Avatar

By now, I'm sure most of you have seen Avatar, so I wanted to discuss the film, and its inherent flaws, in the context of its box office and critical success, without worrying too much about spoilers.  But I'll save the spoilers for after the jump.  So if you haven't seen it yet and plan to, don't read on, or don't read on beyond this first paragraph. Otherwise, enjoy.  In broad strokes, I thought it was a good enough movie, and the effects are pretty great, although perhaps seeing the movie on a regular 3D-capable screen (which was called Real3D in the theater I was in) rather than in an iMax 3D (which was sold out in the theater we wanted to go to) may have muted my fascination with the overall 3D experience.  It was good, but no better in my mind than the 3D stuff that seemed so fascinating at Disney World back in the 1980s.  I haven't really seen any 3D movies recently (I think they've been mostly used for animated kids movies, right?) so I have nothing to compare it to, but Cameron comes up with an impressively rendered fully imagined 3D world called Pandora, and that part of the film is very well done.  The action scenes, late in the movie, are also well done.  Beyond that, though, there were large stretches of the movie that flat-out bored me and the overall storytelling was horribly derivative of so many other films and plots that I could spend the rest of the review explaining them.  But in the end, it was an enjoyable movie, if only for the effects, and certainly a huge step above a Transformers or whatever other kiddie crap passes for quality entertainment these days.  As a Cameron film, though, it ranks well below Aliens or the Terminators or even, sadly, Titanic, although it suffers from the same writing flaws of that movie.  I'd recommend watching it, and maybe you'll be more entertained than me -- most reviews have been very, very positive -- but in the end, I was a little disappointed.

Spoilers ahead:  The story is basically the story of humans colonizing a planet to mine its resources (the horribly named mineral "unobtainium").  The planet is inhabited by 10' tall blue, human-like aliens who are very connected to the nature around them and actually can hook up to the flora and fauna through what seems like cable wires out of the ends of their hair (a weird conceit).  The humans who are there have destroyed "all that is green" on earth and are in negotiations to get a tribe of natives (the Na'vi) to relocate from their home so that they can send their machines to tear up the place and grab this very precious mineral.  As part of the negotiations, scientists led by Sigourney Weaver have created the titular avatars, which are Na'vi replicants with human brains controlling them to try to talk their way into the "savage" closed society and get them to move.  If they don't, of course, the army is right behind them, ready to blow the fuck out of all of them without remorse.  The lead character in the story, a disabled marine named Jake Sully, integrates quite well and becomes accepted into the tribe (as his avatar), but despite he and Weaver's efforts to get the army to give them more time, the evil humans refuse to wait, and Sully is forced to choose sides -- eventually siding with the Na'vi and leading them in their fight to save the planet (and their own lives, but mostly just the planet -- seriously, the Na'vi cried more about the destruction of their trees than about their brothers and sisters getting killed around them). 

Deep down, it's an incredibly simplistic plot.  Dances with Wolves,  Pocahontas, and Last of the Mohicans have all done it before.  The obvious parallels to Native Americans in touch with nature that are destroyed by white Europeans is all over this story.  But there are other points Cameron is trying to make with the script.  Definitely the parallels to America's attempts to "colonize" the Middle East in its various wars on foreign soil are there.  And the whole "we're destroying the Earth"/"we should listen to Al Gore" theme is hammered home so blatantly and excessively that I really started to hate Pandora's leafy fields and wished they'd throw a freaking Starbucks on there.  There's no subtlety in any of the storytelling here and when Cameron's themes got repeated over and over again through visually beautiful but mostly insubstantial scenes, he really lost me as a viewer.  There were also a lot of leaps in logic that got glossed over -- did the Na'vi know that Sully was an "avatar"; why did negotiations suddenly get stopped after Sully had gotten himself so ingrained in that society; why didn't we see these "negotiations";  there seemed to be two hours of showing Sully become a part of the Na'vi tribe and fall in love with the chief's daughter and then two minutes of -- oh yeah, we don't give a crap about all the progress you've made, we're just going to kill them all anyway.  There is supposedly a key "confessional" in which Sully admits that the Na'vi will never relocate from their home, but the decision to attack was made before that is revealed (that's just used as cover) so that scene -- which really affects the entire narrative structure -- was not placed in the right place or given the correct weight.  So for me, the attack just became a pre-ordained thing that made all the boring crap that came before it really unnecessary, at least in terms of the story's plot.  Why was Sully needed as a character at all?  Couldn't we have focused on one of the Na'vi and seen how they were about to be attacked and seen their fears of this?  None of that is shown, because we're completely inside Sully's head this whole movie and see what he (the white human) sees, not what the natives see about their potential oppressors.  In fact, when they finally are attacked and the Na'vi fight back with bows and arrows against armored spaceships I started laughing.  Seriously?  That was their defense?  Did they not actually understand the threat the humans were posing?  What were they thinking?  Are they really that fucking dumb?  Seriously, the movie spent 2 hours explaining how "advanced" these aliens were, with the way they were so in touch with nature and so able to move fluidly and attack and defeat the humans in hand to hand combat, but... they try to take down football-field size spaceships with fucking bows and arrows and rocks?  Are you shitting me?

So I guess that's where the movie really lost me.  After that, when Sully "turns" on his own race and fights (along with Sigourney Weaver and some other enlightened members of our race) alongside the Na'vi, he of course becomes their leader (because they're a bunch of stupid natives trying to fight with bows and arrows) and he gives the obligatory "we can defeat them" Braveheart speech and then, using flying dragons and/or special-power birds (and a couple hand grenades), the Na'vi are able to fight back.  Of course, it's still not enough to defeat the war machine until the planet itself fights back (in the form of its native rhinocerus-style animals), the result of a prayer by one of the Na'vi to the planet's god-spirit.  Seriously.  I'm not making this up.  This is the plot of the #1 movie in America.  In the end, Sully even becomes a Na'vi when his mind and spirit are merged into his Avatar, in a really silly looking ceremony that closes out the film.

All that being said, the battle scenes were absolutely spectacular, and although the human enemy army was drawn so ridiculously one-dimensional that they really should have been Terminators, rather than human beings, Cameron did make the Na'vi interesting enough that I found myself rooting for them and their upset victory over the invading force, even if the outcome in a story like this is obvious.  And like I said, the effects are stunning throughout.  But the flaws in the storyline and the derivative nature of everything being told really hurt my enjoyment of the film.  In the end, it's pretty good, but certainly not anywhere near great, and not worthy of the critical (or box office) acclaim it's been receiving.  Of course, when Alvin and the Chipmunks is making $60M+ against it, I guess I shouldn't complain that such an ambitious and somewhat thought-provoking mainstream adult sci-fi movie is actually being made.

Comments

[LegFuJohnson]

It was good. Not Major League, of course. But nothing is.

[UFFL Champs]

It is so cold outside. F you Gore and Global Warming

[Bill]

I did say good I guess. I did enjoy it but what I'm reading online are so many raves that it didn't seem like anyone noticed the weak and derivative storyline itself.

[Wayne]

I pretty much agree with your review Bill. I thought the world Cameron created was wonderful and the special effects were great. But the script was terrible. The characters were two dimensional and I found myself bored halfway through. James Cameron should employ an intelligent writer to help him make better films.