I finally saw Avatar today, and while I’m still processing the experience, I thought I would share my thoughts on this long-in-the-making bit of cinema. I’m going to be talking in detail about important plot and character points, so if you haven’t seen the movie yet, you shouldn’t read this unless you want to be spoiled.
James Cameron wrote the initial scriptment for Avatar back in the 1990s but lacked the technology to bring his vision to life. The scriptment made the rounds online (I read a piece of it probably ten years ago) and was discussed with a great deal of interest, but as time passed it seemed Cameron had moved on from Avatar to other projects.
Fortunately for us, he returned to it and made a film that is a visual masterpiece. That part was really never in doubt. This is, after all, James Cameron we’re talking about.
But what about the story?
Story
It’s the year 2158 and humanity has found a lush jungle moon named Pandora orbiting a Jovian-sized gas giant in another solar system. Pandora has a substance (inanely called “unobtainium” — seriously) that Earth needs, since it has been stripmined of sources of energy. Unfortunately, the native humanoids called Na’vi are in the way. Their massive Hometree sits atop the richest vein of the substance, and so the Na’vi need to move, either through diplomacy or by force.
Jack Sully is a crippled Marine who goes to Pandora as part of the Avatar Project, which grows hybrid Na’vi that humans are able to enter with their minds and remotely manipulate. The goal is to go into the native population and convince them to leave the Hometree. Jake Sully has better luck with this than his companions — so much so that he begins to doubt the mission to move the Na’vi, and eventually turns against the corporate/military presence on Pandora that is gearing up to drive them out with force.
The primary criticisms of Avatar relate to the story. “It’s Dances with Wolves in space,” or “Dances with Blue Thundercats.” “It’s not original.” “It’s hackneyed and trite.” Take your pick. There most assuredly are similarities to the Kevin Costner film of yore. That is undeniable.
But does it matter?
I don’t think it does. Which surprises me, because I went into this movie expecting to be enthralled by the visuals and underwhelmed by the story. But I wasn’t. Devin Faraci is a reviewer I like, and in his review he states explicitly that he didn’t think you were supposed to care about what happened, that it was all just a flimsy framework to support Cameron’s primary motive, which was to fashion an overwhelming visual experience.
I don’t buy that. I think that’s a cynical attitude that’s not warranted by what’s on screen in Avatar, as well as Cameron’s larger body of work. I think Cameron cares a great deal, and he wants his audience to care. I think that he does lack, in places, the storytelling chops to always succeed the way he apparently wants to, but he does succeed far more often than not.
Avatar is entirely predictable. Anyone with any experience with movies will know exactly what’s coming next. But it’s done with such a sure hand that I don’t see this as a liability (or at least too much of one). Sure, I could have done without the scene where Jake is revealed as being a “spy” who learned to love those he was spying on, and Natiri’s entirely predictable reaction to his confession. And there were a few other beats I wish he would have changed up at least a little from the “standard” formula.
But that’s not the game Cameron is playing. He knows his story is predictable. He’s too smart not to know it. And that very predictability allows the audience an easy “in” to the entirely alien environment of Pandora, and to be carried away by it.
The story could have been a little better, I will grant that. But it’s also not the mammoth turd that some reviewers have made it out to be.
Characters
Cameron is an action movie director. That’s not a criticism, merely an observation. And he’s a very good one. And part of his formula is to paint his characters with fairly broad strokes. He uses cinematic stereotypes as the underlying framework for many of his characters: the evil military commander, the heartless corporate lackey, the noble savage — but Cameron adds enough unique personality to the “types” (or casts actors capable of overcoming the limitations on the scripted page) to make his characters, if not standouts, at least not liabilities. He walks the line — not always successfully — between a broadly-painted character and a cliché.
Sure, Stephen Lang as Colonel Quaritch chews the scenery with shark-sized chompers, but he’s obviously having a blast, and he’s good at it, so his character comes to life in a way it might not have with another actor or a lesser director (hello, Michael Bay). Giovanni Ribisi’s Parker Selfridge is also pretty one-note as the corporate honcho who seems to have no conscience in his quest for company profits. But there are a few shots as the genocide rolls into high gear where he seems to have misgivings and pangs of doubt. Small, yes. But it was enough to subtly reshape his character into something a little more than a moustache-twirling villain.
