Avatar

"Hi there. I'm James Cameron, and I'm sorry your girlfriend made you see Titanic. Please enjoy Avatar."

Arguably my least favorite element of science fiction is the presence of aliens. At the outset, this might sound like me saying, “My least favorite thing about fondue is all that cheese,” but in my defense, there’s been a lot of high quality science fiction about humans fighting and trying to coexist with other humans (or, in one case, robots that they designed – but robots are cool with me.) I just have trouble relating to the countless humanoid, bumpy-foreheaded aliens cranked out by the Star Trek franchise. I’m not as interested in their perspectives and their interactions as I am in those of humans. I guess I’m racist against fictional races that we might discover in the future. I’m like Archie Bunker, in space.

There are exceptions to this rule. District 9, while far from perfect in many respects, gets a pass from me because the aliens there are more of a Macguffin to show what huge pricks all humans everywhere are. The most recent Star Trek is okay in my book, thanks largely to Kirk’s buxom, grin skinned fuckbuddy. Most importantly, Alien and Aliens don’t try to make us empathize with a race of nonunion actors in heavy makeup, loving and appreciating every element of their culture. Rather, the aliens in these films are horrifying monsters that unequivocally must be eradicated, providing a means for a lot of interpersonal drama between space truckers and, later, space marines.

Arguably my favorite element of science fiction is the presence of space marines, mainly because they follow my long established equation that if you take something cool and put it in space, it only gets cooler. Space marines are usually psychotic, ‘roided up thugs, with the weapons and the means to commit incredible violence. I don’t have a boner for war or anything, but I know good storytelling when I see it.

So Avatar, then.

On the one hand, half of every trailer was full of space marines running around in giant robot suits with huge guns or flying around in helicopter things, which looked cool. But then, the other half of every trailer was James Cameron trying very hard to get us to empathize with twelve foot tall blue cat people with tails, which was difficult, to say the least.

Initially, my plan was to watch Aliens and Dances With Wolves on two TVs at the same time and save myself $9, but then I wound up coming home for the weekend and Dad bought my ticket instead. Ka-ching!

A major theme in Avatar is the notion of sight – the Na’vi greet one another by saying, “I see you,” metaphorical ‘seeing’ is how they communicate with their world, and the movie is full of so many close up shots of eyes that I felt like James Cameron was trying to teabag us with his thematic nuts.

It was fitting, because this movie is basically one big testament to the ability to see. Everything is fluorescent and vibrantly colorful, and the option exists to see the movie in 3D and IMAX, which I expect is a cheap alternative to heroin. All the hype about the movie was its groundbreaking eye candy – in effect, the movie’s hype became part of its thematic content. Every time one of the beautifully rendered CGI characters would prattle on about sight, I could ‘see’ James Cameron sitting at his computer writing the screenplay and chuckling.

“Heh heh heh. I am so fucking smart. I mean, would a stupid person have been married to Linda Hamilton? Probably not.”

And yeah, the movie was fucking beautiful. It was downright Nobel Prize quality gorgeous, crammed full of lush forests and glowing rivers and some of the absolutely most epic fight scenes I’ve ever seen in a movie. There was a lot of great eye candy and there was a living, breathing, thinking story backing all of it up. Not that the story thought that hard, mind you – the way I heard it described was “Dances with Pocohontas in Space” – but light years ahead of something like Transformers 2. The screenplay, also, relied pretty heavily on Captain Voiceover.

Avatar was everything that a summer (er, winter) blockbuster should be – great eye candy with a decent amount of story mixed in. James Cameron has always been good at this sort of thing. I feel as though the founding fathers of cinema, if they saw Avatar, would be pleased that their brainchild had been used to such good purpose, even if it raised thematic questions about their flagrant racism.

But no, Avatar should not be a Best Picture contender. Why? Because it’s not one of the ten best American movies this year, God damn it.*

*Inglourious Basterds was cool, but it wasn’t one of the best movies of the year either. Neither was District 9, although it would definitely win for Best Cinematography had anyone thought to fucking nominate it.

This is yet another reason why there shouldn’t be ten Best Picture nominees – they’re started nominating movies from 2009 that got buzz, rather than the absolute best of the best. There’s a big gap between a good movie, like Avatar or Inglourious Basterds, and a great movie, like The Wrestler, which the Academy time and again refuses to acknowledge.

I want to think that they won’t hand Best Picture of the Year to Avatar, a movie filled with innovative and groundbreaking visual effects and essentially no new creative ideas.

But then I think about Titanic, and I start to get scared.

Truman Capps is perfectly content to let Avatar clean up at the MTV Movie Awards.