Avatar - "The Battles Yellow Spaceship Takes Them To Pepperland's Blue Meanies"

Written and Directed by James Cameron

Have you ever been so engrossed in a world created in fiction that you live it, breathe it, and even dream about it? This reviewer certainly has. But Avatar, the new film from James (Titanic, The Terminator) Cameron, is not that film. Notoriously many years in the making, Avatar tells the archetypical story of Jake Sully (Sam Worthington), a marine who has lost the use of his legs that now finds himself on a far off moon called Pandora. His twin brother, who was a scientist, was meant to “pilot” an Avatar, or mock body of the extremely tall, lanky and blue native aliens called The Na’vi. Unfortunately, this brother dies and the Avatars are expensive to develop, so they recruit Jake to be the new Avatar.

Quite predictably, the film is filled with the stereotypes of this type of picture. The military leader who Jake turns on to fulfill his destiny as “the one” and reveals himself as the ultimate villain, the small band of outsiders who assist Jake, the foreign woman he falls for and whose native people he saves, the man she was supposed to marry that first is opposed to this outsider but bows his allegiance to him after being bested, etc. Naturally everything wraps up in a nice little package. The plot is hardly a notch above what one may find late at night on the SyFy channel.

The dialogue is even worse. This reviewer would like you to take a moment to look up any quotes from the film. Any at all. Now simply read them. Here are some of my favorites:

Neytiri: You are Omaticaya now. You may make your bow from the wood of Hometree. And you may choose a woman. We have many fine women. Ninat is the best singer.
Jake Sully: I don't want Ninat.
Neytiri: Peyral is a good hunter.
Jake Sully: Yes, she is a good hunter. But I've already chosen. But this woman must also choose me.
Neytiri: [smiles] She already has.
[They kiss]

Also, Col. Quaritch: This low gravity makes you soft. You get soft and Pandora will shit you out dead with zero warning.

What’s worse than the line written on a page is how they are delivered. Sam Worthington has an Australian accent for 90% of the movie but is supposed to be American. The Na’vi call the humans “sky people” but are otherwise able to speak English quite well. Each subsequent Na’vi who spoke English further drove home the idiocy of having such nonsense phrases. The entire concept of Na’vi speaking English in the first place is nonsensical until we learn that Segourney Weaver as Dr. Grace Augustine (who I believe is also the name of amnesia surviving murderess on some daytime soap opera) at one point had a school for them. Though apparently only the lead female, Neytiri (Zoe Saldana) and her mother attended it.

Giovanni Ribisi, an actor whose work I usually enjoy, has absolutely nothing to do the entire film. The resolution of his character is literally a sad look. Ribisi’s character, Parker Selfridge (I think he was the prom king on Beverly Hills 90210) wants to tear up the Na’vi’s hometree for a rare mineral called Unobtaneum. This is Science Fiction and any ridiculous name is pretty much game. But calling an unobtainable mineral Unobtaneum is stupefyingly obvious, something that Cameron seems to not care about holding back from at all during the film. After all, we are told about it by a selfish character named Selfridge. And some of the first words we hear in the film are “You are not in Kansas anymore… you are on Pandora”, which means that apparently in the future that a phrase that has permeated the consciousness to mean “you are no longer at home” has to be explained with a follow up to tell you where in fact you are.

Navi is a Hebrew word that means prophet. This may be the most subtle thing about the religion and spirituality that Cameron has laid before us. It is an anti-jingoistic combination of every colonized native nation from recent history, somehow excepting Islam. This is bizarre, since the parable is obviously a reflection of the current occupation by western countries of oil-rich Middle-Eastern countries. Perhaps parable is too strong a word, since it is sitting on the surface the entire time, to the point of the term “shock and awe” being used by the military here. But this still seems like a backhanded love letter to “native religions”. Of course they are “wise” but they don’t wear clothes (perhaps the technology just doesn’t exist yet to put some pants on?) and they cannot possibly fight back with anything more powerful than spears and arrows. That is, unless you include the deus ex machina that literally comes in the form of the animals we are taught to fear and then appreciate rallying for the forces of the planet. Of all the religious concepts that have been so apparently plucked for use here, modesty is not one of them, and so any Abrahamic religious concepts also go out the door with it as well.

The one thing the film has going for it is the technology behind it. The performance capture system that has been developed for this film is in fact the next step for the technology and James Cameron has to be applauded for taking the time to shepherd it. Give the man a technical Oscar and nothing more. Compare this to Robert Zemeckis’ A Christmas Carol from this year (or his other recent films) and you’ll see that while that was intentionally a performance captured cartoon, it doesn’t hold a candle in terms of communicating movement or acting. The tech on display here is now a step beyond the previous standard, Gollum from The Lord of the Ring films. But how much more impressive is it than Peter Jackson’s King Kong himself, who Andy Serkis also portrayed in the performance capture studio in 2005? Perhaps the five years in the making Avatar finally got off the ground because Cameron was convinced the technology existed once Peter Jackson’s Weta Digital developed it. After all, Weta Digital is one of the lead visual effects studios on Avatar. Anyone who tells you that what is on display in this film is unlike anything they’ve ever seen hasn’t been paying attention to creature effects animation since 1993, when Jurassic Park set the (still holding up against many successors) bar. The film also makes a complete misstep by having the characters (and supposedly the audience by extension) have their breath taken away about halfway into the film by some floating mountains. But the joke is, the sometimes impressive world of Pandora has a million and one things that we the audience have already swooned over at this point which crown any kind of anti-gravity rock piles. It is a completely superfluous scene that serves only to set up the silly zone of electrical disturbance.

But hey, it’s in 3-D! Obviously, the thrill of the entire film is the 3-D itself. One of the best films of this past year was Pixar’s Up, which like many other CG animated films released recently, was presented in 3-D theatrically. The beauty of Up in 3-D was that there was an added depth to the visual spectrum, an extra element that could immerse you that much more in the world. It was never obtrusive or in your face. One might forget that they are witnessing 3-D in action, and at the time of seeing it I lauded such use of the tool as the future of the medium. At times Avatar falls into this added depth of field, but just as you settle into it, the balance is upset by psych-out gags that made 3-D tiresome fifty years ago. If there is one reason to see the film, it is to see it in 3-D. Unfortunately almost three hours of this, even with updated technology, still gave this reviewer terrible eye strain.

James Cameron can’t separate himself from the same themes, obsessions and holes he falls into every time including but not limited to: evil corporations, mech-suits, tough as nails females, competing male suitors who are wild cards, and an idealized idea of what a future/space soldier is. One should be clear though that just because there are archetypes at work here doesn’t make the film bad. The Matrix, the “Avatar of its decade” if you will, followed a somewhat similar path. However, what separates the wheat from the chaff is how they are utilized. While the Matrix relied on a strong story that could lend itself to both popcorn adventure and subtle nuanced concepts augmented by groundbreaking visuals, Avatar uses the visual artistry on display to distract the audience from a hollow morality play that not only is familiar, but heavy-handed. It is a blindfold in three dimensions.

** Two stars – Watch it if you Must.

Avatar is now playing in theaters. It won the Golden Globe awards for Best Director and Best Picture – Drama.