James Cameron's Avatar (2009. Sequels planned.)
Movie review by Rae West 14 May 2022
AVATAR (2009) is about 2½ hours. My copy is a DVD, linked to a website which no longer exists; this gave interviews, unseen features, and 'special features', perhaps including the special effects, in the style of Peter Jackson. The movie has a vast list of credits. These are largely New Zealand and WETA, with a large number of specialist units, including visuals and sound. There have been many versions, including stereo.
i wanted to write this because (I read) the
first sequel is scheduled for December this year, 2022, making these comments a reprise from the past. The actors will be about 12 years older, and the official stories in the world have developed since 2009, and must,no doubt, make their anachronistic appearances.
There's nothing on assembly of the script and historical references. James Cameron (says Wikipedia) directed, wrote, produced, and co-edited the movie. This statement is contradicted by other sources; probably it must mean he claims or has bought everything. The planet or moon called
Pandora is described as a moon of a Jupiter-like giant planet. It does indeed have something like a great red spot, in blue. This is supposed to circle round Alpha Centauri. In the mid-22nd century. (This complicates the scenery and the small sun's light.) Something like 130 years, in other words, or as far from us as 1890.
Subtleties of language and technology don't really obtain here. The movie starts with a self-styled 'grunt' form the Veterans Administration, an identical twin whose twin brother is dead. The language is pretty much accurate for Vietnam, Cameron being born in 1954. So there's a bit of a jolt.
The four main actors are:
'Sigourney' Weaver as a 'scientist'. I think a botanist, but doing something with 'Avatars', which seem to be imitation 'blue monkeys' (thanks Stephen Lang), which can be driven remotely from enclosed coffin-ish body-shaped cavities. The movie relies on something like biological USB cables to establish bonds—for example, to tame previously-wild animals.
A male actor as the self-described grunt. I looked him up:
Sam Worthington, who struck me as as unsmiling type. Since his make-up is a brow-mounted diadem with a nose-piece, matching his overall blue make-up, maybe it doesn't matter. He's presumably intended to appeal to dim Americans, an abundant audience.
Showing what can be done with printed camouflage fabric—which looked to me c.1960—and real or fake muscles we have
Stephen Lang, for whom Wiki lists over 100 parts on stage, movie, and TV. I'd love to know how much these people were eventually paid. He perhaps specialises in psyops—much of his output has been the sort of things Miles Mathis exposes.
The female actress as implausibly skinny with elegant legs-apart suspension poses turns out to be
Zoe Saldana possibly mixed race, her epicentre being Dominica and Puerto Rico (away from Hawaii) and New York. Her life, as with Cubans, must have been run by Marrano Jews.
As seems inevitable with Jewish control,
all aspects of presentation are choreographed to match. Sigourney Weaver says Pandora is 'the most hostile environment known to man.' The grunt chappie says something like 'if you believe in hell you might wanna go there for R & R. Everything out there that flies, crawls etc wants to eat your eyes.' After years of living there (in the breathable atmosphere, good climate etc) they might have known better. The promotional costs of the movie are given somewhere, as less than the production costs, but not that much less. Having just watched some of the 2022 Eurovision Song Contest (including Azerbaijan, Australia, and Israel) many sophisticate viewers must conclude that promotion is 90% of people's judgement of quality. And that the most important thing is to avoid controversy, to avoid losing cohorts of viewers with definite opinions.
The computer-generated effects remain I think mainly in the backgrounds. There are spectacular huge descents which in life would cause fatalities, including some spanned by long, fallen trees, and suspended mountains. A computer-generated leap into a very very long waterfall worried me; I've heard water hit by objects at final velocity doesn't have time to move away, so the actor would have broken parts, if he was lucky. Computer-generated helicopter gunships had a pair of cylindrical fans which looked dangerously unsafe if one of them got damaged. There seem to have been effects set up for the future: the trees are supposed to have communication by roots, 'like neurons', so I was waiting for co-operating trees to attack the alien earthlings. Or perhaps the floating mountains made to fall. DNA plays a part: the blue types are supposed to have bones strengthened with carbon fiber. Would this be compatible with human DNA? Maybe in later films?
An exception is the animals—there's a sort of hammerhead rhino, skinny hunting dogs, and especially flying dragons, which need close-up image processing, of the eye-pupils changing size type. I think I may have glimpsed an eight-legged horse like Sleipnir. These all seem to have taken a lot of time and effort.
The space-travel parts included weightlessness of the same type as in supposed space stations, with wires for suspension. Well, you can't have everything.
On what could be called the 'anthropology' of the blue locals, as always I found weak points, which I'd guess Cameron disregarded as being above the heads of most of his audience. I thought there's a problem with the idea that 'energy' pervaded their natural world. How could they have a word for 'energy' if they didn't understand about several forms of energy? And I disliked the 'spirituality' ascribed to them, which seems to me the biggest fraud perpetrated by Jews. When people trade things of a similar type—meat with fish, wood for timber—values are more or less assessible, but in selling 'Jesus' as a 'saviour' in exchange for land, assets, percentages, and money this was Jews' highest peak of swindling.
On the social circumstances of the invaders, I found Cameron's approach naive and unreasonable, though I'd guess certainly what the average unsophisticated movie-goer would expect. The whole thing circulate around 'unobtainium', a mineral of some undefined type; I think Cameron judged correctly the absence of interest in his audience for geochemistry. They would be captivated enough by the mention of millions of dollars.
We had an absurd press comment, based I think (like 'winning their hearts and minds') on Jewish propaganda on the Vietnam invasion. The chap said the shareholders would be more disappointed in low quarterly returns than a 'bad press'. To this day, some unsophisticated commenters retain the often-repeated bullshit that the US press had atrocity stories and accounts, which of course is untrue. Fragmentation bombs, napalm, chemical warfare, huge ploughs to wreck the lands, rounding up of girls for use as prostitutes, were facts which Cameron would not include in his fictions. At the military attack part of movie, small canisters caused the blue natives to cough; there were things like fire arrows; nothing remotely genuine.
The simple model of a raw material to be grabbed omits the realities—the miniature figure of Kissinger planning war crimes, the takeover of land, the control of demoralised cheap labour.
The plot is simple enough—man from technically-advanced country links with local woman, but in this case in a decorous manner. There's a set of final scenes, including burning of a sacred tree and departure of assorted troops, with of course no comment on what had been achieved for the money-men.
© Rae West 15 May 2022
