Unsolicited Film Review

Máire Áine and I agreed we didn’t want to be the only people in the world not to see Avatar. Well, that was before we saw it. If we’d known what was to come, I think we would have gone to pick a fight in the car park instead.

What do you get when you take Disney’s Pocahontas and mash it up – in 3D – with a bit of Braveheart, the music from Titanic and a makey-uppy language? Why, Avatar, of course. Except at least with Pocahontas, there are songs. There are no songs in Avatar, so we just murmured lines from Pocahontas to each other when appropriate. One of us would say, ‘He thinks I’m an ignorant savage – and he’s been so many places, I guess it must be so …’. And the other would reply: ‘And still I cannot see, if the savage one is me, how can there be so much that you don’t know – you don’t knowwwww.’

If there’s someone out there who would like to defend the film, I’m curious to hear it, but for me, this was a VERY LONG film about blue people with magic plaits that plug into plants and animals to create a mystical connection (yes, they literally plugged the plaits into things) and mean humans who will let no blue people (or trees) come between them and the Unobtainium they are mining on the blue people’s planet. All this while speaking awful, leaden dialogue that any real person – human or alien – would be ashamed to utter.

We came closest to being thrown out when the hero and heroine started to get snuggly and Máire Áine whispered to me, ‘do you think he’s going to use his plait?’

Give James Cameron all the Awards for Special Achievement in Making Flying Dragons and Floating Mountains Look Great (it does look amazing, I’ll give it that) you like, but as a piece of storytelling, this film is a big pile of poo. And that’s how Eithne Cs it. (Yes, I love Glee – I love it as much as I unlove Avatar.)

Here's me, looking sad in my 3D glasses:

PS I laughed out loud when I read a review this morning that described Avatar as the most elaborate Thundercats episode ever made. So true.