Okay, I know that James Cameron is part of the Hollywood Elite, and I guess it’s some kind of requirement that they all think in lockstep, but for crying out loud, Avatar was supposed to be some awesome science fiction, not some three hour Greenpeace commercial!

But before we get into that we’ve got to talk about the plot.  And it’s pretty simple, being that it’s essentially the plot of Aliens as envisioned by eco-hippies everywhere.  The evil nasty corporate capitalist humans come to the planet of Pandora, a peaceful colorful world full of peaceful colorful bipedal life forms that live surrounded by trees and rocks and assorted wildlife that’s pretty much all bioluminescent.  Seriously, there’s almost NOTHING on Pandora that doesn’t glow in the dark.

The humans, meanwhile, desperately want a little black rock under the soil of Pandora that the aliens appear to have absolutely no use for or knowledge of called Unobtainium.  Unobtainium will be mentioned for about five minutes and then conveniently forgotten about for the rest of the movie.

Anyway, the main alien settlement, Hometree, is located right above the biggest Unobtainium supply on the planet, so naturally, the humans would like very much for the aliens to kindly move their civilization about, oh, three miles or so down the road so they can dig.  Naturally, the aliens find moving slightly to the left (in planetary terms) so odious a demand that they must fight to the death to prevent it because God forbid anyone pull a rock out of their so-sacred ground.

Basic message here: We are so peaceful and in tune with the planet that we can hear our ancestors talk by tying our hair to trees but if you touch one rock on our planet we will kill you with arrows that are, relative to you, the size of tree limbs.

First, this is an absolutely beautiful movie.  Even a plot synopsis takes forever to recount because this is a three hour movie.  It is beautiful, it represents a HUGE leap forward in filmmaking, and it is huge and epic.

Second, this is the biggest environmentalist kludge of a movie that I have ever seen, even beating out Wall-E, and if I were beaten over the head any harder with their eco-trippy message I would have a concussion.

Watching the Mud People and their jungle friends engage in combat against helicopter gunships and a thousand years of human engineering would be a sad joke if it weren’t for the fact that the animal life on Pandora can either absorb the impact from or move faster than bullets with a muzzle velocity of somewhere around, oh, forty five hundred feet per second or so.  This should be physically impossible even with the weak-sauce plot device of “naturally occurring carbon fiber” in their bones.   But Avatar doesn’t care about physics because it cares about sticking it  to the evil greedy polluting capitalists instead.

You can see this message bright and cheerfully clear in the ending, which I will spoiler only so far as to say it makes perfect sense for the theme, which is “all capitalism is evil and the only way to not be evil is to reject it in its entirety”.

Once you get past the heavy-handed morality play, however, you see a movie of incredible art and skill, so it’s hard to malign it for anything more than its message which is both ubiquitous and omnipresent.

The Screenhead Ten Scale hands this one a seven out of ten for awe-inspiring beauty and brilliant cinematography couched in the biggest political advertisement ever.