Avatar isn't James Cameron's Dances with Wolves; it's his Jurassic Park. By this I mean simply that Avatar is revolutionary in its development of special effects, but the triteness of the story means that in the long term, that's all it'll be remembered for. When I say trite, I don't mean what so many other people seem to mean by trite. When other people talk about the problems of Avatar, they usually focus exclusively on the racial aspect. The problem with this is that it confuses the issue: it isn't the fact that it's a story about race, it's that race is handled badly.

If you'll allow me to back up a minute: sci-fi, like any drama, is really an examination of human nature through storytelling. What makes sci-fi unique and special is unlike other kinds of drama, where the background environment is either fixed in a historical period or altered merely for the sake of convenience for the writer, sci-fi legitimately allows you to toggle the environmental controls. Star Trek among other things examines what happens to humans in the absence of scarcity of resources. So we see a mostly optimistic view that people channel their competitive drive into maximizing their personal skill. Blade Runner, by contrast, examines dehumanization by giving Roy Batty human memory, emotion, and intellect, and then forcing him into slave labor and cutting his life span to just enough for him to realize the high price of his own mortality.

If I may, the problem with Avatar is the problem with a great many sci-fi movies: the emphasis is on what result is reached about the human condition rather than the process of how that conclusion is generated. Sure, the movie goes through the motions of toggling with the controls: new world, new body to replace a broken old one, new creatures, etc, I don't think that there is anything this story has to tell that couldn't also be told in the conquistador-era circa 1600, the American West circa 1870. The emphasis is entirely on saying colonialism is bad, because it ruins the natural environment and hurts natives. It doesn't really address, however, what this says about humanity.

In some ways, I think District 9 is the best contrast to Avatar: while both stories deal with colonial mistreatment of alien species in broad strokes, District 9 when you get right down to it is about the main character's realization of what the mistreatment is and how terribly wrong it is, and his growth as a result of that; it talks at once about humans' capacity for evil and their capacity to learn from their mistakes and become better as a result. Avatar is about how you get better by becoming something else or dying in a suitably noble fashion the instant your character can no longer move the story forward. Wikus van de Merwe tells us a great deal about the human condition, just as other great science fiction characters like Jean-Luc Picard, Spock, or G'Kar do. Jake Sully tells us almost nothing, and to the extent he says anything, it's that being human is good only to the extent that it allows you to persevere long enough that in a different form, you can root a hot native girl. Which doesn't really leave us with much. Hence, it's trite, but triteness that is only tangentially related to race.

Now, I should point out that the movie itself is a generational step forward in movie technology. The graphics are great, and like all Cameron movies, I loved the attention to detail. I also loved the Heinlein influence on him; this is a movie where powered armor worked great. But in the end, the special effects are only effects if they aren't married to a good story. For exhibit A: I ask you to compare the original Star Wars Trilogy with episodes 1-3. Good story in sci-fi tells us something useful about the human condition. This story doesn't. As such, in ten years, it'll be a movie cinemaphiles will watch, and people will pop in on a Saturday afternoon to keep the kids amused. But it's not going to be remembered as anything more than that. Hence, it's like another movie that make kaboodles of money, had revolutionary effects, but had a trite story and today is remembered only for those three things: Jurassic Park.

Avatar is a tricky one for me.

Tricky one for me too. We tried to go see it tonight but it was sold out...again.

Maybe tomorrow.

Tricky one for me too. We tried to go see it tonight but it was sold out...again.

Maybe tomorrow.

Finally got to see Avatar in 3D and WOW, wow, wow, wow!! I loved it and I went in there wanting to hate it. I mean I didn't want the hype driving my decision but I can't deny it it was a great movie.

But as suspected the story line was a little thin and predictable. There wasn't anything new or ground breaking in the way of story telling but omg the world they created in Avatar is stunning, amazing and so beautiful, I want to live there. Everyone needs to see it on the big screen, you may not be interested in the story but the special affects will keep you mesmerized.