Avatarded

"Every living thing that crawls, flies, or squats in the mud wants to kill you and eat your eyes for jujubes." - Col. Quaritch

Avatar is estimated to have pulled in about $73M domestically over the weekend. That's not bad, but considering how much it cost, anywhere from 300M to 500M, it's not exactly great. That's probably partly to do with how uninspired it seems to be. Admittedly, the CGI is pretty damn great and the 3D is incredible. I mean that in a technical sense, as its used in a more subtle fashion than the usual poke things out at you.

But, one of the main criticisms is that it ultimately tells an incredibly slight and cliched tale. Which isn't altogether untrue. It's FernGully with some Dances with Wolves mixed in. It's rather unsophisticated and everyone's playing an archetype rather than a character. So you basically have the evil human corporations and para-military killfuckers that need to mine a mineral to either earn a profit or power the human empire. In order to accomplish this they decide to killfuck the hell out of the Native American/African Na'vi (which is native with ET taken out). The Na'vi of course are alien hippies with a literal connection to nature in their USB port tipped braids. They jam it into the same in animals and trees and shit to command or communicate with them.

Side note, one of the tests of manhood/hunterhood is to claim an ikran (dragon) as a mount. To do this, you wrestle it to the ground and USB-rape it in order to get it to do what you want. Yeah, I had that reaction too. Also, Jake does this twice. He's a serial dragon USB-rapist.

Back on point, you can throw around White Guilt and shit, but it's mainly humans suck and the native alien hippies are awesome. Which, it has been argued, is simplistic and bad because it's such a weak conflict. Here's the thing though, there's not an insignificant amount of people that can't figure out why the humans didn't just bomb the fuck out of the aliens and steal their shit and stuff. So that's why I think for how simplistic the story was, it pretty much had to. The audience is composed of a large percentage of sociopathic morons. If they can't even understand that it's bad to killfuck a population in order to steal their land, then fuck, no wonder movies are so unsophisticated.

America's Promise

Back in the '80s and early '90s we used to have awesome neighborhood video rental places. You'd find all sorts of crap to view, much of the time based on how awesomely bad or badly awesome the cover was. These were the sorts of places where I discovered Robot Jox and Deepstar Six. It's also where I got stuff like Rambo, and Die Hard, though I saw Die Hard 2 on laserdisc. Ah laserdisc, those were the days.

Anyway, back in the day we did have guys like Schwarzenegger and Jet Li, but we also had Stallone and Bruce Willis. We had Seagal and Chuck "The Beard" Norris. In other word, men's men. American men starring in the greatest action movies ever. Seriously, Invasion USA will put hair on your chest.

So what the fuck happened? Now all the heir apparents to the manly men of American action movies are coming from other places that aren't America. Sure, I got a lot of love for Tony "I will break your face on my knee" Jaa and Jason "Crank 2" Statham. But where's the next big American action star? Christian Bale? Not American. Sam Worthington? Not American.

Shia "Fucking" Labeouf. Seriously, he was just in what I imagine was the top grossing action movie of the year, and he's the guy that gets killed in movies so you know that the shit just got real. I mean seriously. Remember Orlando Bloom? Remember how much of a travesty it was that Eric Bana's character in Troy got killed for his ass?

What happened to real American action heroes? GI Joe doesn't count, because it looks moronically stupid. Sorry Tatum.

It's like America has developed a generation of pussies. Where kids no longer get into fist fights at school. Bullies have free reign as long as they don't get caught. The kids that should just get fed up and throw a punch now just fester until they bring guns to school. When alcoholism and beating on your kids is no longer acceptable behavior, you develop a generation of pussies instead of men. If we're supposed to be the world's cowboys, then why the hell are our leading men all a bunch of little bitches?

















And that's why we have Shia "Fucking" Labeouf as the "action hero." And why the girls all dig Zack Efron.