OUR VIEW: Avatar spoiled Earth Day

Thursday is Earth Day, the annual red-headed stepchild of holidays. Everyone will still be in work and school, no special events will take place other than maybe a few environmental enthusiasts trying pressure and guilt everyone else into doing some kind of small and probably irrelevant act to make the Earth a better place. The day will go by, and probably a vast majority of people will never know or care it was Earth Day to begin with.
    This Earth Day is different though. This Earth Day, the No. 1 highest-grossing movie of all time will be released on DVD, probably to the excitement of nobody. James Cameron’s “Avatar” somehow shattered the box-office records held by Cameron’s 1997 “Titanic” en route to raking in more than $2.7 billion in box-office revenue.
    While the visual effects in “Avatar” were undeniably impressive, the story was unoriginal, the characters were unrelateable and, to top things off, the primary antagonists of the film were humans. It was a movie about how greedy and insensitive human beings can be, taking place in a futuristic setting on a planet that was not the Earth.
    So why is “Avatar” being hyped as an Earth Day release?
    Standard procedure for music, video games and DVD releases is for stores to begin selling the new release on a Tuesday, not a Thursday. So why is it that a movie, which does not take place on Earth and has Earth’s most prominent species as the film’s antagonists, is being released on Earth Day?
    It simply does not make sense and, if anything, insulting to humanity as a whole. It’s bad enough that “Avatar” holds the record it does and that we’ll probably have to hear about that record until is broken. Maybe if we’re lucky, the next Batman movie can creep up to the top spot, but I doubt anybody is banking on that as a legitimate possibility.
    Plainly stated, we’re all embarrassed that “Avatar” has earned the accolades that it has. We didn’t need “Avatar” rubbed in our faces on Earth Day, but sadly that is what is happening. To that, we say, Shame on you James Cameron for giving a sour taste to what was previously a tasteless holiday.