My Two Cents: Avatar (SPOILERS!)

Saw Avatar last night.

(If you haven't seen it, STOP READING.)

In the immortal words of Keanu Reeves....
WHOA.

Ahem.  Seriously though, the story has been told before.  Dances with Wolves popped into my head of course, but so did Fern Gully: The Last Rainforest (does anybody remember that movie?  Robin Williams as Batty?  No really!).  It's classic: "civilized" people invade the world of supposedly "uncivilized" people because  there's something there that they want, and they'll destroy whatever gets in their way.  Lots of "they're savages" and "so-called deity" and such.

There's a bit of a Wall-e feel too - humans have destroyed the natural resources on Earth, so we head out to destroy other planets too.  The difference here is it's in the name of profit - there doesn't seem to be any sort of "survival" side to the story.

The antagonists are somewhat stereotypical of this kind of story - we have the greedy businessman looking to make a butt-load of money off whatever it is they're stealing - in this case, a mineral called "unobtainium" (which admittedly sounds a bit hokey, but then I guess it's supposed to) - and we also have the military guy, in this case a hard-core Marine, who will do "whatever it takes" to get the mineral, including destroy the indigenous civilization.  Both of these characters are in the movie, which might be a little much.  But Giovanni Ribisi, the business guy, was absolutely brilliant and played the character to just the right extent where I truly felt uncomfortable.  Not just "oh he's the bad guy" but "shit, there are actually people like that in the world."  The Marine however, was played by a type-cast hard-core military-esque guy and yeah, he was kind of over-played.  Granted, there are people like him in the world too, but it's just not quite as believable or scary to think about, in my opinion.

The protagonists balanced it out though.  Jake Sully, the hero, was a great character.  Trying to still be a Marine despite being paralyzed, but then being drawn into the society of the Navi (the indigenous tribe on the planet) and inevitably taking up their cause and abandoning his own people - but it didn't feel forced.  It wasn't overdone.

The chick - there had to be one, right?  Otherwise why would this guy go through all this? - Neytiri, was AWESOME.  The new female hero of our time.  Seriously.  I loved Zoe Saldana as Uhura in Star Trek, but she was amazing as Neytiri.  Okay, so she wasn't physically playing the part - although she kind of was, through motion-capture - but it was still her in the character, and wow.  Harsh, raw emotion... powerful warrior... all in a hot (blue) package.  I'll say it again: AWESOME.

But then there's the film itself.  Holy CRAP.  I can't describe it.  Okay so after seeing Transformers you could say "the CGI was really awesome!" - you can't just say that about this film.  Because really?  It was more like "what CGI?  There was CGI?"  Really.  It was absolutely breathtaking.  When have you ever seen a CGI character smile with their eyes?  And the scenery, and the animals, and the... the whole frakking thing left me exhilarated.

There was only one thing that I was really "meh" about.  One character, actually, and that was Sigourney Weaver's character.  As a human, she was good - typical bad-ass Sigourney Weaver, attitude galore, but then as an Avatar... erm.  Hers was the only one that I thought looked fakey.  Her face was too soft, too girly for Sigourney Weaver.  And the Avatar side of the character was completely different from the human side.  It was a weird dichotomy that just didn't mesh for me.

In the end, I had a hard time getting to sleep last night because I was just so PUMPED about this movie.  It is an EXPERIENCE.  Period.  I'll be seeing it again.