Smurfs Meet Rambo

The two movies with the most nominations for awards this year are Hurt Locker and Avatar.  You could not find two movies that are more different.

 Avatar is the Smurfs Meet Rambo.  It is science fiction and fantasy and magic rolled up in a battle of good verses evil.  The movie is good and the effects are great and it is definitely worth seeing.  However, it is fantasy.  In the battle of good verses evil the characters are all very one dimensional, except the hero Jake Sully.

  Set in future on an alien moon called Pandora, Avatar tells the timeless story of greed, immaturity, and ignorance and the violence that arises out of them.  But it is all too simple.  The bad people are really bad from head to toe.  They have no redeeming qualities at all.  The good people are perfectly good.  They are in harmony with the earth, the animals, nature, each other and their God.

 It is a nice story and a fun movie but pure fantasy.

Hurt Locker is the exact opposite.  The movie is bloody, violent, reality from start to finish.  The movie is full of explosions and hectic scenes of combat. It is not about the causes and consequences of the Iraq war.  The movie depicts men who risk their lives every day on the streets of Baghdad and in the desert beyond, and who are too stressed out, too busy, too preoccupied with the details of survival to reflect on larger questions about what they are doing there.

The movie left me wondering who was good and who was bad?  What was right and what was wrong?  None of the characters were pure good and none were totally evil.  They were human and real and mixtures of goodness and sinfulness.

I cannot say I really “enjoyed” this movie.  It was hard to watch and even more difficult to digest.  I certainly did not provide the escape from reality I found in Avatar.

It is a not so nice story and an unentertaining movie but pure reality.