Avatar.

So, I went and saw Avatar. It was visually moderately impressive, mostly on the technical level - aesthetically it didn't do much for me. It wasn't a really good movie, in the sense of something with a decent plot or a compelling vision; more of an action blockbuster, which I like watching as long as they understand what they are and play to their strengths - lots of explosions and stuff getting destroyed. GI Joe and the Transformers movies succeeded on this level.

(Spoilers ahoy, maybe.)

Obscene amounts of money were spent making this movie look like a high-quality computer game. In spite of this, the visual image I most remember was the hero, the grouchy doctor, and (I think) one of the other researchers being held prisoner in a cell. This was effective firstly because it was a good image, and secondly because it was possibly the only decent visual in the entire film which the viewer was permitted to watch without being hammered over the head by the swelling chords of the soundtrack. The music is not subtle in this movie, and when I say "not subtle" I mean "really annoying". Imagine watching a movie with someone shrieking in your ear "THIS IS A MOVING SCENE! YOU MUST CRY NOW YES! OH NOEZ THE HERO HAS LET SOMEONE DOWN" &c. That is what Avatar's soundtrack is like.

The plot... what can be said about the plot? The racial subtext has been commented on by everyone and their dog. Insofar as it seems to focus on American guilt over what happened to the Americans who were there before the current Americans came along, this is not a matter of great interest to me. Also often commented-on is how the movie's basically a cri de coeur of a soul lost in a fallen and over-technological world - a soul trying half to fulfil, and half to anaesthetise its yearning for spirit and sacramentality by using money and computers to recreate a plastic bizarro-Eden powered by an even more plastic and unconvincing pantheistic mother-goddess cult that turns out to be the worship of a giant tree brain. This movie almost gives pantheism a bad name. And then there's the characters.

Far and away the most likable character is the badass marine commander. Unfortunately he's the bad guy and is constantly trying to do obviously evil things so it's not possible to root for him, but he does liven the movie up. In a fit of originality, Avatar foregoes giving him a cigar to chew as he destroys the planet, and instead has him drink a cup of coffee in a quietly badass way while he works his woeful deeds.

Second most likable is Sigourney Weaver's character, Dr. Grace Augustine. Her character is possibly (judging by the name) supposed to be a subtle way of referencing Original Sin - when she smurfs up, she loses her grouchiness and becomes a lot more cheerful and pleasant, like a sinner baptised and shriven into the sanctity of the new creation of happy alien smurfdom. Unfortunately the things that make her character interesting are lost in her redeemed state: grouchiness, barbed comments, scientific absorption (her reaction to Pandora's natural beauty is typically along the lines of "I gotta get some samples of that"). As a smurf, she loses all this and just goes around looking happy and playing with smurf children, and also looking earnest and making sad faces whenever anyone threatens to hurt a tree. The plot of the movie involves the badass marine threatening lots of hurt to trees, so she gets to pull too many sad faces for my liking. Although really, even one of her smurf-mode "o please do not hurt that tree" expressions is too much for me.

Third is the awesome gunship girl. She is badass, attractive, and has a gunship. Sadly she does not get any moments as spectacular as the marine commander, and doesn't even get to blow all that much up. I don't think she really gets to blow anything up, actually. A waste of good badassedness, in my opinion. Waste of potential love interest material, too; she had far more personality than the smurf princess.

Somewhere down the list is the hero, who has some rudimentary personality that keeps threatening to be interesting, some nerdy lab types who have moments of near-likeability, and the hero's native blue-skinned doxy, who is entirely computer-animated and manages to be vaguely badass but in a boring way.

Overall, the movie also suffers from taking itself too seriously. It's trying to be deep and meaningful, so doesn't take time out to do silly things or just cram itself to the gills with explosions (though the last half-hour goes a long way to making up the deficit here). But it doesn't particularly succeed in being deep and meaningful. G.I. Joe was wiser.

FRIDGE LOGIC TIME: all those other avatars running around outside the labs - what happens to them?

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ALSO, on the plane home I watched Cloudy with a chance of meatballs. It is a fun film, but the fridge logic is not kind to it. It involves an aspiring mad scientist who is disliked and regarded as a weirdo for his mad-sciencey-ness and also because his experiments keep going wrong. Then one of them goes so wrong it threatens to wipe out humanity. He manages to stop it so that it only causes incalculable levels of property damage worldwide (and possibly kills lots of people, but it's a light-hearted kids' film so no-one is shown dying). Once he has done this everyone likes him and accepts his nature as a mad scientist who will occasionally endanger their species. His father makes a heartfelt confession about how his son's accidental destruction of their town (and very nearly the world) has made him realise that his son has something to contribute to society, which he had not been fully cognisant of when his son's activities were less earth-threatening.

It is a most curious thing that the film clearly believes itself to be putting forward a pro-smart person, pro-nerd outlook, when the events it shows admit of only one moral: that science is a highly dangerous thing, open to perversion and misuse by unscrupulous and foolish politicians and naive scientists, and that it and all its practitioners should be firmly kept in check. A rational conclusion from watching the film (granted only the irrationally-affirmed premise that the survival of humanity is a good thing) is that society was right to try discouraging the nerds, and that the weathergirl was acting in the best interests of her species by covering up her intelligence and nerdiness and thus being less of an irresponsible, planet-endangering maniac inventor and more of a productive and respectable member of society. Unfortunately this necessary restriction is blown open by the film's end, and the hero is left free, indeed encouraged, to invent new things (with a renerdified weathergirl at his side), until such a time as he succeeds in destroying the world for real.