Yes, I had my 3-D IMAX tickets a week in advance.  Yes, I purposefully avoided trailers, reviews, clips, anything that would tell me about the film.  Yes, I re-watched that James Cameron A&E Directors series, preaching of the visionary wonder he brings into our humdrum lives.  Yes, I thought long and hard about the technical achievement of a film over a decade in the making.  And, yes, as of 3:00 am Friday morning I can officially say: I hated Avatar.  I hated it for innumerable reasons (which I will attempt to enumerate), but  above everything else, I hated Avatar because it’s no better than Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen,; it’s just prettier.  The film is a visual landmark and a self-proclaimed “game-changer”, for sure.  But all it’s marked and all it’s changed was finally emptying the last breath left in my lungs for blockbuster filmmaking.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  On a visceral level, Avatar is equally breathtaking in a good way.  Within twenty minutes on the planet Pandora, you actually forget you’re watching a film in 3-D, which is a testament to the subtle use of this brand-new technology.  The Na’vi peoples’ world is lush and expansive – never-ending forests, well-developed wildlife and unexplained floating mountains – with foregrounds that meld seamlessly into backgrounds, displaying unbridled three-dimensional world-building.  I would love to inhabit this planet for an entire nature documentary, BBC-style.  And, oddly enough, that’s the film’s first problem.  Because if Cameron’s goal was to make a fully realized world, a glorious melding of art and technology, he could have done it.  Probably the only director with enough clout and vision to create such an extensive, believable ecosystem is James Cameron.  But instead of making an epic piece of art and a true beacon for filmmaking’s future, he developed a $300 million throw-away hunk of entertainment, entrenching Hollywood’s heels deeper and deeper.  Visual effects are great, but there must to be something behind the flair or it’s just giant robots punching each other into pyramids.  All Cameron did was make the pyramids three-dimensional.

 

Avatar takes an incredible setting, stellar creature design and amazing 3-D animation, and tacks on the most pandering, photocopied, contrived, self-important, and above all else, long storyline.  The characters are merely assumed sketches – Sam Worthington is the “Jarhead”, Sigorney Weaver is the “scientist”, Michelle Rodriguez is the “pointless character who only delivers one-liners”, Giovanni Ribisi is the “Paul Reiser in Aliens”  – plodding through a played-out plot of white-person expansion in search for a natural resource which is actually called “Unobtainium”; I’m not kidding.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The story soon spirals into a vague mixture of Dances With Wolves, Fern Gully, Pocahontas and the Last Samurai with enough schmaltz to smother all of them.  Oddly enough, the storyline of Edward Zwick’s and Tom Cruise’s mediocre epic was much better than this one, because at least Cruise’s alcoholic, wish-he-was-Japanese, Nathan Algren had defined goals.  I walked out of Avatar not able to answer the questions, “What are the main character’s motivations?” and “Why?”  After nearly three hours, I was hoping at least to scantly define character development.  But that’s not in the film’s best interests.  Instead, Cameron probably spent somewhere around $10,000 copy-pasting a story so he could spend the rest of his $299,990,000 on a breathable world.  The unexplained Unobtainium (it’s sounding sillier, isn’t it?) serves as a perfect metaphor for the film.  Instead of telling us what this mineral is used for or why it’s worth wiping out an indigenous species, we’re simply told it fetches a high price and are left to assume the rest.  The world precedes the story, and even that doesn’t hold up under extreme scrutiny.

Sure the green, infinite jungle is beautiful, but its haphazard construction is noticeable, throwing into question just how much time was spent planning rather than merely creating.  The animals and plants are very similar to those on Earth, which is a great guidepost for viewers, but the differences are seemingly random and obligatory.  For example, there are equivalents of horses, panthers, hyenas and elephants on Pandora, all closely resembling their earthling counterparts, except they have six legs and gills.  Ok, fine, that makes sense.  So why don’t the indigenous people have six legs or gills?  If Pandora’s life is so close to Earth’s, we can assume that Darwinism and evolution still apply, right?  Did the extra appendages take away from our anthropomorphism too much, and suck out all the Na’vi melodrama?  Neil Blompkamp’s recent sci-fi success story, District 9 has aliens more closely resembling Futurama’s Zoidberg than any human, yet we still feel greatly for their human-like suffering.

