Avatar 3D

Whoa.

Just saw it. Super-cool. I can see why Jimmy was on my case to see it.

There is, as you can tell from the previews, an extremely heavy-handed liberal/anti-colonialist message...but apparently not heavy-handed enough for Cameron, because he then has his protagonists add references to "some kind of shock and awe campaign" against the indigenous Na'vi, and has his bad guy/American/military villains talk about "fighting terror with terror." But, heavy-handed though it is, it's hard not to like the story, and technically the thing is just amazing.

The attempt to represent the thoroughly evil campaign against the Na'vi as similar to the Iraq war is annoying and irresponsible. Radically misguided though that war was, and criminal though the Bush administration's actions were in the lead-up to it, it does not seem to have been a colonial war, and it was certainly not a genocidal one. To throw in that kind of BS is not only ridiculous, but I suspect it also plays into the hands of defenders of the decision to go into Iraq, since these quasi-accusations against that war are so outlandish and easily dismissed.

But all that notwithstanding, the movie is really pretty awesome.