In one sentence: Remarkably beautiful, incredibly brain dead, and if it were any more touchy feely I would have felt molested.
Now, in a few more sentences: Taking place in 2154, Avatar tells the story of Jake Sully and his journey to Pandora, a moon around a distant solar system. (It’s supposed to be the planet Polyphemus in the Alpha Centauri star system, but I’m darned if I can remember that being in the film.) Sully is there to remote-pilot a cloned alien body, his “avatar” of the title. His publicized mission is to provide security for scientific recons; his covert mission is to infiltrate the natives, learn their weaknesses, and advise military command.
The entire necessity for an avatar is the toxic and hostile nature of Pandora. It is presented as a planet custom-made to eliminate human life. Animals will kill you on sight, and if they fail the atmosphere will do the job, so for goodness sake, don’t breathe! More than a few times I found myself wondering whether Harry Harrison should sue for copyright infringement, but I realized that his Deathworld novels aren’t the first, or only, examples of fantastic tales of humans attempting to survive on a lethal world. It’s just that he does a much better job, while delivering almost exactly the same message as Avatar.
Let’s face it, James Cameron sucks as a writer. The original Terminator was apparently a fluke (oh wait, he “borrowed” from Harlan Ellison on that one; eventually paid for it, too). I thought he’d hit his low point with Titanic, but no, here’s Avatar. Titanic survived his writing “skills” because the sheer power of the historical event overwhelmed the mediocre love story, cartoonish villains, and dismal attempts at showing class warfare.
Avatar has no such shield. The Na’vi, Pandora’s natives, are such clichés that if this had been a western, Native American groups would have been protesting in droves. Egads, they whoop and holler in the finest tradition of old school westerns. They snarl, snap, and even hiss. They ride “horses,” shoot arrows, and apologize to any critter they kill – even in self-defense. I laughed out loud more than a few times. It couldn’t have been any worse if Cameron had put them all in blackface rather than blue. They are such a cliché, so flat, I came close to cheering as the first bombs hit. Yes, wipe those smug looks off their kittycat faces!
Only the droppers of said bombs are even worse. Aside from the few scientists, every human on screen is deserving of horrible, agonizing death. Remember Caledon “Cal” Hockley from Cameron’s Titanic, the Snidely Whiplash villain who did everything but twirl his moustache and laugh, “Bwahaha”? He’s the very image of humanity compared to the humans in Avatar. They sneer constantly, as if their expressions are frozen. And how many times do door gunners have to say, “Get some”? It was disturbing and amusing when first seen in Full Metal Jacket, but here its said over and over again. Thank the planet they get et by a nearby dragon. Or two.
Not that the film is without some merit. Peter Benchley once said that Steven Spielberg was the world’s greatest second unit (action) director. While you can debate that about Spielberg, it’s utterly true about Cameron. The action sequences in Avatar are superb. Cameron knows how to block out movements, edit cleanly, and give you a clear presentation of bedlam. He righteously eschews the shaky-cam plague destroying modern cinema. Other directors should take note.
Cameron’s mastery of technology is quite possibly without equal. The result is that Avatar is simply a wonder to look at. I can only imagine how the 3D looked because on a large HDTV via 1080P Blu-Ray, it was a visual feast. It’s easy to see why people kept going back, just to roll around in the trees of Pandora.
In the end, though, it’s pretty lights and flashy effects, all served up for no good purpose. The story is undeserving of such love and care. And for much of the time it doesn’t so much require a willing suspension of disbelief as a lobotomy, the elimination of thought and reason. One simple example: If the “flux vortex” that allows mountains to hover jams weapons tracking and flight instruments, why do radios and avatar signals still get through?
There’s also the matter that we must all chant Na’vi style rather than remember that Cameron himself, in Aliens, gave the humans the solution to recalcitrant natives. Namely: “I say we take off and nuke the site from orbit. It’s the only way to be sure.” I could even imagine someone saying, “Hey, Eywa [Gaea’s Pandoran cousin], catch this one!”
What’s frustrating is that germs of greatness are buried within the film. The entire planet of Pandora is networked. The Na’vi can link to that network. Much like Vulcans and their katras, the Na’vi preserve themselves within the planet. In Star Trek, Vulcan katras are presented with a sense of casual wonder and acceptance. How the Na’vi communicate with all species of Pandora, even the planet itself, could have been presented that way and, by doing so, invoked some sense of awe and wonder. (Of course, then Harrison might have really been able to sue….)
Instead, Avatar is all New Age and touchy-feely and Gaea and “they [humans] killed their mother [the Earth]” and “go back to your dead planet.” The environmental preaching just comes oozing out of the film’s pores, like some smarmy snake oil salesman’s pitch, exchanging awe with nausea.
That $2 billion+ worth of filmgoers worldwide thought differently is disheartening. As uneven as it was, District 9 kicks Avatar all around the block. As ultimately pointless as it was, The Hurt Locker really is the better film (and Up even better), and Kathryn Bigelow the better director – no matter what Sigourney Weaver says about breasts casting the deciding vote.
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