Avatar

It's not often that Julie and I go see movies on a weekday, but considering that I'm on and off on the night shift presently, we just went for it even though it was out of our norm. Besides, it seems everyone has been talking about Avatar these days. We heard about it a lot in New Zealand (even the grossly overplayed song "Fireflies" seemed strangely appropriate for the movie despite having not seen it yet), our friends have seen it and talked about it, it apparently won a Golden Globe award, it's all over the internet, and even ESPN's Mike and Mike in the Morning talked about it this morning!

But perhaps the biggest evidence that the hype machine was working was that we watched the movie on a Monday night well over a month after the movie came out, and the theater was crowded!

I had originally thought this was going to be some quirky The Lord of the Rings thing with lots of loyal fanatics and over-the-top fantasy amidst lots of scenery. But after seeing the movie with its 3-D effects, I found myself quickly getting over the cynicism of the LOTR nerd stereotypes, the impossible physics (e.g. the waterfalls without drainages coming out of floating islands?), or the 3-D novelty, and ended up taking them for granted amidst the suspension of disbelief.

Maybe it was the plethora of waterfalls gracing the backgrounds of many scenes. I swore I was getting flashbacks of being at Iguazu Falls or being within the tepuis of Venezuela. Or the on-top-of-the-word feeling of being at the edge of a cliff above the clouds like we experienced near the Tianmen Arch in China.

Whatever it was, the message of the movie also didn't get past us. We've been advocates of Nature, but apparently the writers of the movie are, too. We definitely noticed the references to the "War on Terror" in the name of oil (oops, I meant that nameless ruby worth a bunch of money) to keep shareholders happy. We also noticed the natives (hmm, could they be talking about Native Americans?) being forcefully re-located against their will by intruders who don't understand the land. Not sure if most of the people watching the movie got the message or not.

But all in all, we enjoyed the movie. We don't normally give movies recommendations, but if you're a waterfalls and nature fan, we think you'll enjoy this flick like we did.