Avatar

Saw the new "Titanic Director James Cameron" movie, Avatar, last night. It was spectacular and must have cost a huge amount to realise, but my overriding feeling is that it was cheap in its heart. The whole experience was one of raw emotional manipulation and shallow posturing. Though the visual affects were gorgeously smooth, like luxurious chocolates served in a palace of pearls and gold by a waitress clone of Angelina Jolie, in a room full of guests invited from the pages of Grazia, the plot was a cheap rip-off of Rocky IV; the conversation also from Grazia.

I understand! The way these films work is entirely formulaic: you introduce the characters, (optional montage), the good guys get a whooping (Apollo Creed/The Na'Vi), then there's a montage (non-negotiable) after which 'The Big Fight' ensues and just when it looks like the good guys are never going to make it, Ivan Drago gets knocked out and Rocky makes an impassioned speech about brotherly love and thawing cold-war relations.

Everybody cheers.

There is nothing wrong with this formula. It has worked time and time again. Why? Because I can understand Rocky - his pain is my pain, his victory is my victory. It works in Avatar. But it works too damn well.

Most people know something about the plight of Africans, Native Americans and Australian Aborigines during the several hundred years of awful persecution under 'Enlightenment' Europe. The Native Americans and Aborigines have all but disappeared as cultures. This, if you need to be told, is a real tragedy. It is their plight that Avatar replays, albeit with lanky blue giants on an alien planet.

So the Na'Vi are Rocky and Apollo Creed, right? Well, no. I can wrap my head around the pain of a guy getting hit - I can't bear the agony of the destruction of an entire culture. We are invited to witness their genocide and root for them against a cartoon Colonel. I felt like I was being torn apart - it is simply an unconscionable set-up. It's too much. It's like Cameron doesn't understand his subject matter enough, or doesn't trust his audience to understand it, so feels it necessary to labour the obscene tragedy as heavily as it could ever be laboured. It's too much.

The best period of the movie is the development of the relationship between the lead characters at their world. The exploration of the Na'Vi mythology and the beautiful sights we're treated to are a real pleasure to witness and held my interest almost completely. Then again, I studied religion.

We are introduced to this beautiful world to woo our sympathies in a cynical and cheap effort to crush us when that world is defiled and destroyed. That this is affective is not in doubt. It's just not right.

James Cameron makes me sick.

At the end of Avatar you're left with nothing else to chew on except the cold, calculated manner in which you've just been manipulated and the crushing inevitability of the sequel. You haven't been taken for a thrill ride, you haven't been given a transcendent experience, you know yourself no better; you're just poorer by the price of a ticket and the time in your evening.

The movie sums its self-centred nature up in its final moment, when the word 'AVATAR' is splayed across the screen in giant green letters.

Cheap expensive cynical beautiful manipulation for soul-dead eco-conscious mooning tragi-junkies. And not a patch on Rocky IV.