Movie Review by Sister Lorie
You can’t miss the trailers and commercials, so you know the drill. Ten foot tall blue folks don’t like it when humans invade and want to strip mine their world. Evil humans don’t care; they just want the goods. Sounds like ‘Dances With Wolves’ in space. Maybe so, but there is no new story, only new applications of stories. With that said, I liked it. I liked the wonder of a place that was like no other. Animals that were similar enough and different enough at the same time. The wonder of a damaged human who discovers his soul.
Now for the presentation. This movie is what 3-d should have been all along. I found myself wanting to swipe at the ‘floating things’ that got too close to my face. The detail is amazing. I didn’t find anything to nit-pick in the more than 2.5 hours I sat stone still. Ok, maybe a quick intermission for a pit stop would have been useful.
This is a must see in 3-d, don’t be cheap.
I have to agree with Sister Lorie about the 3-D in this movie. It was awesome. Bottom line was that this movie was very entertaining.
Was it a great movie, I don’t know? First thing that came to mind was the hip hop practice of sampling. This movie unabashedly sampled several movies.
The obvious one that comes to mind is “Dancing with Wolves”. Solider goes off, beds with the natives and joins them. Part of it seemed like a good old western cowboy and Indian romp. There was a scene that seemed straight out of Terminator. Our villainous Colonel survives a fiery helicopter (-they seemed more like helicopters than anything else) crash to continue the fight.
Speaking of the Colonel I kept expecting him to spout, “I love the smell of napalm in the morning.” ala “Apocalypse Now”.
We had the weaselly corporate guy harking back to “Aliens”. I could not decide if the walkers were from “Aliens” or “Star Wars”. Speaking of which some of the jungle scenes reminded me of “Star Wars III”. The pantheistic “Force” that permeated the planet certainly was a riff on the Star Wars series.
There were several themes or messages in the movie. One was that evilness of big corporations. They were the ones exploiting this planet and its natives for obscene profits. Somehow with the corporate movie/marketing machine that is Hollywood this always seems less than sincere.
And let’s not forget the Smurfs with all the blue natives running around.
One thing I did wonder about was this. The creatures, intelligent and otherwise were interconnected. One way this could happen was the intertwining of tentacle like appendages with small tendrils that grew from their heads. I wondered if our love birds so connected when finally they “mated”.
Perhaps I am being too analytical. The movie was 3 hours long. The last 45 minutes or so I needed desperately to visit the facilities, but I remained glued to my seat not wanting to miss any of this hip hop movie experience.
The Messiah Complex – David Brooks in the NY Times
Pretty much what I thought, but he says it so much more eloquently.
Guess that is why he writes for the NY Times and I blather in the black hole of cyberspace.