Disclaimer: Avatar has been written about hundreds of time by now with reviews ranging all sorts of categories. I have had strong feelings about the film and I have read a lot of these reviews. My opinions have remained true to what they were as I was walking out of the theater. I have read a review that looked like the reviewer used my head as a note book while writing a review. I know that enough time has passed since the film has come out that there are people that have deep rooted opinions of the film and I am no exception. However, I am going to do my best to adhere closely to my own opinions. Now to what I thought.
The history of cinema has changed. Although when every movie comes out cinema history is changed, yet we now have the first film that effectively uses three dimensions that aren’t goofy and awkward. The first time in history, we have a movie that was made better by 3-D. Although if 3-D was not there we would have the most boring two and a half plus hours of drivel that was ever released in 2009.
James Cameron is a master of detail. You look around the background of his early sci-fi work in Alien and the Terminator movies you’ll notice tiny details in the frame that really add to the over all universe and wonder of these films. In Avatar Cameron shows a lot of the same flair. However, this time it is all done with computers! Usually I would hate this. I think films look so much better with out computers trying to imitate real life, it is much better to have an actual dumb person driving a stunt car than to have a fake computer car crash and poorly integrated into the frame with actual scenery. However Cameron and his tech-team have done a fantastic job of actually pulling off C-G that does not look passable but actually looks real. For this reason alone the film is worth one viewing, in an IMAX 3-D theater. On the other hand, you may be kicking yourself an hour into the film after the glitz and glam become boring and the only thing left to pay attention is the actual movie.
Avatar revolves around Joe Everyman American Jake Sully: a paraplegic marine from Earth sent to the forest moon of Endor Pandora to jump in a Matrix-style tank to get behind the wheel of once fancy and apparently aside from the fact that it is remotely controlled a functioning Na’vi (the native inhabitants of Pandora) body. He is sent to take the place of his fallen twin brother who was a researcher trying to convince the natives to abandon their home to let the evil greedy men destroy it and take the precious oil unobtainium stores from underneath. Sully is given orders to spy on the Na’vi from his hard-ass-take-no-shit Sergent. He goes along with this plan and is willing to sell out the brown blue guys, because hey, they live in trees and they don’t know what real civilization is. You can see where this goes. Sully gets involved with the tribe and now feels guilty about being a total dick. He then goes against his commanders and takes side with his radical science buddies and his blue friends.
Now everyone and their mother who has a negative opinion of this film will point out all of the similarities of this film to many other pieces of sci-fi and colonial films. It is obviously there. Now there really isn’t much of problem with the film being derivative in theory. Had Cameron and his brain trust of tech guys paid a little attention to something that wasn’t generated through a high powered computer. There is very little to like in this story and even less to like in terms of characters. The characters are more archetypes than characters. There have been so many of these same types of characters in many other films that it is hard to connect with them emotionally. All of the character development techniques felt stolen and glossed over as if Cameron knew that he had an unoriginal story with unoriginal characters but since he spent such a large amount of money on visual effects people won’t really care. The worst character by far is Parker Selfridge, the “evil capitalist” that is so obsessed with money that blah blah blah, played by Giovanni Ribisi. He plays this role as a poor man’s Jeremy Piven. Seriously it is as if Ribisi just watched a few seasons of Entourage before he came up with his idea for his character. Selfridge is the guy that everyone who really loves the film for it’s “political message” just love to hate.
The underlying theme of Avatar is really where the film falls from an annoying but cool looking blockbuster (see Sherlock Holmes) into a trash heap of annoying-heard-it-all-before moral blather. On the surface, Cameron is telling the world that we shouldn’t be ravaging the land of other humans who have just as many rights as we do all in the goal for mad stacks of cash, embrace the differences of other rather than scorn them, and respect nature and become in touch with more natural aspects of life. The problem I have with this is that that theme has been present in many, many other films (Dances with Wolves, Pocahontas, and countless other post-colonial films from the 80′s and 90′s) that I as if we really need to have something like this made again. The themes are all solid. All the things he is trying to say are true, yet it feels a bit like anti-smoking ads: we all know cigarettes kill you and we have since the 70′s is it really necessary to stage fake protest and target the adds to teens? I ask Cameron the same question do we really need yet another two and a half plus hour film about the horrors of colonialism? Now I’m not saying that this theme shouldn’t be revisited every now and again, but Avatar adds nothing new to this particular type of film other than the fact that you have to wear 3D glasses to enjoy it.
Secondly I can’t over look the hypocrisy that this film presents. As I stated earlier the film adores nature. The Na’vi are literally connected with the animals that provide them with transportation and other such helpful things. The audience is manipulated (fyi it isn’t a bad thing to manipulate your audience, a lot of times it is really great) into loving the natural world that is Pandora. Everything is so wonderful and the wonders of the Na’vi god are really seen first hand. However when one looks at the way in which this film was made you see that it is the furthest thing from natural and organic as you can get. The audience is supposed to feel that as a population humans need to be less concerned with money, yet the filmmakers cover-up the naked “savages” in order to keep a PG-13 rating and hopefully make this thing turn a profit. The magic “nipple-magnetic” is just one example of the things used in the film to make money. It is very hard for me to listen to someone that is telling me to stop being so money hungry when the person exemplifies everything they are trying to stand up against.
Lastly, Avatar still bangs around that theme of the noble white man. The guy that sees the evil of his own race and is willing to do whatever it takes to stop his own kind from doing “evil”, because lord knows those blue people are too fucking stupid to do so themselves.
There is some light at the end of the tunnel however. It is no secret that Avatar was one hell of an expensive movie. And it is an even more obvious that this film is making mondo cash right now. I hope that James Cameron has found a way to make studios so much money in the future that they’ll have a little money to throw at film makers that actually have something original percolating up in their brains. Maybe this will start another period of the Miramax and Fox Searchlight films of old. Although one can’t be too certain. What is certain however is that James Cameron did a lot of work to make what is a really cool demo of his fancy motion capture/3D technology that really should have only been an hour long. I’d say see the film once. Spend the extra to see it in IMAX as well. It will make you hopeful for the future when a better film maker gets his/her hands on this technology and makes something truly great and actually does change the history of cinema.
Grade: D
