(Above: good game for the kiddies, but remember to make sure the cowboys win every time. Anything else would be a gross ideological folly, an in your face sledgehammer of leftie offensiveness I'd be certain to get upset about).
About the best - certainly the most pleasurable - reason for Avatar having been made is that it's irritated the shit out of Miranda the Devine, and in the holey day season, what's more.
It's all there in Hit by the leftie sledgehammer, and though I'm a late-breaking arrival at the scene of the crash - who wants to be hit by the Devine sledgehammer during the holey day season? - it's still a grand way to start off the new year.
Because when you see everything through the filter of ideology, it must be worse than trying to watch a movie through the clunky 3D glasses they charge a buck for as a way of celebrating capitalism.
It even gets the Devine casting around for an alternative hero, and she finds one:
Incidentally, for all the hype about Avatar's global box office domination, Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel managed to knock Avatar off the top spot in Britain after only one week. And that's without the inflated ticket price charged for 3D glasses.
The squeakquel as triumphant destroyer of leftie views? What about the destruction of parental sanity? Or the musical mastication of what's left of your hearing?
And hang on, what's the Devine doing stealing my line about the price of 3D glasses? She couldn't be suggesting that the market is wrong, that capitalism can be bad? Gasp. Just like silly old James Cameron?
You know, it's a simple formula:
American military very bad.
Capitalism bad.
Mining bad. Raping planet.
The only good soldier is a traitor.
3D glasses pricing outrageous.
Buckets of popcorn sickening. Bad. And at inflated prices.
Never mind. The dialogue is outrageously corny in Avatar, and the borrowings of the plot from previous Cameron outings are remarkable - not least the climactic set piece between the heroes and a mechanised soldier kitted out in grander style than Ripley in Aliens; or the dumb treacherous company man, who even looks the same as in Aliens; or even the chief baddie, who carries on like he's in The Abyss.
Generally it's a hoot, of the cowboy v. indians kind, with a more than lavish homage to Pocahontas thrown into the mix. Of course the only character who provides any decent fun is the lead psychopathic baddie, who rants and foams and struts around, delivering George Bushisms and doing what he can to ruin life for the natives and their hippie fellow travellers.
That this kind of formula has been around since the very first westerns seems to escape the Devine, who as a movie critic has all the skills of say a Joe Stalin, or a Mao. What she might have made of a movie like John Ford's Cheyenne Autumn boggles the mind, while an ideological approach to Ford's The Searchers might have been even more traumatic for her.
Still, it's a hoot as she trawls over the trash to find some decent insults for Cameron. It seems he's made the most expensive movie ever made - with a budget of US$500 million - which now seems to mean that marketing budgets must be included in production budgets. And he's "Canadian-born".
Say no more. We know what that means. Is it true that Canadians are worse than cheese eating surrender monkeys? Well they have the French amongst them, speaking a strange provincial argot, and they're known to be able to leave their doors unlocked at night. Say no more.
And when you throw in the fact that he's a child of the '60s - hiss boo, you vile hippie - we know Cameron must be a poster child for the Devine's hatred of everything left.
About the time the baddest bad guy - a US marine, of course - launches an unconscionable attack on the Na'vi with the words "Shock and awe", "pre-emptive war" and "fighting terror with terror", you realise you've been had. The snarling vipers of left-wing Hollywood have been let off the leash in a way previously unmatched in a high-priced blockbuster.
Snarling vipers? Unconscionable? But hang on, didn't they have WMD's? You know, that bloody great Tolkien tree that acts like the intertubes? The fiends.
Oops, she's making me start to like the show, when really I thought Starship Troopers did it so much better. Because we are watching a movie, aren't we, rather than an ideological treatise?
A minority of critics have dubbed the movie "Dances with Wolves in space", "cynical and deeply unpatriotic propaganda". That's not to deny Avatar's success. Its nature worship theme mines a rich vein. In a world suffering eco-fatigue, in which advertising clever dicks have pronounced blue the new green, Cameron has judged the zeitgeist well.
We all like to be Zen with the world. And Cameron has tapped into the religious impulse hardwired in his audience in the same way airport bookshops abound with New Age bestsellers such as The Secret.
Oh dear, we all like to be Zen with the world? Miranda the Devine is going Zen? Oh no, say it ain't so, my favourite non-religion ruined for ever. And where I saw a raging battle, with the Indians just proving better at guerilla tactics, or having fun riding dragons, it seems the Devine was focussed on the religious impulse, and a movie chokkers with zeitgeist and new age airport propaganda.
... he defeats the purpose by indulging in the rancid partisanship that characterised the anti-Bush/anti-Howard left of the last decade. The pity is Avatar's in-your-face preaching only serves to annoy people, who will soon shrug off Cameron's accomplishments and forget whatever it was he was trying to say.
Well actually he was just making a cowboys and indian show with a lot of action, as he tried to claw back the rather large production and marketing budgets. As the immortal Samuel Goldwyn once said, if you want to send a message, use Western Union, but then he also reportedly said that MGM's comedies were not to be laughed at.
Of course the main thing about Avatar isn't the message, which is tucked away in nooks and crannies, and is never ever allowed to get in the road of the action, but the spectacle. And you can buy a lot of spectacle for three hundred million bucks. Within the spectacle, it's just a straightforward melodrama, pressing all the standard Hollywood buttons.
