Instead, Aurora should have been the protagonist ... and in fact, it's incredibly weird that she's not. From her perspective, she wakes up 90 years early with some guy she's never met before. Sure, the guy she's with is Chris Pratt, and that sounds delightful, but the scene in which she meets Pratt for the first time would take on a far more sinister tone if the audience only know what she knows.

Now the whole thing is unfolding as a mystery. Can we trust this guy? Is he telling the truth? Now you've set up the audience for a gut punch of a revelation halfway through the film: He alone woke up by accident, and rather than ride it out, he essentially abducted her. He ripped her out of the life she was set to live to instead spend the rest of her years trapped on a spaceship, with him and only him.

At that point, if you want the movie to be about her slowly learning to forgive him, fine, maybe that version sells more tickets. But it still makes far more sense for her to be the protagonist. The emotional journey is hers, not his. Her choices should drive the story.

Or you could take it further and turn it into Alien, only Chris Pratt is playing the role of the menacing predator who wants to ensnare and impregnate the hero. Now you have a tense cat and mouse game through this glitzy futuristic cruise ship, culminating in Jennifer Lawrence blowing Chris Pratt out of a goddamned airlock. Then you just sit back and wait for the Oscars to roll in.

If we're just following Art3mis, the story suddenly becomes a compelling quest for personal revenge against the powerful, instead of a clumsy wish fulfillment fantasy in which obsessive, shallow fandom is all it takes to conquer the world.

In the film, it's a powerful moment only in the sense that it advances Barnum's cause. In our film, this becomes the big call to adventure -- she finally has an opportunity to step out in public and learn to accept herself. Then Barnum begins to reveal the true asshole he was in real life, and she has to grow the confidence to realize she doesn't need him.

Or you can make it closer to the real story of Annie Jones, which was actually much weirder. She was placed in Barnum's freak show as an infant (her parents getting paid huge money to do it). She had to grow up under those bizarre circumstances and try to build some kind of normal life for herself. (At one point she was kidnapped, in what may or may not have been an elaborate publicity stunt -- with Barnum, you just never knew.)

At various points the real Jones struck out on her own, touring the world with her own act, publicly campaigning on behalf of "freaks" (she wanted to kill that dehumanizing label the exhibits were using), but always returning to Barnum in the end. Here's somebody battling everything from gender norms to the capitalist exploitation of the disabled, and doing it in the late 1800s, before dying tragically in her 30s. But no, by all means, tell us the inspirational story of the smarmy conniving millionaire instead.

In the original film, we know the reason Cruise has to kill Tim Robbins is that he's ranting too loudly and putting his daughter's life at risk. It's still murder, but we understand the protagonist's motivations and how it's for the greater good. ("If it wasn't, would Tom Cruise be doing it? Don't be absurd.")

But from her point of view? We just see her dad going into another room to kill a man. She would view her father the same way all of us viewed Tom Cruise after 2005. Amidst this unimaginable crisis, she watches him stealing cars and getting into fights with his teenage son. The whole film becomes about the loss of innocence in a terrifying, uncertain world. A young girl slowly realizes that the grownups actually have no idea what they're doing.

Granted, there's a reason movies on this scale rarely put a kid in the lead: Child actors are to films what E. coli is to spinach. But there's also a reason Dakota Fanning has consistently gotten work since she was six years old, and it's that she was a pretty damn good actor even as a kid. She could have carried this thing.

Say what you will about the plot of Avatar (which is built almost entirely out of plot points from similar movies), but James Cameron actually spent a lot of time and effort on world-building. He even went so far as creating an entire working language for the Na'vi, who of course are ultimately the protagonists. But you know what would have been an even better storytelling challenge? Actually telling the story from the aliens' point of view from the start, while still getting the audience onboard.

If we just make Neytiri the protagonist and pick up the story with her, the audience could get a better sense of what life of Pandora is like before and after human colonization. Then she can meet Jack and make the decision to allow him into her tribe. Her mistake leads to the attack on her people, and she comes to terms with the realization that the colonizers are not to be trusted. Sure, we can still get the guy's change of heart and he can still help them overcome the humans, but instead of being the white savior, he's just a means to an end for the hero, Neytiri.

Now you have the thing this movie was probably always trying to be, a clever twist on the alien invasion genre in which humans are the invaders and the world being threatened with extinction is someone else's. The difference is that it's not some dude whose choices save the day -- the outcome rests in the hands of the natives, i.e. the people who actually have something to lose. Who knows, maybe one of the dozens of planned sequels will eventually get there.

Mike Bedard has a Twitter account if you're prone to following people on there.

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