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If you are a 14 year old boy who thinks The Lion King script was opaque, Transformers was too sedate and you have plans to major in “Live Action Role Playing” at college, James Cameron’s technological Sominex is the film for you. While there were tussles over the politics of the film (it is, as a fact, virulently anti-corporate, anti-military, anti–Coca-Cola, anti-modern and anti-Bush, Iraq, Afghanistan etc . . .), the script is truly at the level of Disney’s Pocahontas, so it’s difficult to engage in an analysis of the meaning with much gusto. That said, minor examples that for whatever reason made me laugh: the corporate shill’s name is Parker Selfridge and the psychotic “Burn the village and fu** saving it” stand-in for Lt. Calley is Col. Miles Quartich.
I’m guessing the first draft included Bernie Skilling and Col. Ariel Cheney, but legal problems ensued.
Cameron’s script for Titanic was simplistic and laugh-inducing (“Will the lifeboats be seated according to class? I hope they aren’t too crowded”), and that too is a terrible blight of a picture, but at least you knew the damn boat would sink and sink with a bang, so you had that to look forward to. Here, it’s all blue people, interminably hopping from tree to tree, and there is no assured calamity to keep the lids from drooping.