilian planets, and the other side is full of saints? Oh, yeah,
very subversive, a real critique of the military industrial complex, that flick.
Wonder Woman, which painted WWI Germans as proto-Nazis for using chemical warfare, while completely omitting that the Allies also used those weapons, and had a happy ending in which Diana kills her enemy, but that's actually a
great thing because she believes in the Power of Love? Pretty sure nobody was squirming in their seats over
that movie (unless they noticed the glaring hypocrisy).
Inception blew all out minds, but was there
anything in that movie to think about once it ended apart from wondering if the goddamn top will fall or not? Anyone notice how brave
Justice League was for critiquing its Evil Invading Alien Mosquito army? Yeah.
It's hip to crap on
Avatar because Cameron dared to call
us the monsters, the Parademons, the Empire, the Death Eaters, the Mad Titans, and had the audacity and cinematic mastery to make one of the best-selling movies in history doing so. Yeah, the dialogue ain't Shakespeare. What is? (Not fucking Netflix's
Daredevil, tons of online nerds' slobbery wet kisses to the contrary,
that's for goddamn sure.) But to completely overlook the movie's environmental, in-your-face challenge is to comically miss the big picture. IMHO.
Hugs!
