Avatar: A Fuller Review
Roger Ebert said that when he watched Avatar, he had the same feeling that he did when he saw Star Wars - that from-the-future sensation of "Oh, this is going to change
everything." And in that, he is correct.
Avatar is what movies will look like ten years from now, because it is the first movie in which they have gotten CGI and 3D right.
CGI's always been dicey because despite its tremendous usage, it still has yet to get heft and movement correct. There's something about non-human CGI that
looks CGI - it's pretty, but the mind is subliminally aware that the way gravity interacts with things doesn't quite fit together. They've fixed most of that for humans, because you can (and should) motion-capture people - but for the other things like tumbling rocks or CGI animals, subliminally your mind still knows it's all just equations in a box somewhere. It's close, so you're willing to go with it, but somewhere in the back of your head you said, "It's a special effect."
Avatar has a whole CGI
forest, and you buy every tree in it. There were points I kept having to remind myself that it was CGI, because that bioluminescent frond jiggled just perfectly when the fake character brushed against it. I don't know what they did to simulate mass correctly, but they did, and I bought the world wholesale.
That is an amazing feat. Let us congratulate James Cameron for that.
And the 3D? There were times I kept forgetting it was 3D, which sounds like a waste but it wasn't. This is the first movie where I've said, "Seeing this in 2D, the movie would lose something I don't want to live without." Sure, you can see shit like Journey to the Center of the Earth on your TV and miss out Brendan Frasier hocking a yo-yo in your eye, but who cares? But Avatar uses 3D to enhance the action scenes without making you aware that
dude, you're in a 3D theater, isn't this awesome?
I'll state again: in ten years, this is what cinema will look like. Just like Terminator 2, he's taken umpty-million dollar and put every dollar of that money on-screen. It may, in fact, be one of the prettiest movies ever.
That is an amazing feat. Let us congratulate James Cameron for that.
Now. Let's discuss the plot.
I know I'll catch shit for this, but I'm not instinctively opposed to the "white guy meets noble savage" plot. It's hoary and can be completely insulting when done poorly (and yes, is mildly insulting when done well) - but the fact is that if you have some alien culture in a movie, the simplest and easiest way to introduce a reader to that culture is to have them experience it through the eyes of someone who is
also new. It's lazy writing, but it's also effective, because at the moment your lead character is falling in love with this new set of people,
so is your viewer.
(And sadly, at this moment in time "white guy" is going to be the stand-in for the viewer when Hollywood's involved - a regrettable choice I've come wearily to accept probably won't change in the next ten years. Although I'll disagree with some folks who've said that the underlying problems would evaporated if this had been Will Smith in the lead instead.)
The trick is, pulling off that plot is all about the subtlety. It can be done well, if white guy helps out the tribe
but doesn't turn out to be the greatest warrior, the most intelligent planner, and the most swoony lover by mere nature of the fact that he exists and is white. So I said, "Self, I'm gonna hold off on this until I see how much finesse he applies. It's all about the subplots."
Avatar has no subplots.
Avatar has no finesse.
I'm going to reference
Neil Gaiman's party theory here and say that most Hollywood films at least try to answer the question, "Why do I want to hang around this guy for the next two hours of my life? What makes him likeable?" Avatar is amazing because it sidesteps that question
in its entirety.
The lead character is introduced as a man who lost the use of his legs and has a dead brother. How did he lose the use of his legs? In "a battle" in Venezuela. We don't know what the nature of the battle was, how he felt about the loss of his legs (aside from "he'd like them back"), what kind of soldier he was before. Nothing. And his relationship with his brother? Was it good? Bad? Is he driven by guilt, a need to supercede his brother, some need to make up for his brother's crimes? We have absolutely no clue why he's here or what he wants to accomplish aside from two facts - and those facts could mean any number of things.
Say what you will about Titanic, but at least at the beginning we knew that Rose wanted to be free of her too-strict societal conventions and Jack wanted freedom. The lead dude in Avatar is so blank that he's running on pure actorly charm - thank God the guy has a nice smile, because that smile is all the characterization you're gonna get.
So the emotional arc? Is completely stunted. Yes, of course lead dude falls in love with the civilization and defects to the other side, but do we know what it means to him
personally aside from some sort of mishmash of The Earth is Good and Milspec Is Bad? Not really. We have no idea what he's
personally rejecting in order to become a part of this world.
Any feelings you're gonna get from Avatar are coming straight from the SFX - it's like if Star Wars hadn't bothered to put in good dialogue (and yes, the original Star Wars has good dialogue, if not
natural dialogue - check the number of quotable lines) and instead put all the weight on you feeling anything for Luke based on how awful that desert looked (so he'd want to leave) and how pretty the princess looked (so he'd want to follow her).
That's what Avatar is: a beautiful world where you're expected to fall in love with it just like the lead. Who doesn't really exist except as a hollow construct of actorly charm.
But the plot is thin, and often makes no fucking sense - rare for a James Cameron film. (I rather enjoyed how he went out of his way to show us why all that grand military equipment didn't work well against the Aliens.)
( In fact, let's ask the following questions... )So what you get in the end is a very gorgeous movie where the natives, barring some very interesting biological quirks (I want an organic USB cable), don't have have the protective cladding of an interesting plot or fascinating characters to shield us from the knowledge that
hey, these are Native Americans in blue garb! Which they are. They have the weapons of Native Americans, the vocal patterns of Native Americans, and the chanting and rituals of - well, Native Americans and some Africans. So suspension of disbelief, at least in that aspect, goes right out the window for anyone at all attuned to such things.
Let us bash James Cameron for that. His heart's probably somewhere in the vicinity of the right place, wanting us to love nature and people who love nature, but in the end what he creates is a fantasy where the native population is too butt-stupid to know how to fight the overwhelming power of the conquering civilization until the lead character comes along and shows them. In other words, the natives don't have the intelligence to build technology, and they don't have the wisdom to see the threat of the technology well enough to make plans to fight it effectively - but boy howdy, they have
heart.
A heart that's only valuable because it can sucker a guy from that superior civilization into working for them. Otherwise? Toast. It's a value system that says, "You know, if only white guys had showed those Indians what to do, they'd have won!" Which, you know, is a little historically sketchy on so many levels that I don't even want to deconstruct
that one.
It didn't ruin the movie for me, because it was extremely pretty. If I turned the brain off and watched the eye candy and said, "Holy crap, a mechasuit that looks mecha!" I was happy. Yet it was three hours long - and yes, viewers, I checked my watch twice. I'm not sure I'd go again by myself, but I'd happily take someone just to watch them gasp.
Avatar may be Hollywood's last gasp for the theater: You have to see this in the theater, in 3D.
Have to. Because if you see it at home, on your crappy HDTV, the pretty's going to fade - and once the pretty fades, the plot is exposed for its underlying wreckage. And that plot? Hollow as a chocolate Easter bunny. It looks pretty, but most of your hungry bites are going to catch nothing but air.
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