The Mind of Murph

So the question was: “What is the saddest day in movie history?”

This was one of the answers

Here we go, point by point:James Cameron’s Avatar. I was just shocked when I saw it, especially because I was raised on his movies. Terminator, Alien, The Abyss, Rambo, even True Lies. But Avatar was inexcusably bad, and man did I ever want an excuse to like it. The characters, what characters? Does anyone remember that Sam Worthington’s brother died? No, because it didn’t matter, like a lot of other things in the movie. Sigourney Weaver was Scientist. Sam was Soldier. The blue-skinned chick was Native American. There was a CEO. There was a General. You know what I mean? Not even a “I love the smell of napalm in the morning” kind of callous general, just, a General.

The plot was childish and ridiculously simplistic. It was literally good guys smashing bad guys, period. No tension, no suspense, no originality. These guys care about nature, these guys don’t. Begin the pyoo-pyoo. Yes you can have great good-guys-smashing-b ad-guys movies, 1. If you have a memorable lead (Die Hard, Terminator, Rambo), 2.if you smash bad guys in interesting ways (Jackie Chan, Matrix), 3.if the bad guy is interesting (Predator, Alien).

Any of these ring a bell in Avatar? No, Sam Worthington is a clay doll who never said a thing the entire movie worth a damn. Does anyone wonder why Sam sympathized with the Smurfs? MAYBE he sympathized with their back-to-nature lifestyle, but what proof of that do you have? Far more substantial motives are A) Smurf pussy B) Giant Smurf body to cruise around in the jungle with. Not only is he not memorable, Sam Worthington is unimaginably boring to watch.The fights are pyoo-pyoo (I literally saw a box labeled “EXPLOSIVES” in the movie, in case you were wondering how the bad guys were going to blow up the forest). Some arrows. Ok the knife fight with the robot suit at the end was a’ight. The bad guys are industrialists, you know, the kind that don’t care about nature. Is there any other kind? If so, Avatar doesn’t give it to you. Finally, the moral was morally reprehensible. At the end, nature stands up and solves everything. All we have to do is ask nature, and she’ll send armies of rhinos and elephants to clean up our problems for us. Just ask and you will receive. No need for ingenuity or diplomacy. The Smurfs didn’t win, the Planet won. Deus ex machina, without any attempt to even hide it. Yes it was foreshadowed, but that doesn’t make it any less pathetic and lazy. If this movie was supposed to be an environmentalist statement, it sent a horrendous message. If it was supposed to be a character study, they forgot the characters. If it was supposed to be an action flick, the action was pretty damn sub-par. What is it good for? What I liked: the animals and the plants. I guess the movie would’ve worked better as a sci-fi “Walking with the Dinosaurs” special for the Discovery Channel. Movie? I don’t think so.