Avatar Has No “Hasta la Vista, Baby”

A few weeks back, my friends took me to go see the movie Avatar. I’d never seen it. It’s a movie that I had intended to see, I guess, but it got away from me and then it left theaters and I never got around to it. And one of the things I noticed is that it really didn’t have a cultural footprint.

All I really remembered about it was the trailer:

Avatar.

Seriously, they give away the whole movie in trailers.

Anyway, they asked me if I wanted to go and, you know what? I was feeling antsy in the pantsy but I had my bivalent booster in my arm and I had a day off scheduled and YES. I WILL GO TO THE MOVIE THEATER.

So I went to see it and, as we were walking out to the car, I had a handful of thoughts that I rattled off. My friends asked “Well… did you like it?”

Well, before I can answer whether I liked it, I’ll have to explain the experience of seeing it.

James Cameron is the guy who directed Aliens, Terminator and Terminator 2, True Lies, and Titanic. (I don’t know about you, but I had him pigeonholed as a sci-fi/action guy until Titanic came out and then he blew up everything by making the first film to cross the billion dollar mark.)

“Okay, guys. I want to make *MY* movie now. And if it bombs, you won’t have to pay me.”

So he told the movie that he always wanted to tell and he had precious few people that were able to tell him “no” as he was making it.

And he made a movie that had absolutely zero cultural footprint. Can you name anything that you remember from the movie Avatar? “The blue cats”, I guess. Anything else? I mean, I saw it a handful of days ago and I can’t remember anything about it.

Like, believe it or not, Maribou has never seen Pulp Fiction. But if you asked her to rattle off a bunch of lines from the film, she’d be able to do so. Me? I’ve never seen Mean Girls or Clueless. I sure as heck could rattle off some of the lines of those films for you. Heck, look at the movies made by James Cameron listed above: Aliens, the Terminators, True Lies, and Titanic? You could probably give lines from each of those right now.

“Nuke it from orbit. It’s the only way to be sure.”
“I’ll be back.”
“Hasta la vista, baby.”
“They were all bad.”
“I’ll never let go.”

See? That’s all from memory and I’m sure that you can rattle off another half dozen for most of them.

Avatar, however, doesn’t have any of that. Like, I’m trying to remember a single piece of dialog and I can’t remember anything. I saw it less than a month ago!

This is a movie that does not have a single “Hasta la vista, baby.”

We’re talking about James Cameron, here. This is a guy who knows how to insert a line like that into a film. The fact that there isn’t something like that in this film, the one that he was given close to free reign to make, strikes me as a deliberate choice on his part. Me saying “there isn’t particularly memorable dialog” isn’t me criticizing the film. It’s me saying “what was Cameron going for that he deliberately withheld particularly memorable dialog?”

Well, if you can’t remember the words… what was the rest of the movie like? I’ve got to say that the visuals struck me as exceptionally interesting. The digital part of the movie was absolutely gorgeous. The Na’vi (the blue people) had a ton of research behind them where scienticians carefully crafted aliens who were: cute, sexy, and, at the same time, communicated that they were capable of great violence. So, of course, they went with “let’s make them look like cats, kinda”. Because, let’s face it, cats are cute, sexy (if you’re into that), and quite regularly communicate that they are capable of great violence. Between barfing on the rug and begging for treats.

The rest of the world had visually stunning florae and faunae and megaflorae and megafaunae. When you were out in the world of Pandora, every frame had something beautiful in it. You were constantly looking at these gorgeous visuals. It was hard to believe that they were completely computer-generated. It was *EASY* to suspend disbelief.

Well, what about the story? I’m sure you’ll remember the line “Dances with Smurfs”. That’s pretty much what it was. You’ve got an outsider guy who joins up with a native tribe that speaks its own language and Pidgin English, they teach the outsider their ways, and he goes native. He’s better at making war than they are. After several montages that show him learning how to be a blue cat person, he leads a battle against his former comrades and delivers a crushing defeat to the much more technologically advanced bad guys.

They did a great job of making the good guys bright and colorful and the bad guys were all dull metal.

So, when they asked “did you like it?”, I mean… it’s almost beside the point. It was carefully calibrated in a lab to make me like it. They spent millions on making the movie as likable as possible.

But it was, effectively, a theme park ride. That was a fun ride and I really liked it.

What Avatar was *NOT*, however, was particularly memorable. Which seems odd for one of the movies to have held the “highest grossing movie *EVER*” record for a while.

I have to assume that it was deliberate on the part of the creator… but it also strikes me as a bit of a mistake. Given the lack of cultural footprint, I wonder if Cameron also thinks that it’s a bit of a mistake.

As such, I will keep my ears open for whether the upcoming sequel will have an “Hasta la vista, baby.”