ME: “THEY SURE USED A lot of tech to spin a yarn about how tech is bad.”

She: “Nice visual imagination, though.”

Me: “Very nice. And the acting and casting are spot on. But it’s a planet full of Magic Negroes. Blue Magic Negroes. And there’s still two hours left.”

She: “Let’s read aloud ‘Lord of the Rings’ instead.”

Me: “Okay.”

(Okay, maybe that’s a bit harsh. But I did find it to be so obvious as to insult my intelligence. (I mean, the Good Guys wearing organic bodies and the Bad Guys wearing robot bodies would be thrown back as too small by other metaphoragers. But mostly I don’t like being preached at, even when I agree with the preachment (and especially the latter if it’s heavy-handed). I did want to like it; some of my friends did, and one who’s reminiscent of Sigourney Weaver’s character, and doing some fairly serious and beautiful work along tangential lines (i.e., avatar as revelatory experient), is “all about it” the way I am about, well, Judaism. But when A&I started saying things like “This must be where the hero doesn’t know that the monster behind him frightened off the monster in front of him,” the spell was, alas, broken.)