Yeah so they had a really long preview of the movie during the last "House MD" episode...and yes I was also wondering, the Nick one? why are there blue creatures everywhere? but anyway, it's like his own movie with a super-complicated world, lots of clever details, and some amazing 3D graphics development (at least according to "Wired").... At any rate, it's all very modern.
And then there's the plot.
Which, to sum it up, is nice guilty American stalwart boy saves cute, earth-spirited, but totally primitive society from the conquerors. I was reminded of "The Last Samurai" or, you know, like pretty much every other Hollywood film that's got the "noble savage" (a cringe-worthy term, and seriously how do you not cringe when you see their stage version) against the usually white invading horde. And then the happy ending is always, always brought about by a self-sacrificing white dude.
WTF!
For once I would like to see a movie intelligent enough to portray the "backwards" people as their own saviors, utilizing their superior knowledge of the natural world and idiocy of a conquering civilization trying to just transplant its whole way of life without any modifications onto their soil. As my friend pointed out, though, that's so unpatriotic! So I decided to go through historical examples of conqueror vs. civilization where civilization eventually won out....
India c. 1947, Japan a couple of times, China at least once (can you count the Boxer Rebellion as a win? I don't know), various South America locales (but honestly things have been so fucked-up there since the conquistadors)...and Iraq and Iran in the 1920s against the British.
Oooooooops.
On another note, how cute is it that people still put terms like "tweet" in quotes? We've already stopped doing it with Google. (Although I would like to see Google also used to mean aggressively-apps friendly, which is not to say I don't love those Verizon commercials making fun of AT&T and especially the iPhone.)
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