Cameron paints characters with broad strokes precisely because it’s a shorthand way of making the audience either love or loathe someone, exactly the opposite of what Devin asserts (though I don’t doubt Devin himself didn’t care about the characters because of this). But Cameron does it to make us care, not because he doesn’t want us to.
Themes
Annalee Newitz at io9.com wrote a review where she criticized Avatar as a “white man’s guilt” movie. She feels the film is largely about race and how white culture alleviates its collective guilt over past oppression of other races by creating fantasies in which a white man (a) oppresses a culture, (b) becomes part of that culture to “understand” it, (c) “goes native,” (d) betrays his own race, and finally (e) becomes a great leader.
I’m not going to comment on this concept except to say that I didn’t really have an issue with it in the movie, and I was aware of this criticism before I saw it. Maybe it’s just me and my lack of white guilt. This idea got a lot of buzz in the blogosphere so I felt a duty to at least acknowledge it.
Gary Westfahl at Locus Online feels that Avatar is a deeply anti-technological film in which all technology is portrayed as bad. He also feels that Avatar is an analogy to the Vietnam War.
I wonder what movie he was watching. Really. (Sorry, Gary!)
There is absolutely nothing in the movie that is anti-technology. Technology in Avatar is portrayed mostly in a neutral light (and the avatar technology itself is decidedly helpful, despite Westfahl’s assertions to the contrary). The gunships and powered battle suits and machine guns are absolutely bad for the natives, who have nothing more sophisticated than knives and arrows, but that’s not anti-technology — that’s anti-war. Anti-genocide. And yes, there is a difference.
This movie isn’t about Vietnam either (though the jungle imagery does echo that long-ago war). It isn’t about Afghanistan or Iraq.
Thematically, Avatar is about 9/11.
I haven’t read much else about this idea, and I’m surprised. It seemed really obvious. Cameron might have written the original story in the ’90s, but the major theme of this is terrorism.
In this case, human beings are the terrorists. Cameron has made the humans on Pandora the equivalent of Al Qaeda.
Look at the imagery when the Hometree is destroyed. A gargantuan tree rising thousands of feet above the surrounding jungle, home to hundreds of Na’vi and the center of their world. When it’s blown to bits, the smoke churning from the burning support roots blackens the sky like the Twin Towers after the planes hit. And when the Hometree itself falls, the imagery echoes, more than a little, the collapse on 9/11. The reaction of the Na’vi as they realize their world has irrevocably changed, that something they thought would always be there was now gone, and that it was deliberately taken from them in an act of unimaginable brutality, further adds to the concept of humans as terrorists.
Colonel Quaritch himself later mentions “shock and awe” (which some reviewers use as a basis for claiming this is about Iraq), but in the same breath he says they will “fight terrorism with terrorism,” even though the only terrorism that has so far occurred has been inflicted by the human military.
That, I think, is the larger theme of Avatar. It’s anti-war and anti-terror, and consciously uses 9/11 to drive that point home.
Special Effects
Regardless of what you may or may not think of the plot, the special effects really are something, well, special. I was continually astounded when I thought of how much of the movie was created entirely in the digital realm. The detail was amazing. I was looking at stuff like the grass flattened by the rotor-wash and wondering how many man-hours went into designing and realizing Pandora. And how much processor power.
The facial expressions of the Na’vi, created via motion capture technology, was a step up from anything that has come before it. I wasn’t too impressed by still photos of the Na’vi before the movie was released, but in motion and in the environment of Pandora, they are utterly and absolutely real.
ILM and Weta Digital have duked it out this past decade, with audiences as the winner as these two special effects powerhouses vied for the upper hand. ILM ruled the world in the ’80s and ’90s, but between The Lord of the Rings, King Kong, and now Avatar, I’m going to give the crown for the decade to Weta. Well done! (And more, please!)
3-D
If you can, see Avatar in 3-D. Cameron doesn’t have crap sticking out at you in a gimmicky way. He uses the 3-D process to add enhanced depth to the jungles of Pandora, and it’s worth the premium ticket price.
Conclusion
If you haven’t figured it out yet, I really liked this movie. Yes, it has flaws, and some of them run pretty deep. But they’re not fatal, and not big enough that you shouldn’t experience this for yourself, at least once.
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