An Avatar Too Far

If this is the level of journalism The Times can summon-up then we are truly up the Indy without a paddle.

I have read some utter shite in newspapers before now but nothing compares to this…

Global warming, don’t even try it, they’re ice-skating in Delhi and sledging in Seoul. That kind of sums up the argument doesn’t it? One of the heaviest snowfalls of the winter was landing on Britain as Ed Miliband stood up to defend the Copenhagen summit in Parliament and explain why it was the political event of the Noughties.

Sledging in Seoul - quite possibly. Korea gets cold in the winter. But don’t let East Asian Geography get in the way of a hack’s shiticism.

Yet the £130 million spent on this environmental junket for 115 world leaders appears to have come to nothing. They just expended an extra 41,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide, more greenhouse gas than produced by Malawi, Afghanistan and Sierra Leone over the same period.

No one seems to care. Who gave their wife a wind turbine for Christmas? How many people bothered to sort the paper crackers from the cranberry sauce? Perhaps it’s not just the Chinese who aren’t trying any more.

No, we don’t care because it’s best bollocks. This is the most severe winter I recall since ‘79 and they are lecturing me on global-fucking-warming. It’s colder than Captain Oates’ scrotum round here. The trains are buggered, airports are shut and folks are hiring those evil 4×4s for the duration.

When the political parties began their election campaigns this week Gordon Brown somehow failed to mention his compost; David Cameron didn’t pose for that poster with homegrown marrows in his vegetable garden. Green is no longer minty cool, it’s sludge-brown boring. According to a Populus poll in The Times in November, less than half of Britons believe it is an established scientific fact that global warming is largely man-made.

I can live without Brown’s compost or iDave’s vegetables (aka the shadow cabinet). Green was never cool. Flying Sabres over the Yalu right to the stall and shooting down MiGs is cool, getting a number one album is cool. Lots of things are cool. Sorting trash has never been and shall never be “cool” unless you are one of those deeply earnest twats who are by definition not cool.

They refuse to feel guilty any more. Going green is just another luxury that we have learnt to do without in the recession Yet the planet may be saved — not by human beings but by 10ft Picassoesque aliens in turquoise Speedo bodysuits with tails.

Yes we don’t feel guilty. I don’t feel guilty about having central heating, hot water, a car (that is currently snowed in), electric light, computers, a convection heater (that is currently preventing my nadgers freezing-off in this shed) or anything. I don’t feel guilty that I buy food that is sometimes air-freighted and that I tend to holiday abroad. I feel proud that our species has achieved all of that. And I want more.

And quite frankly is that final clause about big fellas with tails taking zee piss?

These creatures, who inhabit the distant moon Pandora, live in branches and worship Mother Earth. They drink water that is pooled in giant leaves, chant around trees that whisper of their ancestors and use pterodactyls for transport (although they do still eat meat, apologetically). They are the stars of Avatar, the film that has become the fourth-biggest blockbuster of all time in less than three weeks.

Oh, for fuck’s sake! Now, I wish I had a pterodactyl. But this being reality I have to make do with a Vauxhall Corsa. And worship Mother Earth and chant at trees! Sounds like the heir to the throne. I’ve met such people and they are all complete and utter twats.

The Na’vi may be armed only with bows and arrows, they may live 150 years in the future, but their message to humans is clear. You have no vegetation left on 22nd-century Earth. You have messed up your planet and wasted your resources, now don’t come and destroy ours.

They are also fictional animated beings. This is veering from the twattish into the realm of the positively supernatural. If this carries on I’m going to have to lay pixie-snares in the garden. Play havoc with the flowere beds do the pixies.

When humans are sent to exploit their mineral wealth (called Unobtainium, of course) with a campaign of shock and awe bombings, they fall in love with the Na’vis low-emission lives and the hero chooses to become an alien and reject selfish humanity.

For the sake of the living fuck!

The script could have been written by Al Gore. This is An Inconvenient Truth for children, but instead of a middle-aged former Vice-President lecturing you about destroying the planet, it’s extraterrestrials who are better dressed than ET with their covetable jewellery.

The script could have been written by Al Gore. Just savour that for a moment whilst I take the safety off my Glock-17. Actually it’s true. Mr Gore has frequently indulged in writing fantasy that makes the works of Tolkein look as mundane as a check-out queue in TESCO.

