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(My fellow Criticker members, this full review functions primarily to satisfy my suspicion that I didn't/wasn't able to communicate all my thoughts about James Cameron's Avatar within the confines of the mini-review character limit. In this sense, it's almost as masturbatory as the film itself but I digress... you don't have to humour me with responses - though you're welcome to comment.)

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In a bout of borderline-insane righteous indignation, a user of this website - let us call him Sufflerack - has shouted down those too pretentious to swallow the not even slightly banal and overblown Avatar as the next Holy Grail. I counter with this: cinematic revolution comes in the expression of new ideas, and the honing of distinct aesthetics, not hackneyed videogame-like diversions pre-emptively pissed on twenty-plus years ago by the great John Boorman. So fuck you.

The above is my mini-review of Avatar, which I'm quite happy with in the sense that it achieves its goal by saying exactly what I initially intended it to, a target that even my worst mini-reviews should aspire towards. However, aside from the fact that Criticker's character limit prevents me from saying everything I would like to say about this frankly terrible movie, I think an extended take on Cameron's - ahem - achievement is necessary if only to make two clarifications.

Firstly, I wouldn't want the confrontational tone of my capsule to be misconstrued as being contemptuous of the film's fans, of which there are many (some of whom are my own friends). Rather, its an affront to those who would make the unfounded assertion that not blindly following the commandment of Avatar's KoolAid-swilling marketing/hype campaign might be symptomatic of pretentiousness or arrogance. Seriously, such statements are infuriating, indicative as they are (by extension, of course) of a belief that not having fealty to hyperbole (or willingness to take pappy rip-offs as endeavours of greatness) is somehow a character flaw. As it happens, I don't think having a "Top 10 of 2009" list comprised of, say, Avatar, Inglourious Basterds, (500) Days of Summer, Star Trek, District 9, Precious, Up in the Air, An Education, The Hurt Locker and Up would be testament to one's ability to get over his/her self so much as his/her capacity for allowing studios to make their opinions for them. Don't get me wrong; some of those movies are fine films, but disliking them isn't a telltale sign of some self-absorbed ghoul. If you think it is, then yes: go fuck yourself. In any case, believing so would be akin to writing an anti-intellectual attack on, well, anti-intellectualism, such as http://www.criticker.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=20&t=1509 In other words: it would be futile.

The second clarification I must make is that the disdainful tone of my mini-review doesn't really extend to Avatar itself. Sure it's a movie befitting my mandatory Tier 1 label of "Atrocious," but I simply found its self-serious tone as combined with its utter ridiculousness merely deserving of sarcastic heckling than outright contempt. As it happens, I feel little anger towards the film. Rather, it probably deserves it's own Wall of Honor in the annals of "so bad they're good" motion pictures. There hasn't been such an accidentally ironic, empty-headed, wishy-washy expression of liberal self-reproach ever ever.

Avatar, proof-positive that all the money in the world can't buy an original screenplay if nobody's heart is set in that direction, is part Apocalypse Now, part The Emerald Forest, part Dances with Wolves, part Braveheart and all terrible. It's the most hilariously corny white apologist movie ever made. Watching it - or, to be more precise, heckling it - you can practically see Cameron traversing the Amazon River in his personal hovercraft, looking to the side to see the natives fleeing the impending bulldozers and thinking to himself: "I have to do something about this. Indeed, I should spend hundreds of millions of dollars.... on a film that I - not being a sociopath and all - shall use to show the world How. Much. I. Care." He's like the world's most self-righteous bleeding heart rock star, superficially dedicated to do-good moralising even if he's only really indulging special-effects fancies under the guise of serious cinema - and he's all too smug to see that he's making himself (not to mention Zoe Saldana, or his entire prospective fanbase) look like an idiot.

Verdict: Using surely state-of-the-art technology, Cameron and Co. have created a world of unique visual beauty. Unfortunately, its ladeled into a plot so trite, so contradictory and so half-baked that, yes, it might have to be seen to be believed. 1