AVATAR

If you’re looking for a comprehensive movie review, you won’t find it here. Avatar is not really the sort of movie for which a “movie review” is appropriate.

For one thing, you’ve seen it before. It was called Dances With Wolves or a dozen other things that used the same formulaic plot. An outcast from the dominant culture (almost always the evil white guys with big guns) goes to live with beautiful, pure, primitive, native people, becomes one of them, and then leads them in battle against his own (evil white guy) people. The movie has been made so often, the plot has a nickname: it’s called the White Messiah story.

Obviously, this is a heart-warming theme for the politically-correct lefties who make all the movies in Hollywood. As a bonus, you will get plenty of unsubtle dialogue that is somehow startlingly relevant to the actions and beliefs of the recent Bush/Cheney administration even though Avatar takes place on another planet in the 22nd Century. (Actually, the left-wing political cracks are so absurd and out of place that I wondered whether they were actually written by a conservative script-doctor who was trying to spoof what liberals would do with a movie like this.)

Yet, though the story and the dialogue and various bits of business along the way are profoundly silly, the very first words I said to the wife and child upon emerging from the theater were these: “Well, I certainly feel I got my $14 worth.”

And that, in a nutshell, is my review. Go. You won’t regret it. Fourteen smackers is cheap for the 3-D extravaganza awaiting you. The foliage alone on the planet Pandora is worth the trip to the theater, even in sub-freezing weather. (NOTE: there are movie palaces that lack the 3-D projection system to show Avatar, but they are showing it anyway. Shun them.)

But none of that is what I really wanted to talk about. I want to talk about the villain.

It’s a corporation, of course. The villain these days is always a corporation. In Avatar, it doesn’t even have a name. It’s simply known as “The Company,” which makes me suspect it’s actually the Vermont Teddy Bear Company. Whatever it is, it’s very evil. It’s major-league evil. It’s much more evil than the pharmaceutical company in “The Constant Gardener” that hired mercenaries and killers and started wars and intentionally gave lethal drugs to innocent Africans. It’s even eviler than Dynacorp, the evil corporation in the Terminator movies. The Company in Avatar is so evil that movie patrons (not just me) find themselves snickering at how utterly, unrepentantly, hideously evil it is.

It’s a problem for Hollywood. When the peanut gallery can’t take the villain seriously anymore, they need a new villain. But apparently, they can’t think of one.

It used to be that anybody could be a movie villain. Then Italians started complaining about being villains so, taking the path of least resistance, Hollywood decided Italians wouldn’t be used as villains anymore. Then black people complained, so they stopped being used as villains too. Then it was crazy people. Then it was homosexuals, and Hispanics, and Muslims. For a while, the only villains you saw were semi-unidentifiable, crypto-Eastern-European, post-Soviet gangster punks, but Vladimir Putin must have complained because you don’t see them anymore either. Eventually, the deep thinkers in Hollywood decided that it was just too dangerous for the bottom line to cast any sort of identifiable person as a villain, so the villainous corporation was born.

For a while, it was a novelty. It was entertaining. But when, in movie after movie, the evil corporation is always the villain, it becomes necessary to ratchet up the malevolence. If your villain is an evil corporation, you need it to be even more evil than the previous blockbuster’s evil corporation. And then the next guy’s movie has to feature a corporation even more monstrous than yours. And then you get The Company in Avatar, and the audience starts chuckling.

We all want to suspend our disbelief so we can enjoy the show, but there comes a time when you just can’t swallow it any longer. I mean, even if you think that corporations are bad and wrong and amoral and yes, EVIL, we all know that these undesirable qualities tend to manifest themselves in activities like stealing a competitor’s technology, or trying to monopolize a market, or maybe even bribing a public official. These things happen. On the other hand, murder, nuclear conflagration, genocide and world domination tend not to be featured in the mission statement, even at Halliburton.

Hollywood thus finds itself in a bind. They have no bad guys left except for the one remaining entity their politically-correct shibboleths allow them to defame, and they have made it into a laughingstock. They need a new idea for a villain, and there are millions of dollars waiting for the genius who comes up with it.

I suggest blondes.

Copyright2010MichaelKubacki