Goldberg on Avatar

Jonah Goldberg offers a very interesting take on Avatar. I had many of the same thoughts after watching the movie.

As a cinematic experience, it's not bad. Actually, I really enjoyed it. But as a story, it's utterly predictable, condescending, and preachy. If you haven't seen it yet, you can get essentially the same experience by Netflixing Dances With Wolves (great movie) along with some Disney-ish enviro-propaganda (Fern Gully or Pocahontas should suffice) and tapping yourself lightly on the forehead with a ball-peen hammer to simulate the effect of 3-D (I'm just being silly here. The 3-D was wicked cool and didn't make me nauseous at all).

I agree with Goldberg - the movie's preachiness doesn't bother me per se; it just made the story so much weaker than it had to be. Look, I'm preachy and I like preachy things (at least when I agree with the message). I just think it's strange that popular culture fails to acknowledge that movies written like this are the film equivalent of contemporary Christian music for Whole Foods shoppers that hate Sarah Palin. (To clarify: I like contemporary Christian music, but I'm willing to bet that many who sing the praises of movies like Avatar would find such music cheesy and shallow - too message-driven to be taken seriously as music.) It just proves that most people aren't as offended by public proselytizing as they pretend to be - they're just offended by certain messages.

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UPDATE: Goldberg has written another post examining the claim from some on the left that Avatar's popularity proves that Americans really do like left-leaning movies.

Goldberg responds:

Look, I enjoyed the movie. But Goldstein's line how Avatar turns conservative complaints on their head is really bizarre. He recounts a long list of explicitly left-wing movies that bombed, but says all that doesn't matter because people are flocking to see Avatar. Never mind [that] very, very few people are going to see Avatar because of its political content. Meanwhile, conservatives are "prickly" and "partisan sloganeers" for noticing the incredibly lame partisan sloganeering in the movie!

Let me explain something, if I may. I can't speak for every conservative who complained about Avatar, but it seems to me that most of the conservative complaints centered on the laziness of the story (a complaint that is hardly unique to right-wing critics of the film)....

The partisan stuff didn't make me angry because it took shots at Bush or Republicans. It made me angry because it was so incredibly lame.

I couldn't agree more. When we walked out I told Julie, "It was okay. The visuals were amazing, but I thought the story would be better. It was basically just Dances With Wolves with boring, two-dimensional characters."