Avatar.

We went to see Avatar last night. We got 'er done.

First, if you are reluctant, like I was, see it at Alamo Drafthouse. It’s painless. I’ve said it a million times but, if you want to watch a big Hollywood movie like Avatar, Alamo is the only place. You can have a beer or two, eat a very good burger, and you never have to worry that some asshole sitting behind you is going to be yapping on his phone so that you want to murder him.

I didn’t see the first one. I was thinking it was in the 90s it seems so long ago, but it was 2009. You don’t need to, to understand the sequel. They kind of catch you up at the beginning, but it’s not necessary. There are a couple unexplained things, but I think they’re just mysteries. (I love Edie Falco, but it’s a weird character. And there’s a kind of gay Richard Dreyfuss character who flies around on a boat and I never really knew who he was, but he’s entertaining.)

For a movie that sometimes feels like it’s flapping its morality in your face for three hours, I found it in the end to be strangely amoral or even immoral. Or maybe just pro-war. It’s set within a war, and the last hour is pretty much non-stop combat, which is portrayed, of course, as not just valorous but thrilling, fun, beautiful. There are huge operatic massacres a-plenty, as well as dozens of beautifully rendered zooms-in at the various exciting ways individual are killed. For all its anti-colonialism messaging, you’d have a hard time arguing that this movie does not glorify war.

I’m being a bit of a smart-ass, but I did enjoy it. It’s often visually astonishing, and the underwater sequences are breathtaking — and they are long, and you are thankful because above water the characters are as insufferable as you can imagine, and the story makes you want to throw things — the family and gender politics are so reactionary in such a tired way you wonder if it’s satire (I’m pretty sure it’s not), and it’s very Second-Amendmenty. It’s disappointing that in a movie so imaginative about the future and about the possibilities of the universe, it couldn’t spend a moment or a dime imagining a world that doesn’t revolve around a man killing people to “protect his family.” There are a couple of characters obviously meant to be the “strong women characters” and they are strong, but they never threaten the nuclear family structure or the strong man at its apex.

But if guns and battles aren’t your thing, there’s lots of nudity, which is unsettling. It’s alien nudity mostly, and it’s blue, but it’s clearly ass. There is lots of ass in this movie. And there’s a shipwreck, there are several shipwrecks. Lots of ships sinking, sliding into the sea. But one big spectacular one, so if you liked Titanic, go. I’m not being snarky, he does a good shipwreck.

Seriously, how did I not know it was a war movie? Was the first one a war movie? I feel like the first one got criticized a lot for being lefty environmentalism. I can’t speak for the first one, but this one was like John Wayne on a horse.