If consistency were any concern to Cameron, there are many ways Pandora’s wildlife could’ve differentiated itself from Earth’s.  But no, just throw some traits against a wall and see what sticks.  We are shown a completely new living environment, but since none of the life interacts together outside of what horse or bird our hero decides to ride, the evolution is merely aesthetic.  There are twirling, flying lizards that look gorgeous, and showing a short clip of one of them interacting with a plant would have greatly added to the depth of the world.  Imstead, it just insecurely spins, getting dizzy from its own digital splendor.  Grab any generic tropical setting, make the trees taller and you’ve got the innovative world of Pandora.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I believe the same simplistic planning went into the Na’vi culture.  The age-old, prelapsarian utopia of the Pandora natives is given no identifiable characteristics and no relatable link to humanity sans an underdeveloped interspecies romance.  The Na’vi cooperate with seemingly no quarrel at all (yes, there is one line barely alluding to the contrary, but there are no perceived signs of discontent among the other tribes who deus-ex-machina the crap out of the third act), and since their religion is provable, and their link to nature palpable, the large-scale, existential human struggles of faith and planetary role are absent as well.  I think Cameron was attempting to make a culture we could strive to emulate -- the classic “infallible, mystical native” complex.  But without strife or questions of eternal life, how can we even hope to connect to such a people?  All I took away from the Na’vi culture was if God would just prove or disprove himself, life would be a lot easier; and if we could all ride duck dragons, it’d be super sweet.

 

So without original characters, a believable world or a relatable culture, the only hope for the film to rise above mere technical marvel is to have a compelling, engrossing story driving home the heart of the work.  And as I’ve been extolling already, the plot is without a doubt the worst part of Avatar.  A crippled marine, Sam Worthington is sent, via his psychically linked Na’vi avatar, to infiltrate the native people so they can be persuaded into leaving their valuable land (which is situated on a large deposit of Unobtainium – keep saying it; it just gets more and more ridiculous).  But after learning their harmonic ways, the marine switches sides.  A simple, elegant story.  All we need now is motivation.  So why does he switch sides?  Honestly, I don’t know.  Maybe because the planet’s pretty?  Because his avatar has functioning legs?  The characters are devoted no time for explanations, so it’s impossible to show change from the beginning of the story to the end.  And the scenes are treated the same way.  Nothing actually develops over the course of a scene and most plot changes are explained in voice-over narration after the fact.  For example, once Worthington’s character is accepted into the tribe, we see a series of action montages transitioned with the narration “I can’t believe it’s only been three months.”  Neither can I, Sam, neither can I.

 

Obviously, the now ex-marine is going to fight against the humans and invariably become the deciding factor in the triumph of the Native Americans, I mean the samurai, I mean the all-black civil war battalion, I mean the Na’vi.  But how can an outsider gain the much-needed trust required to fulfill his destiny?  Fall in love with the tribe-leader’s daughter, of course!  The Pocahontas story is a tried-and-true romance that’s proven relatable, but we actually have to see the romance.  All we are shown is a few doughy, alien eyes given back and forth over the course of a few scenes and voila! we assume they are in love.  At least in Dances with Wolves or even Disney’s musical Pocahontas there is significant time devoted to the relationship between our two leads.  You’d think nearly three hours is sufficient to develop such endeavors.  But instead, scenes of genuine affection are replaced with camera swoops 19-24.  Perhaps we are to assume that Poca-Na’vi is the reason our hero switches sides, but without believing they are in love in the first place, it’s hard for me to stretch any further than that.

 

With all these faults and inconsistencies, James Cameron has made a very declarative statement:  <i>Avatar</i> is a showcase of technology and every other aspect of the film is intended to service that technology – an idea backwards in its intent, and condescending in its execution.  I love spectacle for spectacle’s sake, but if you’re telling me to sit through 160 minutes of your spectacle, you’d better be able to justify it.  And after the first 75, the giant rolling camera movements through the jungle don’t mean anything anymore; I was already awed the first seven times.  Where is Terminator’s careful attention to storyline?  Where is Aliens’ and True Lies’ emotional heart?  Where is Ghosts of the Abyss’s sense of artistic endeavor?  All of these previous Cameron qualities are absent, replaced merely with Titanic’s grandiosity, but devoid of any historical significance to ground it.

 

 

 

I am not saying all this to demean Avatar’s visual brilliance.  It is without a doubt a feast for the senses and one of the most beautiful films I’ve ever seen.  If you want to see something pretty, I recommend this in IMAX 3-D; it’s worth the extra money and time.  However, if you want to see a new science fiction movie worth a damn, with things like “characters” and “ideas” and “justification for its uses of technology”, watch District 9 again.  Blomkamp’s film may pull its punches and devolve into a videogame in the final third, but at least it has a direction, a point, and never once sacrifices its story for technological wonderment.