I saw Avatar over the weekend. My reaction was similar to most people’s: visually amazing, cheesy dialogue, entertaining, blah blah.

But here’s the thing. The movie was two and a half hours long. Did it need to be? Absolutely not. In fact, I am of the opinion that nothing needs to be longer than two hours.  With the exception of a faithful film adaptation of Hamlet, why would something need to be that long?

People like lists, so here’s a disjointed list supporting this argument:

1. No one wants to sit in a theater for that long. When you make me do that, you make me hate you.

2. Brevity is the soul of wit. If it’s a famous aphorism, it must be true. Also, same thing if it rhymes.

3. I walked out of the first Lord of the Rings movie. Never saw the others. I thought it was over when they got out of that goddamn cave, only to find out next they have to stop off at a forest.  It never fucking ends, it’s like driving through Nebraska. We know you paid for the fucking helicopter, and New Zealand has pretty landscapes, but we get it. These gnomes or whatever are on a journey, they’re walking around, great, but guess what? I’M HUNGRY! I want to get some dinner and I’ve been in this theater for six hours looking at fucking wizards! Fuck you!

4. Apparently there is no one in James Cameron’s inner circle who had the balls to say “Hey J.C., do we really need this thing to be 150 minutes? Can we cut it down? I mean, the visual spectacle of the 3-D wears off after 45 minutes and we’re really just trying to sell toys here.”

5. Seriously, cut it down. What is so important here that the film needs to be that long? “But the scene in which Sigourney Weaver’s character makes the main guy eggs is—” NO. Cut it. Nobody cares. “But we NEED 8 scenes of him flying on the dragon to show that he’s mastered the—” NO! You really don’t. This is me, ringing the doorbell at your colossal majestic palace of self-delusion.

Cameron, this movie cost $500 million. If you had cut out 30 minutes of azure cat-folk riding dinosaurs, you might have saved up to $100 million. With that money, you could have fed an African country. Hell, you could have saved actual indigenous tribes who live in actual rain-forests being destroyed by developers. Come on!

Economize!

P.S. Kids, if you want toys of crazy motherfuckers riding dinosaurs, go on eBay and get yourself some Dino-Riders. You’d think some guy riding on a dinosaur would be enough? Hell no, they pushed it to the limit. Riding on a laser-equipped dinosaur you would have a man in a spiffy purple jumpsuit with the head of a hammerhead shark. You’d think a shark-man would have enough to worry about without training dinosaurs for open combat. But you’d be wrong.