This weekend, James Cameron re-released his multi-million dollar epic film Avatar in 3-D theaters. This is great news for James Cameron, because people are determined to fork over their cash for nine additional minutes of tail sex and a chance to relive a grandiose robbery of time. In 3-D!
But let's not pretend as if Avatar was some genius achievement in filmmaking. Aesthetically appealing? Sure. But are we so stunned by the visuals that we can't recognize how weak just about everything else was?
Of course not. Luckily, there are some easy fixes for some of the movie's shortcomings. Here are five ways to improve Avatar:
1. Drugs.
Nothing fancy here, just some good ol' drugs. I mean, James Cameron
himself had to be on some kind of intoxicant to look at this movie and
say "You know what this needs? Nine more minutes." Add that in with the
fact that Cameron originally had two scenes in which Jake gets wasted -
drunk in one scene and tripping off a glowing purple worm
in the other - and it becomes clear that Jimmy C is down with
inebriation. So why not have a few screenings where 3-D glasses get
traded for pot brownies. That might actually draw crowds to the
re-release.
2. Get the human characters laid.
I can't be the only one who noticed the level of aggression in most of
the film's human characters. Look at Colonel Quaritch: An
overaggressive, lunk-headed militia guy hell-bent on blowing the entire
planet sky high. Throughout the film, Quaritch gets his rocks off by
barking out orders to his fellow soldiers and decimating the Na'vi
population. Same goes for Sigourney Weaver's shrill, foul-mouthed
character Grace. She manages to go as far as referring to Jake -
crippled from the waist down, mind you - as "numbnuts."
Wouldn't both of these characters benefit from a little 'horizontal
bop?' Perhaps a round of peek and poke for the two aforementioned
individuals dramatically changes the fate of Pandora altogether. Then
again, judging Cameron by his euphemisms for sex (so far we have "horizontal bop" and "alien kink")
and the fact that he envisioned blue, cat-like creatures intertwining
tails as sex, that's probably not something we want to see. Let's just
move on.
3. No more unobtainium.
This is probably the easiest one. The actual, scientific use of the word
notwithstanding, you can't expect an audience to fully immerse
themselves in a world where war breaks out over something with such a
ridiculous name. Imagine a version of Mel Gibson's The Patriot in which instead of fighting for America, the soldiers are fighting for "Other Countryland." Who among you would take the Terminator movies seriously if Skynet had been referred to as "Evil ComputerBot?"
4. Lose the accents.
The Na'Vi language (an actual
language created by linguist Peter Frommer for the purposes of this
film) is not at all dissimilar to Klingon in that neither language
serves any purpose. In Avatar, however, the Na'Vi language takes
pointlessness to new heights as the protagonists of Pandora spend most
of the film speaking English. The movie mentions that the humans built a
school on Pandora to teach the blue folks English. Their teacher must
have been the guy from the Red Stripe commercials. Look, if the
transformers can learn English from the Internet, then surely Na'vi
could be better English speakers. Hell, even the coneheads managed to
pick it up better than the Na'vi.
5. Finally, put Zoe Saldana in the film, not just her voice and avatar.
Most people will agree that Avatar's appeal lies in its spectacle and
not its substance. So why not call up Gordon J. Smith (the makeup artist
that designed Mystique's outfit in the X-Men films and get Ms.
Saldana in all her glory? What could possibly be more visually stunning
than that? Way to drop the ball on that one, James. Or, as the Na'vi
would say: something unintelligible.
--Marques Brantley
