The Red Circle

12-18-09. That date might not mean very much now, but if we fail to act decisively, it will be a date more infamous than 9/11, D-Day and St. Patrick’s Day combined. 12-18-09 is the release date of James Cameron’s sci-fi epic Avatar and unless it is the biggest bomb in box office history, all our worst fears will have finally come to pass. The human race will have finally placed themselves outside the reach of redemption and civilization as we know it will begin its rapid descent into chaos and madness.

The Consumer Confidence Index is an oft-cited economic indicator that uses consumer spending and saving habits to make predictions on growth. In a healthy economy, consumers feel better about their economic futures and are willing to buy more retail goods. If millions of Americans, having been bombarded with images of the movie’s terribly childish character design and garish environments on the film’s titanic advertising campaign, still choose to pay between nine and fifteen dollars to see this obvious affront to taste and decency, each screening will end with a devastated mob of consumers who have lost all confidence in their own decision-making abilities. It’s not like this hasn’t happened before. The Spider-Man film franchise has grossed billions worldwide mostly on smoke & mirrors and Michael Bay’s Transformers series had to bribe fanboys the world over with the gift of the world’s first genetically engineered sex object to get a pass. The reason Avatar is so unique is that it will mark the lowest that the lowest common denominator could possibly drop. Spider-Man, Transformers and the bulk of the major event movies of the last few years have been tied to properties that were major cultural touchstones for many of the most commercially desirable demographics. Avatar, on the other hand, appears to have been born from a collaboration between the brains of director James Cameron and tween school supplies magnate Lisa Frank. Cameron had apparently waited almost twenty years for effects that could faithfully recreate his vision. His vision, as it turns out, was fugly. The film’s all-neon palette and bizarrely cartoonish character design doesn’t look good to anyone, and the plot has been done so many times that even the trailers think it’s too boring to mention. The same basic techniques that made the second Star Wars trilogy such a sterile, lifeless disaster are employed here to much the same effect.

James Cameron, Rupert Murdoch and let’s say Sarah Palin (who by 12-19-09 will have launched her 2012 campaign alongside future suspected pedophile Glenn Beck) will attempt to sway some cinema snobs and members of the media elite into thinking that Cameron and WETA’s technical achievement in digital camera and effects technology makes the complete lack of imagination forgivable. They’ll say that while they may have seen this sort of fare before, Cameron’s vision brought it to life in new and exciting ways. They’ll be lying through their teeth, but once the 12-18 Truth Commission starts trying to tell the public that the critics were all promised cushy jobs with Fox News once the Palin administration named it the “Official News Network of America, Freedom and Jesus” it will be too late. The Tomato-meter will be certified “Fresh” and the damage will have been done. The combination of middle America’s addiction to artificial movie theater butter, the moderately educated’s reliance on unqualified film criticism, and the failure of parents and public school systems to teach children the value of a dollar will lead to one of the highest grossing opening weekends of all time. As each moviegoer leaves the theater though, they will look around and realize that not one of the other moviegoers enjoyed the movie even a little. They will understand for the first time that they were a part of the stupidest crowd ever to be lured to a movie theater: They have just paid to see the worst-looking movie EVER MADE.

Final render on a key scene in James Cameron’s Avatar.

As millions of consumers worldwide begin to understand just how stupid they have become, they will lose faith in their own judgment, making even the simplest buying decision impossible. Mothers will be haunted by visions of the Na’Vi as they navigate the supermarket, suddenly aware that the pictures on microwaveable food really never looked appetizing at all. Owners of Hummers will drive their hideous shitboxes into the ocean like lemmings to their demise. The doubt will snowball out of control and even genuinely well-made products will become suspect, crippling the US economy. Right around here, everything gets a little fuzzy and there are plenty of scenarios for the apocalypse. Most estimates project the end result to fall somewhere between Mad Max and Waterworld (Editor’s Note: Imagine a world where gas is so rare that the remnants are ingested for safe keeping and then pissed into our fuel tanks. That should sum it up pretty well).

So it’s up to all of us to make sure no one sees Avatar. It’s up to us to make sure that our friends, families and co-workers understand that seeing Avatar is as dangerous as staring into the Ark of the Covenant. Unless we’d like to see the very fabric of our society melting away like so much Nazi face-skin, we need to stay home on December 18th. Going to see Avatar is in a real way the equivalent of a vote for the Palin/Beck ticket in that it’s more than just an admission that we as cultural consumers have flatlined, finally finding even the slightest bit of style as indigestible as substance. It’s a complicit endorsement of willful ignorance. This December 18th, take a stand against the tyranny of mass marketing. Show Rupert Murdoch, James Cameron and Sarah Palin that Americans aren’t as stupid as they all seem to think we are.

What do you think of James Cameron’s return to film? Talkbacks are below!

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