I took my mother to see Titanic when it came out. As soon as the first actor spoke, I knew it was a mistake: my mother at the time was in her late 70s, but her mind was – I was going to say the equal of a 20 year old’s – when idling, the equal of the combined mental capacity of fifteen average 20 year olds concentrating hard. She liked her films to contain interesting dialogue, a commodity that had been thoroughly expunged from Titanic.

So my expectations from James Cameron’s latest attempt to turn the graphics backdrop of Far Cry 2 into a film were low. I watched it this evening and was not disappointed; my mother, were she still with us, would not have approved.

Leaving aside the inevitable demonising of the military, large corporations and industry, the lionising of noble savages in ecstatic pantheistic harmony with their computer game vegetation – all of which are irritating enough in their own right – the dialogue was so mind-numbingly trite, it make Titanic look like Proust.

For those who are interested and want to save 3 hours, the story is: nasty men want a rare mineral that is under the noble savages’ village. Nasty men try to kill noble savages to get rare mineral; some enlightened scientists and a crippled soldier help the noble savages drive out the evil humans with bows and arrows and send them back to their own planet which is not green; in fact Gaia earth is dead. Finis.

And it was very long.

Other than that, I enjoyed it from the professional perspective of marvelling at how many hours it took to render so many pixels for so little edification.