Avatar

The last time James Cameron sunk $200 million into a movie, he was warned by the LA Times: “What really brings on the tears is [his] insistence that writing this kind of movie is within his abilities. Not only is it not, it is not even close.”

A decade later, after waiting patiently for technology to become more expensive, Cameron devised a plan that was $37 million better. It came with a warning of his own: if Avatar does well enough, he will use his next lunch break to write nine more sequels.

For one, Cameron’s prolific output will ease the pain of moviegoers who went into depression upon leaving theaters. I’m not making this up. Psychiatrists have been dealing with a stream of patients complaining that life has lost meaning to them since they saw the wonders of digital animation.

A fan on Naviblue.com writes: “I even contemplate suicide thinking that if I do it, I will be rebirthed in a world similar to Pandora and everything is the same as in ‘Avatar.’” You will not be missed.

The fundamental flaw of “Avatar” can be described with one of its own metaphors. In a hastily slapped-together montage sequence, one of the scientists explains the indigenous Na’vi greeting “I see you” as “much more than that. It’s like, ‘I see into you and understand you…’”

By equating seeing with understanding, you lower yourself to Cameron’s superficial worldview, in which every viewer is inherently a moron. For example, every creature on Pandora has a tentacle, which they use to touch other creatures’ tentacles and thereby establish a special psychic bond ­— like they’re making a connection. Do you see?

“Avatar” has been accused of copy-pasting swaths of “Dances with Wolves,” “Pocahontas,” “FernGully” and countless other works that would never dream of being plagiarized. If you’re wondering where the images of aliens came from, don’t be fooled by Cameron’s fib that he was inspired by manifestations of Hindu deities.

Watch Mel Gibson’s “Apocalypto” (2006). It’s like Mel went forward three years in time, watched “Avatar” and decided to invent a rainforest-dwelling civilization, where everyone wears dreads, thongs and blue paint on special occasions.

Or — “Quick, blow some s--- up before they notice!”

While the technical innovations employed in the film are impressive, they lack purpose because the script was not designed to accommodate them. Shot-by-shot, nothing distinguishes “Avatar” from another action movie because that’s exactly what it is. Cameron did not challenge himself with the technology by responding to its intrinsic demands, to the necessity of making the viewer’s skin crawl with every new scene because it is so mind-blowingly lifelike. There is no grand finale where the director says,

“You think you’ve seen 3-D? No, my friend, watch this!” Instead, he banks on the narrative. Big mistake.

The Guardian writes:

“Cameron has constructed a fable that combines militarist sci-fi, alarmingly vacuous eco-waffle and an intra-species love story that is presumably designed to cover all the bases” — another sign that art for its own sake is last on his agenda. The fantastical potential of Pandora is tethered at every step to the sociopolitical bases “Avatar” tries to cover, making it impossible to let one’s mind wander because the illusion is shattered every minute by the film’s rabid craving for topicality.

And for those of you still willing to cut the film slack for his insights into colonialism, dig this gem of authorial commentary: “The Na’vi represent something that is our higher selves, or our aspirational selves, what we would like to think we are,” while the humans “represent what we know to be the parts of ourselves that are trashing our world and maybe condemning ourselves to a grim future.”

Perhaps in his next film Cameron will share his thoughts on what different races on Earth represent, and how he would like to see them duke it out.

You may be a lover, James, but you ain’t no dancer.