All Things Patrick - Working Hard to be Lazy!

Avatar had some great action sequences, but I just felt beaten to death with stereotypes and Captain Planet's message that business is evil. We have the stereotypical kill everything military leader taking orders from the stereotypical I only love money business henchman, with a stereotypical green peace I hate the military science leader, and a blind sheep going which ever way he's pushed until he realizes unobtainium is just unobtainable with the suffix -able switched to -ium.

To give this a bit of pretext, yes I missed Avatar in the theatres. I got the Avatar DVD from Netflix, put it in to watch it, hit Play from the DVD's root menu, see the FBI warning about copying the movie, and ended up at the root menu - wtf? I hit Play again and this time I get the 20th Century Fox thingy, followed by the FBI warning, and I find myself back at the root menu. Several more rounds of that and I gave up, ripped a copy via dvdbackup -M, played the directory as a DVD in VLC player, and it worked. Why do I have to rip something just to watch it?

About halfway through (they had just crossed a bunch of vines to get their winged mounts) my copy stopped working. I popped the DVD back in, went into the Scenes section from the root menu, flipped through the various pages until I found what I needed and from there I was able to watch the rest of the movie off the DVD.

The other issue might be that I slept most of the weekend away because the hours I was awake my neck was causing me a huge migraine - I couldn't feel my allergies until Sunday night. I made it in on Tuesday to see my chiropractor and found out C1, C2, C3, and C4 were out of whack. Maybe part of the fun negativity of the weekend rolled into this post.

I enjoyed Avatar except for the jarring moments when the movie kicked me across the room and then proceeded to beat me with it's political issues. Then again, maybe they weren't political issues? Maybe, just maybe, they didn't have time to actually come up with something other than stereotypical characters just like they only had enough time to come up with something as obvious as unobtainium. I've heard of MacGuffin's before, but having a pointy haired boss use a geeky engineer term is just ridiculous.

I recognized many similarities between Native American Indian lore and the Na'vi beliefs and the way the Na'vi interacted with the surroundings. I had to laugh at Jake and Neytiri's first conversation where she pointed out how loud he was. I regularly get complaints from co-workers about sneaking up on them, and yet I still consider my movement loud.

I did find the natural datalink odd and interesting. Perhaps the Na'vi ancestors reached a technological peak and where able to perfect biolinks (mutating the DNA for future generations) and biocomputers in order to create a data network within the plant life of Pandora. At some point thereafter they reverted to their primitive ways (Star Trek For the World Is Hollow and I Have Touched the Sky)... Or maybe the Na'vi were a science experiment (42?) or not (Star Trek The Paradise Syndrome) and the data network was left as a guide of some sort. Or maybe I'm just getting all Trekkie and over analytical.

So yes, I guess I did enjoy the visually stunning Avatar in spite of being reminded that it was just a movie - over, and over, and over again. Maybe part of the problem is Avatar was just over-hyped and I was expecting something magical (like District 9). At least with Shooter I already knew it was a political movie (and action thriller) and could ignore the political nonsense (and possible complete lack of story).