Margarita Movies

Most of the time, the Margarita Movie team stands alone. We walk a lonely path. I mean, there are three of us. But we three are out there with no support, seeing these shitty movies for the good of… well, nobody. When the big blockbuster films roll around, we tend to get some guest stars turning up. For Avatar, we had guest stars Andy, Lou and Sam, with no ladies, which makes this the most bro’d out Margarita Movie in history.

The plot of Avatar is… there’s this paradise jungle planet with an indigenous race of tribal humanoids, and the FUCKING white man is up to his old tricks again, and trying to take some shit from them with SCANT concern for the tribal wisdom of these noble warrior people who live off the land, or the sanctity of their beautiful forest habitat or whatever.

I find all this pretty tiresome. I can’t stand when simple tribal wisdom or ancient rituals are held up as being innately more clever and valid than nasty industrial modern science. I’m sure your fucking… space-rhino horns… or whatever, are pretty fucking good medicine, but you know what the civilised world has? iPhones! Can you play video games on your fucking bow and arrow? Hey, what kind of 3G coverage do you get on that big bone sticking out of your nose? Here in my adopted homeland of California, it seems that the natives will basically believe any old shit about crystals or ancient Chinese wisdom or the innate healing process of chanting things, and I don’t really think much of any of that kind of thing because I believe it flies in the face of really quite noble and valuable principles like the scientific process and controlled, double-blind studies.

This kind of story has been done to fucking death. It seems like James Cameron didn’t really do much research to see whether he was walking well-trod ground, because I have played a million videogames and seen a million anime films about this topic. Princess Mononoke and Nausicaa spring immediately to mind, they’re pretty good examples of the genre. Nobody could get James Cameron a couple of Ghibli DVDs for his birthday?

The main character in this film is a guy in a wheelchair who, with the assistance of Science, can become one of the native tribal aliens. His mission is to infiltrate these aliens and DEFINITELY not to start fucking one of them and lead a revolt against humanity. I guess they didn’t make his mission briefing clear enough because it is on with this blue girl before he even learns to walk in his new alien body. They promise this guy that they’ll fix his legs for him when he completes this mission - apparently the US healthcare system is still totally fucked in 2154AD. His mission is to inhabit this alien body and infiltrate the native tribespeople. His human body has a sick tribal tattoo. This is ironic for obvious reasons.

Sigourney Weaver leads the science team. What the fuck kind of name is ‘Sigourney’ anyway? I have never met any girl named Sigourney. Anyway, she also has an alien body she can knock about in as she sees fit. The alien bodies are three metres tall and super tough and agile, so I don’t know why people wouldn’t just inhabit them all the time. I guess they don’t seem to have genitals, except this little cluster of glowing tendrils coming out of the end of their ponytail.

Another super-tough monstrous figure rocks up at this point, and you think it’s another of the native tribespeople until you realise it’s actually Michelle Rodriguez, who is a more terrifying sight than any of the monsters on Planet Treetopia. She always has a face on her like a bulldog licking piss off a nettle. She also heavily puts me in mind of Vasquez from Aliens.

The plot is so generic I hardly need to outline it. Giovanni Ribisi as Paul Reiser as Carter Burke in Aliens twirls his arch-capitalist moustache and decides to destroy the habitat of the native tribespeople to get whatever shit it was they had that he wanted. Wheelchair Guy leads the blue people to victory. You can extrapolate the entire film’s plot from the first ten minutes. Shit, you can extrapolate it from the fucking poster.

The shit they want, by the way, is called Unobtainium. Listen James Cameron. I know plot is not your focus in this film. I know you don’t want to get bogged down in the details. But seriously, put some fucking effort in. Unobtainium is your basic bog-standard anti-gravity mineral as seen in a million comics and 70s sci-fi stories. The biggest deposit on the planet is, would you believe it, right under the Sacred Magic Tree where the blue people live. Apparently where it is NOT, is where all the floating islands in the sky are.

There’s a stock Complete The Mission At All Costs military guy functioning as the villain of the piece, straight blowing up trees all over the place. He might as well have ‘cunt’ written on his forehead, he’s so wilfully villainous. At one point he says ‘shock and awe’. Hey - let me blow your mind, but I think this whole thing might also be some kind of allegory for Iraq. That’s AS WELL as being a thoughtful treatise on the evils of industrialisation and deforestation. Eat shit, The Wire!

The plot is so thin you couldn’t even spread it on your toast, but to be fair the effects are fucking amazing. Blue people are jumping through the forest, riding pterodactyls, firing arrows at things, and communing with the spirits of the jungle all over the fucking place. Humans have spaceships and robot suits to trample the beauty of the jungle with, which they do every chance they get. The entire film is like the Ewok battle in Return of the Jedi in the style of BBC Planet Earth.

What’s notable is that every single blue alien tribesperson in the film is voiced by someone who is black, native American or hispanic. There is only one way to interpret this: everyone who isn’t white is a backwards hick who lives in the forest and wears a loincloth. This is some racist bullshit. It is also mildly racist that these primitive natives are basically fucked without a white American to help them, fuck their women, and take over their tribe.

Anyway, by the end of the film, the blue people have beat the shit out of the humans and their shitty robots and spaceships, and Wheelchair Guy has been permanently transferred into his blue body because - wouldn’t you know it - the blue people have a process that they can perform with a bunch of trees and chanting that replicates the human avatar process. It really is remarkably convenient. It doesn’t explain why the humans just fuck off with their tails between their legs. I’m no historical scholar by any means, but I believe that in human history, when a primitive native people achieves a minor military victory over a more technologically advanced invader, that invader comes back with the big guns and shoots them, then enslaves them, then steals their native musical styles. There should be a bit after the credits where an orbital dropship just nukes the entire hemisphere.

Here is how the award-winning SCALE Scale breaks down.

Story: 2. So fucking… generic. I would give this story a higher score if I was playing it in a videogame or watching it on a badly dubbed anime VHS from 1982, but I expect better when half a billion dollars is spent on a film. I can think of so many ways to make the film better. Chief amongst them - hey, how about instead of blue tribespeople, you use the fucking xenomorph from Aliens? Let’s see how the creakingly heavy-handed anti-industrialisation subtext plays out when the natives are exploding out of peoples’ chests and shooting acid everywhere.

Comedy: 0. I actually have to hand out a zero. There was no comic relief, and nothing really funny happened at all in the film.

Awesomeness: 10. The effects in this film are preposterously awesome. Every five seconds someone is swooping through a ravine or running away from an alien monster or flying a sexy future helicopter around or marvelling at the beauty of some glowing plants or something. Colonel Bastard jumping out of an exploding spaceship in a giant robot suit gets 10 on its own.

Ladies: The blue alien girl probably carries this thing to about a 5 on her own, but I need to be assured that she has functional genitals. Nobody is touching my Space Boner with their prehensile glowing ponytail tendrils. Also, Michelle Rodriguez scares my erection away. 4!

Et Cetera: The Margarita Movie team is split on this film like you would not believe. Dan and I have been arguing about Avatar ever since we saw it. I think it’s racist and dumb and he thinks it’s awesome and that makes it all fine. It’s basically your common-or-garden religious schism. Usually when we disagree about films we can find common ground but this issue is threatening to wreck our friendship. Han also is on the side of Awesome but he is less vehement and prone to fury than Dan. As such I must split the score for an even 6.66.

-Nick