Dance With This!

Been waiting for the first reviews of Avatar and they're finally coming out. James Cameron, who once was (and still may be) the best action director around, has waited a ridiculous 12 years since putting out his last film, the biggest hit ever, Titanic.

Anyway, Avatar just premiered in London and early word is good. As for the plot:

Cameron said the movie, which is set in the future on an alien planet being pillaged by humans for natural resources, deals with how indigenous people are treated by newcomers.

"It's a way of connecting a thread through history. I take that thread further back to the 16th and 17th centuries and to how the Europeans pretty much took over South and Central America and displaced and marginalized the indigenous peoples there," he said.

"There's just this long, wonderful history of the human race written in blood going back as far as we can remember, where we have this tendency to just take what we want without asking," he said.

In other words, as in Titanic, Cameron just wants to hit a bunch of cliches. (By the way, I'm pretty sure a lot of the indigenous peoples displaced by the Europeans had themselves displaced former indigenous peoples. There's an old saying: aborigines are the first ones to successfully wipe out any trace of the people they killed.)

But we can always ignore the message. The question is does Cameron deliver. I have no doubt the film will have state of the art effects. What counts is are they used in service of an exciting story.

To be continued.