How come you know so much about it, you’re thinking. It sounds ludicrous. Having seen the film twice in three days with my nine-year-old, I admit that I don’t need to see it again, but he and his friends do — and not just for the £237 million 3-D effects, the battles, the Bambi-like scenery of Pandora or the popcorn. My son believes in these creatures’ message and has started lecturing me on my environmental commitment. Why do we need to cut down a tree for Christmas? Does he really need all that packaging round his new iTouch (he does, however, still need the iTouch).

Last things first. an iTouch sounds like something you only buy a nine-year old if you are disgustingly middle-class. Anyway, if nine-year old kids are “lecturing” on environmental science off the back of a fucking cartoon then… Well someone needs beating to death with a hockey stick. I mean…

For fuck’s sake. Is that what the Greens are reduced to after climategate showed their models are about as much use as Tango classes for Stephen Hawking . Cartoons and kids? I’m going to base a religion on Tom and fucking Jerry. Why not? Every other deranged cunt is making a sodding mint doing it.

The film is brilliant PR — smug and simplistic but effective and energising. James Cameron, who won an Oscar for sinking the Titanic, now wants to save the world and may just succeed in converting the next generation. Avatar has made $1 billion from ticket sales around the world in the shortest time yet and could overtake Titanic, which took $1.8 billion.

Note the use of the word “convert”. Is this parody? I no longer know.

The director sounds a bit ridiculous when he says: “We’re going to find out the hard way if we don’t wise up and start seeking a life that’s in balance with the natural cycles of life on Earth,” Disney put it more succinctly in The Lion King with “The Circle of Life,” but Cameron is clearly a believer who is not in it just for the box-office receipts. He spent 15 years perfecting the film.

Unlike Mr Cameron I’m a scientist by training and within the context of science I despise the word “belief”. I do not for example “believe” the speed of light is a universal constant because it was revealed to me in a kiddie movie (or a song written by Elton John). I think it likely is because I can derive it from Maxwell’s Equations. Moreover, seeing as Cameron is one of Hollywood’s top directors are you going to bet that he has a lower “carbon-footprint” than this humble blogger? You wouldn’t stick a fiver on it would you?

It may not be every 40-year-old’s first choice, but anyone with children — which includes most politicians — is likely to see it. President Obama chose Avatar for his family’s new year outing. The Shadow Cabinet has fallen for it: “A story about blue people who save the world created by a man called Cameron — of course we’re seen it,” said one, who went with his son. The Miliband brothers are said to be fans.

If you are forty and like kiddie films you’re either a peado or a nut-job. Quite frankly if the shadow cabinet and the Milipedes and that Commie in the White House like it then I know I won’t. What happened to movies where Bruce Willis wore a dirty vest and blew shit up?

The political elite is beginning to get the message — audiences do care about the planet, they just don’t want to be lectured about it by hypocritical politicians. They want help to do their bit, not hectoring.

Or possibly hectored at by fictional aliens in Speedo bodysuits either. They can fuck off as well.

I mean how the bastarding fuckulence can that cunt Cameron spend the best part of a quarter of a billion making a movie to lecture us on over-using resources. Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity might have demonstrated that spacetime is curved but it took this utterly profound collection of epic wank-shafts of Hollywood to prove everything else is just bent.

Avatar isn’t Star Wars, Apocalypse Now or even The Lord of the Rings: it’s not a classic. But few films manage to change perceptions. The Sound of Music rehabilitated the Austrians, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner ridiculed racism, Philadelphia maybe changed our views about Aids, Kramer vs Kramer tackled divorce. Dr Strangelove made the best case for unilateral nuclear disarmament. Avatar — rather than Ed Miliband talking about Copenhagen — could do the same for global warming. If you can get through the snow to see it.

What an odd paragraph. Has the writer actually seen any of the movies mentioned?

So, this is what it comes down to. Ultimately the case for AGW is being best made by a movie director most famous for getting Kate Winslet’s tits on screen (good) and for drowning Leonardo DiCaprio (even better). The inhumman arseholes aren’t even playing the science game anymore. They lost that one so now rather than trying to convince the likes of me or you they are nakedly propagandising to children. Science education should be about giving children the intellectual tool-kit to find out for themselves. One of my heroes, Feynman, once stated that if you can’t explain it to a freshman student you don’t really understand it. There is a sort corollary to that. If you can’t convince the likes of me and resort to the medium of fairy-tales to indoctrinate the kiddies then you have lost the intellectual argument.

The next couple of years will see an epic battle. It will be the battle between reason and unreason. It will be a battle for everything. I just hope we win because here day fights with night.