Avatar is a bad film.
Not because it lacks any meaningful character development (which it does), not because its plot is laughably flimsy (which it is), and not because it is little more than a big-budget remake of FernGully, but because it is yet another example of b-grade Hollywood moralizing, of not very smart people with typically superficial good intentions offering Americans an insidiously shallow civics lesson along with their 64-oz Cokes and shrink-wrapped boxes of Butterfinger Minis.
I was lucky enough to see Avatar with langer on Christmas day. I agree that it’s a bad film, and I agree it’s “little more than a big-budget remake of FernGully” (which we watched later in the day, so believe me, we’re sure). For me, though, I went in with the expectation that it would be a mostly weak film with stunning visuals, and thought I would be OK with that. Turned out I wasn’t.
The 3D took a lot away from the visuals for me. I’m not sure if it’s because the theater was imperfect — that’s likely the case — but there was enough ghosting and inclarity for me that I simply wasn’t blown away as I ought to have been. I’d kind of like to see it again without 3D, but I really, really don’t want to sit through it again.
There are plenty of films that I’m glad I saw despite finding them generally uncompelling as films, simply because of their stunning beauty (Children of Men, The Fellowship of the Ring, and Pan’s Labyrinth come to mind), but Avatar was not one of them. It was, frankly, a waste of three hours of my life.
