Avatar

OK, ok, I know I’m three weeks late, but last night I finally got to see Avatar. Now, like any self-respecting geek, I’ve been reading about it for months; about how it’s going to change film forever, how director James Cameron had to wait for technology to catch up with his hare-brained scheme to thrust cinema futurewards, about the big blue Jar-Jar Binkses in loincloths and can-you-can’t-you-see their boobs and how does that really make you feel inside; is it ok to fancy them or is it wrong like that dream I had about Lara Croft when I was fourteen that still throws me into a tornado of criss-crossing emotions that I’m still not altogether recovered from or even comfortable with? Well?

Watching a big blockbuster like this is always a pain when it’s been out for a while, too -three weeks in this instance – by which time the hype has always subsided into a fully blown attack of the nerds. The trouble with nerds is that, unlike normal people (whose reaction to something disappointing is either to ignore it or sigh slightly more loudly than usual), they write essays of bile on internet boards slagging the thing off. In Avatar’s case, the geek backlash began after the first 40 second teaser trailer last summer. Thus, the majority of things I’ve read about Avatar in the last six months have been bad, but still haven’t quashed by enthusiasm for seeing the film, meaning that you enter the cinema riding a wave of negativity mixed with excitement. A bizarre cocktail.

Unlike the last Star Wars trilogy, where you were repeatedly asking yourself, ‘Seriously, did they do that on MS Paint or what?’ (this is a good example) - there are scant few moments where you suss that the vast Technicolour globe lurching out of the screen is entirely computer generated, and even then you’ve only a nanosecond to think before a huge hammerhead heffalump comes bounding through the shrubs towards you. I couldn’t help wondering what the first generation of 50s teenage 3D glasses-wearers would have made of it all. I concluded that they would have shat themselves.

Cleverly, all the digital showing-off doesn’t make the film feel hollow either. Unlike poor old unloved Jar Jar, you actually give a shit about the Na’vi. In fact, it’s such an incredibly easy film to immerse yourself in that you don’t actually want to leave the cinema at the end, and attempt to barricade yourself into your seat row using a mixture of sticky floor-sweets and congealed popcorn, thrashing wildly at the Cineworld employees with a sharpened arm-rest as they attempt to drag you by the ankles back into the vast boring tundra of meh that is the real world.

Seriously. Walking back home afterwards was like being given one single brick of Lego to play with, after having spent the previous 3 hours on an XBOX 360.

“Oh look! There’s a lamp-post! And it’s… it’s GREY!” Yawn.

Avatar is what it is, a super-entertaining morality play and love story. Plus there’s loads of flying shit and explosions, which is y’know, wicked and stuff.

Anyway, your reason for reading this on a music site? A professional critique of the Leona Lewis song that plays over the end credits, ‘I See You’.

It’s fucking abysmal.

Mind you, that’s probably a deliberate move to prevent nutters like me wanting to stay behind in the bowels of Wandsworth Cineworld to fight the next wave of gun-toting greedy Earthlings. Nice one, Jim. Now, where can I find some naughty Na’vi pics…