Alien Elephants

Beware Spoilers galore!!

Water for Elephants

As always I left purchasing a gift for my sister's last birthday till the very last minute. At the bookstore I quickly skimmed through Water of Elephants and decided what the hell...grabbed it and sent it. Luckily she loved it, in fact shes read it twice and insists it's her favorite book. This Christmas she brought it back, and forced me to read it in the time she was here. Sadly I don't share her passion for it. In fact, I didn't really care for it much.

The book speeds through the story, and it's not that I became lost, but I found it difficult to digest, like eating too fast. But I mean that's the story style. It's problematic, I think mostly in the characters. I never really got a sense of who anyone was, they were just talking names to me. The main character I found to be too immature for a 23 year old Veterinarian. Yes he's a virgin whatever, but he either just plain annoyed me, or really didn't say or do anything. As far as the other characters are concerned I didn't really care about any of them. I found all the women to be horrendously stereotypical, and many of the instances with them. The plot would have been boring had it not been injected with the circus. But frankly it was still unbelievable, even when Gruen used old terms, and showed off her research into this creepy world. The animals all seemed ridiculously too tame, and from what I could tell too subdued to be real. Yes you can beat that into an animal, but some turn more vicious and from what I can every animal in the book was pacified. Anyway as you can see I can really rip into the parts of the story that bugged me, which is what I do when I don't really like something all that much.

Avatar

Yes yes yes...this movie is brilliant, but is it good? I have to say I agree mostly with the Rotten Tomatoes average 85% for this movie. I saw in 3D, and clearly it's stunning. Although it took me 30 minutes to adjust to watching 3D. And it is a very long movie, although I'm not sure how they could make it shorter. Maybe if I didn't feel like some scenes were inserted to say "hey look what we can do" I wouldn't have found myself tapping my fingers once or twice.

After the movie, an eerily familiar feeling swept over me. I swear 90% of the planet was stolen from the 60-70 levels in WoW from Zangarmashes mushroom neon sparkly swamp forest, to Nagrand's floating chunks of land with waterfalls and sky scape, to the animals themselves, heck the aliens looked like the love children of night elves and draenei. I felt like I'd just participated in a 6 hours World of Warcraft raid. Sitting there so focused on the screen, I'd stiffened up, my brains were mush and I generally felt exhausted. Except in WoW raids I focused on not killing myself or others, and in during Avatar I tried desperately hard not to get nauseous all over again.

As far as the story is concerned. It's Fern Gully, meets Dances With Wolves, meets Pocahontas. Way to fall back on a like-able and easy to follow plot. I also had difficulty with the enormous plot holes and lack of character development. Like: Why Avatars in the first place? We all know that missionaries don't need to dress up to go into the jungles of the Amazon and convert everyone to Christians. That one I supposed I could let go of, since yes being in an Alien's body is easier then a humans in that environment. But since when is there alien life on Pandora, a moon we can clearly see today? Which brings me to planet Earth, Why do we need the metal so badly? Who are the people in charge of this company? Who the fuck is Jake Sully, and why do we care? He had no qualms, no conflicts, his choice was entirely too simple. 'Duh! save the aliens!', why is this driving the plot line? Maybe I missed all these answers during my time figuring out to adjust. I'd like to say that if Zoe Saldana hadn't played the lead alien the movie would have sucked. She was stunning and they need to invent an award for best actress who plays something 3D.

Okay anyway, yes it's worth it to see for a grade B generic plot you're sure to like because you already did in the past. But it is 100% stunning, it's beautiful, the aliens are pretty and hot. Although I'm terrified for movies in the future. I happen to still be impressed with normal action movies at the moment, well most of them, I don't need to have things pop out at me, well not until they can figure out someway to subdue the barfing sensations and migraines that occur.