Unsurprisingly the heroes win, and if you don't like this brand of heroes, tough luck. You mean you want Blackwater written up as the heroes of the show? The Indians as treacherous, deceptive, scalp hungry villains, primitive, and deserving to lose the planet and their lives? Wiped out by a victorious righteous US cavalry? Good luck with that for a sellable storyline.
What looms large is the film's predictability (spoiler alert).
The pilot who changes sides inevitability dies, the warrior man whose lost his legs will be reborn as a warrior with legs, the baddie will go down, along with whole evil corporate mining enterprise, and the giant tree will be blown down in a way that will remind some of the twin towers, others of Hiroshima, while somehow leaving the internet of living trees alive and doing their thing, and grokking ill people to health.
And in a now inevitable twist, the Indians will beat the cowboys in a way they've never managed in the real world, and each of the action sequences will contain starting points and tie ins for sequences in the video game.
But in the end it's just a movie, and if you spend all your time watching movies for their ideological import (or their theological subtext, or their sociological implications, or their
teleological meanings), you'll invariably miss the aesthetics and the real point of the drama. Which funnily enough is a standard riff about the coming of the messiah, and the need for good hearted, stout leadership, of a kind a conservative should love. Yep, our very own Sam is an interplanetary Christ figure risen from the limbless dead.
Alternatively, perhaps you could trawl through the history of the first fifty years of the western, and brood about the ways the savages and injuns usually copped a hiding at the hands of the Winchester toting, six gun wielding westerners.
Strangely some Indians objected to this kind of screen treatment - in much the same way as a few indigenous folk get upset about the way the British snatched Australia away from them - and were regularly dismissed by conservative ideologues as fun-hating, entertainment-denying spoilsports who couldn't take a good licking, but hey let's not wander off down some black arm band view of history so early in the new year.
In the end, the Devine's bleating is so profoundly dumb - has she ever watched any of the many sci fi shows peddling the same pieties as Avatar? - that the movie in retrospect takes on a strange, erie 3D glow of respectability. Just like the plants in its jungle.
It's especially suitable for the ten to fifteen year old boy demographic, in much the same way as Titantic was suitable for the teenage female demographic. But both shows are stretch for anyone older, though not for the reasons the Devine carries on like a pork chop about:
It's extraordinary that, while American soldiers are dying in dangerous wars on foreign soil, a mainstream movie would show such cartoonish contempt for them.
Sigh. Welcome to democracy, instead of flag waving all in one step goose step strutting fascism. Or mad as march hare fundamentalist Islamism. Why is it that conservatives always rabbit on about democracy preserving choice and difference, and then when confronted with difference they do a furry freak out brothers routine?
Yep, after seeing the way the show's sent the Devine into a frenzy, I'm definitely warming to it.
If you decide to see it as a way of sticking it to the Devine - an odd kind of protest, but whatever lights your wick - make sure you don't see it flat, because the banalities of the genre, and Cameron's tendency to self-pillaging and raping might make non-regular movie watchers a little queasy, and will certainly astonish the buffs. Which is to say Avatar was an okay experience in 3D, but in flat screen form, the visual feast is certain to lose its gloss, and you'll be left with Cameron's navel gazing and the cliched dialogue as the chief form of entertainment.
That said, I never thought I'd be saying this, but thanks James Cameron for starting off the year with a bang. Tech credits are solid, performances all hit the mark, the WETA animation is up to scratch, the music noisily predictable, and the 3D shows how the studios will be able to carve out a new world away from the pirates. For the moment.
And above all, kudos James, for starting off Miranda the Devine's year with a bang. Such fireworks from such a foolish mind.
Next week: Miranda the Devine uncovers the ideological implications of The Sound of Music, decodes the hidden textural meanings of Gone with the Wind, and bores the academic world silly with a deconstruction of the chariot race in Ben-Hur. Or discover the joys of District 9. Oh wait, she's done that already:
The movie plumbs the worst of human behaviour, of xenophobia and ignorance, without being unrealistically misanthropic.
Yep, following the Devine's orders, for the rest of the year we will only watch movies that plumb the worst of human behaviour, of xenophobia and ignorance, without being unrealistically misanthropic. Anything featuring the holocaust should do for starters, but I'm feeling the bible really should be the best starting point:
Come on down god, and hit us with that story of Noah one more time, along with your own ineffable, intolerable smugness and righteousness, as you wipe humanity from the planet. Or is that just the Pellist and Jensenist heresies interpretation of your genocide? Talk about Christ figures ...
Oh it's going to be a good year, and we can all grok along to the ineffable inanities of the Devine while realizing we're likely to lose a brain cell or three along the way ...
But wait ... just as I thought it was all over, the Devine comes along with a final inanity of nightmarish proportions:
One of the main reasons we keep going to movies is that it's a communal experience. Rather than watching some pirated download on your home theatre, you can share the experience with hundreds of strangers, part of one big symbiotic system, even though we're not plugging our ponytails into the seats just yet.
Share a communal movie experience with the Devine? Plug my ponytail into a seat so I can grok along with the Devine?
Oh shoot me, shoot me now, before it ever comes to pass.
Memo to self: must never ever grow ponytail. Dangers obvious and growing ...
Memo to self: must watch pirated download in privacy of home theatre as it seems it might be the only safe way to watch a movie.
Alternative: share communal experience with Miranda the Devine and hundreds of strangers.
Oh shoot me, shoot me now.
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