The Flicks Blog

There’s no easy way to say it so I’m just gonna come right out with it. Avatar sucked. It sucked bad. It sucked more than a sucky sucker stuck on suck sucking up a puddle of suck spilt from a sucky glass that’s spilled all over the sucky floor of a sucky house that’s been built in the suburb of Suckton in the city of Suckland on the distant moon planet Suck.

So no, I didn’t like it.

And I should have liked it. It should have been great. It was seemingly tailor-made for my not-at-all-unique fanboy tastes; Aliens? Check. Explosions? Check. Robots? Yeah kinda… but definitely close enough to roll with a check.

So there’s the top three prerequisites covered. As a bonus it even had James Cameron in charge, not just spending insane amounts of cash on bringing the world of Pandora to life but also breaking the dimensional barrier in a way he promised would not be eye-gougingly terrible.

So with a gajillion dollars to spend, the processing power of 1500,000,000 super computers churning away at generating believable 3D pixels and the vision of the man who gave us the totally badass T2 running the show this should have been great. But it didn’t happen.

So instead of rehashing the old Avatar arguments about the incredibly poor character design, the terrible CGI that looked like CGI, stupid blue alien cats, the whole 3D thing that was nothing more than a gimmick and did nothing to make the film any more immediate or immersive, the bad actor acting, the fact that all the hullabaloo in the film was over something called ‘Unobtainium’, the film’s foul stench of its hippie message, the fact that there was a location called ‘The Life Tree’ in the film, it’s overly simplistic and frankly ridiculous dipiction of evil whitey and the noble savage and, worst of all, the horribly drawn out dumb-ass plot that was filled with more clichés than a cliché filler set to turbo cliché fill, let’s instead look at what I didn’t like about Avatar:

Everything.

Avatar should have been great. It should have revolutionised cinema. It should have told a compelling and interesting story. It should have kicked ass. But it did none of these things.

Unless of course you count the across the board rising of movie ticket prices and the invention of post-production 3D that’s being carelessly shoved onto as many upcoming films as possible as some kind of cinema revolution.

Tim Burton clearly does. He applied this gawd-awful fail of a technique to his recent reimagination of Alice in Wonderland with breathtakingly stunning ungreat results. But, nevertheless, I can still honestly say that the film filled me with wonder.

Wonder at how great it wasn’t. Wonder at how Tim Burton’s reimagination can be so consistently bad. Wonder at how come Tim Burton doesn’t use his actual imagination anymore. Wonder at why they bothered with the 3D at all when the effect gave the film nothing more than a flat, lifeless pop-up book gone wrong look.

Wonder at why people still like Tim Burton films when he hasn’t made a good one since Beetle Juice (I’ll give you Mars Attacks! at a push but it certainly doesn’t stand up to rewatchings). And wonder at why Tim Burton is even allowed to keep directing movies at this point when he has clearly demonstrated time and time again that he is not very good at it. At all.

What Tim Burton is good at is art direction. Dude can draw a creepy cartoon, no doubt. So let him weird out the look of mainstream films in his creepily wholesome, PG-rated way while someone else – preferably someone with competence – directs the action. Just don’t let him loose behind the camera anymore.  And someone, anyone, for the love of Jebus, please, please, please hunt him down and make him stop reimagining. I can’t take much more.

Tim Burton’s kooky vision matched with a competent director and decent screenwriter could have made Alice in Wonderland a great film. The movie happened, but I really would have preferred it not too.

I also really would have preferred Transformers not to have happened. I’ve detailed why before, and you can read why here. But the films did happen and they continue to happen with cinematic results that are so far from great they need a GPS system just to locate the vicinity where greatness hangs out.

Sigh. I suppose I need to mention them… The Star Wars prequels. They should have been great. They happened. Let’s just say they were not great and leave it at that.

And what the smurfing smurf happened between the release of The Smurfs teaser poster and the trailer that dropped a few weeks ago? Smurf me it’s smurfing smurf.

The smurf in the poster looked cool, cartoony and like one of those small old-school smurf toys had come to life. The smurfs in the trailer look fake, unconvincing, and detached from their environment in the worst possible CGI way imaginable. It’s smurfing smurf smurfingly smurfy smurf smurf and I don’t like it.

And I know I’m not alone on this. Outrage and disbelief has been pouring thick and fast in the comments on the Flicks Smurf movie page, with only 14% of the esteemed Flicks community having said they want to see it.

It seems we all hoped the movie would be great, we were all excited for it to happen but instead of being great it looks like it’s going to happen to be awful.

It’s said that some are born great while others have greatness thrust upon them. In the movie world this translates roughly as “Some films are great while other films just plain suck monkeyballs”.