Last night, I watched the Golden Globe Awards…or at least the last half. I was surprised when Avatar, the $492 million epic by Titanic’s James Cameron won best director, and horrified when the film itself won best motion picture – drama.
There are a myriad of reasons I think Avatar is one of, if not the most overrated film of all time, which I will list below. But first, its interesting to discuss what this means for Hollywood – and filmmaking in general. Avatar is beyond popular. It is cruising quickly to become the highest-grossing movie of all time, and even now, almost two months after its release date, it stands at number one in the box office.
Only one of its competitors came even close to making a quarter of Avatar’s money (Inglorious Basterds made over $120 million), while the other three (The Hurt Locker, Precious and Up in the Air) instead roamed in the lower ranges like most critically acclaimed films.
To make it short, in my unschooled estimate, Avatar was simply too-big to ignore. Awards shows have long been trying to gain audience by choosing crowd-pleasers over more critically acclaimed films (Crash winning the Oscar over Brokeback Mountain comes to mind), and Avatar is a good way to do that. Regardless of its (many) flaws, Avatar is and will continue to be a turning point for major motion pictures. Audiences like it, its making loads of money, and award shows know a chance of an Avatar sweep will make their historically-ignored shows watchable.
But there are many reasons to be disgusted that Avatar won last night. I’ll list them after the jump…
1. For James Cameron, there is no such thing as subtlety. I agree with every point about imperialism, war and terrorism he wants to make with the film. I love that he’s bringing a pro-environment message to the masses and MAKING them like it. Overall, he has a good point with the film. It may just be me, however, but I’d rather come to the conclusion about what the movie “is saying” myself, instead of having Cameron beat me over the head with the message throughout the film. He even has his big-bad soldier enemy discuss “fighting terror with terror.” Ever since Cameron had his bad guy drive a car through a wall to make an entrance (Terminator) he has forgotten all about what subtlety even means.
2. Let’s face it, the whole movie is racist. I know that (spoiler alert if you are one of two people who still haven’t seen it) the natives win in the end, but that doesn’t make this film’s plot acceptable. It is, in its simplest form, what is called a “going native” story. Think Dances with Wolves, but with a fake race instead of Native Americans. The plot revolves around the chosen white man coming to Pandora to inadvertently – with no training and no experience – save these oppressed people. He “becomes” one of them through a fast-tracked ritual and is suddenly better than every one of them, and more important to the people’s history. The enemy is the white man, but they can only be defeated by a white man, the rest of “the people” just aren’t good enough.
3. The acting is awful. Just horrible. The script isn’t well written, so you have cheesy speeches like the aforementioned “fighting terror with terror” that no actor could salvage. And just taking two of main actors from big summer epics (Star Trek‘s Zoe Saldana and Terminator Salvation‘s Sam Worthington) doesn’t mean you’ve found great actors. If you saw this movie and just listened, you’d know how horrible the script really was.
4. Pandora isn’t that original. So much praise has been heaped on this beautiful world the film created, something so new and original. This is a complaint I have with much sci-fi, as much as I love the genre. Cameron has no thought for true originality. Instead he takes mountains – and makes them float. Jungle cats – but they look oily. Birds – with FOUR wings. Really, it gets old. Making things shiny, double sized or acid-trippy colors does not constitute originality. So don’t call it that.
5. How lame is it that they are mining for “Unobtainium?” Really, I know I said he lacks subtlety but this one even amazed me.
6. There were so many better choices for this award. I know its a matter of taste and that every year you can find many more films deserving of awards than the winner, but there’s no reason to give full-on awards to what are basically technical masterpieces. I love Lord of the Rings, but even I was upset when it beat out the beautiful and well-done Mystic River in 2004. Give it the awards it deserves for art direction, costume or whatever, but leave the actual awards to thought-provoking affairs like The Hurt Locker.
Zing! FANTASTIC round-up on Avatar, Steph! While I enjoyed the visual aspects of the film and James Cameron deserves every technical achievement coming his way, the plot left me incredibly underwhelmed. Seriously, do we even know what Unobtainium even does?
I think I’ve seen Avatar before, but I believe it was called Last Samurai.