Begrudgingly Stuck In Our Head: "I See You" - Leona Lewis

Yes, yes we KNOW this is absolutely dreadful, but a) it's genuinely stuck in our head (the horror!) and b) it gives us an opportunity to talk about that Avatar film, being that we rarely find opportunities to do so on our MUZIK blog.

First of all, despite "I See You"'s horrendously tacky lyrics about the opening of hearts, and worlds you could never imagine, there's some lovely sweeping production on this song. YES, YOU READ CORRECTLY. Those bells at the start are startlingly lovely and we appreciate how the melody doesn't always do what you expect (well it is composed by a proper composer 'n' all) by throwing in the odd sharpened third and that. There's also a spectacular 'melisma' at the key change. Yes we did just do serious music talk, deal with it!

Anyway it's a testament to the song's inherent shitness that despite the lovely production and odd imaginative touches, it's still trite, contrived, soppy, obvious and annoying. Well done, everyone involved.

We suppose this brings us to the film itself. We briefly touched on it in our 'humourous' (terrible) coverage of the new Alphabeat video but let us expand. Avatar is, undoubtedly, one of the most visually stunning films ever made, especially in 3D. We're usually completely indifferent to the plight of the third filmic dimension, but for Avatar it really works. The wondrous (if derivative) world of Pandora is stunningly rendered, every fluttering leaf, glowing flower, iridescent creature looks spectacular and specifically captured this writer's imagination. That, however, is where the compliments end.

There's been a big hoo-ha on the internet about the similarity in plot between Avatar and Pocahontas (something we noticed immediately, remarking - it's just Pocahontas in space!) but there's a crucial difference between those two stories: whilst Pocahontas is based on a true story and has a tragic ending (she dies, 'fyi', and America is conquered), Avatard is entirely fictional and contains a hamfisted almost impossibly positive ending. Whilst on the land of Pandora, the indigenous people who inhabit it can fight evil, 2-dimensional humans and win, in the real word, indigenous people never win. They don't have the reinforced alien bones or spectacular giant pterodactyls to carry them to victory. They are crushed by imperial forces and no one does anything about it.

Whilst we're sure James Cameron's heart is mostly in the right place, and the psuedo-environmentalist message of the film is an admirable one, the way the story unfolds is not only deeply insensitive and patronising to indigenous peoples but it also manages to simultaneously eroticise, exoticise and glamourise their lifestyle. Anyway perhaps the most infuriating thing about the film is that it basically plays out as a quasi-liberal white-guilt fantasy. By making this film, James Cameron has quenched his guilt about the slaughter of Native Americans. He has retold the story, saved the natives and wrapped it up with a happy ending bow. First of all, this doesn't change or atone for what really happened, and secondly, if you're going to preach about the preservation of nature and indigenous cultures in your film, then DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT IN REAL LIFE YOU MULTI-BILLIONAIRE IDIOT.

Another niggle is that the native Na'vi people in Avatar seem to be incapable of fighting for themselves (despite their supposed strengths) without the aid of the hunky, white, American, military protagonist. The entire film might have been much more palatable if (AND SPOILERS BE HERE) the tribes had been brought together to fight back by Neytiri who is actually OF the tribe, as opposed to her hunky white outsider boyfriend.

It's impossible to claim that this film works as a parable for the conquest of other countries on Earth, and then refuse to be insulted when hoardes of viewers completely indulge in the fantasy of joining a tribe without actually having to do so. Yes all those people in the audience wish they could live a wonderful care-free tribal life full of flowers and bows 'n' arrows and mystic trees but they're not willing to fight against imperialist conquest and if you were to plonk them down in the rainforest to live this life they fantasise about, they'd start crying for their iPhones within minutes.

Just escapist bullshit, really. And don't get us started on how they stole those pterodactyls and the whole initiation shit from the skybaxes in the Dinotopia books.