Movie Review: Avatar

Yeah, I know it's been like awhile.  I have a few plans for improvement of this here blog for 2010, but really what I need is more time. So, if anyone has any extra, feel free to email it to me.

But, back to business.  I saw Avatar last week, avoided reading any and all reviews and then broke it down for just for you, fair readers. We have never seen anything like Avatar before. James Cameron (Aliens, Titanic) delivers a seamless, rich and all-engrossing 3D experience with CGI that looks and feels completely authentic.  The uncanny valley has been conquered and yet Avatar is still just a bloated fantasy movie with a weak script and recycled devices. For once the digital effects are so good that one is left to only dwell on the art direction, story and characters.  Uh-oh.  Gratuitous use of phosphorescence, problematic otherness, plot holes and general cheesiness keep Avatar from being more than just a corny, uber-fantastical cartoon — a really elaborate, $400 million-plus (including marketing) cartoon that looks nothing like any film or animated feature that has come before it.  When a movie looks this good who needs a good story?

The acquisition of precious Unobtainium, which is nerd-speak for a substance that can do whatever your meager plot needs it to, is the goal of the evil corporation and its private army full of ex-military goons sporting robot suits and other fun things one would be inclined to lock and load. The largest cash of Unobtainium is found on the lush, verdant planet of Pandora underneath the tree village of a tribal warrior race of naked, 10-foot tall blue cat people called the Na'vi, who don’t really care for the newcomers who are digging up their home.

I'm going out here on a limb, but if I were a 13 year old boy I would think the giant gun part was cool, but the fruity colors and headband...not so much.

Of course, the heartless corporation has also hired scientists, headed by a nicotine and whiskey loving Dr. Grace Augustine (Sigourney Weaver) to study the natives from the inside in the most convoluted way possible — the Avatar program, which enables a human to inhabit the mind of a blue cat person grown in a lab.  The tale of nature's superiority over technology and corporate greed is told through Jake Sully (Sam Worthington), a wheelchair-bound ex-Marine whose identical twin brother just happened to be in the Avatar program before he died. A Na'vi/human hybrid was tailor made for Jake's brother and since stuff like that is generally really hard to make, Jake is hired to fill in for his brilliant (but dead) brother, much to the chagrin of Dr. Augustine.

While paraplegic Jake lies in a chamber, he's mentally linked with his new blue "avatar" body and through an act of the Pandora deity, manages to be put on the path to manhood in the Na'vi tribe. As the chief's daughter, Neyteri (voiced and motion capture acted by Zoe Saldana) teaches him the ways of her people, he also learns the ways of love.  Oh, yeah (in a Barry White voice).  Sure, she has the emotional intelligence of a 6th grader, but she's also perpetually topless, a perfect match for Jarhead Jake. And they both like the same things — running, jumping, flying tacky pterodactyls and hissing at their enemies.  But as Jake gains acceptance with the Na'vi tribe and the scientists, he's secretly reporting everything back to Colonel Quaritch (Stephen Lang) who only cares about quelling the resistance no matter the cost of civilian lives. Sound familiar?  At one point "shock and awe" is uttered.

Though the movie spends a considerable amount of time referring reverently to the deity of this magical world, one gets the impression that this particular deity is totally nuts. There is no logical or evolutionary reason that these animals should look the way that they do. There’s no clear survival advantage for every living thing to emulate and LED light. The world, however expertly created by dedicated technicians, makes no sense. It is fantasy for fantasy's sake and it feels hollow. Floating mountains with waterfalls, glowing animals and plants, air poison to humans — these elements feel like a random collection of arbitrary decisions instead of a complete universe intended to invoke a deeper sense of global harmony.

And Cameron leaves one big question unanswered for too long: When Jake is hanging out, walking and talking in his real body, what's his Avatar up to? And when this is answered it’s even more unbelievable than the lack of blue alien penises shown given the free flowing style of the Na'vi loin cloths.  Watchmen clearly takes the Award for Most Blue Wang in a Motion Picture.

Guess who.

Weaver and Lang are the pros here. They know how to make a B-movie script sing.  Lang chews up scenes with his imposing physicality and Weaver, well, she practically invented that technique. Giovanni Ribisi, playing the moral-free corporate head doesn't stand a chance. And it's even hard to remember that Worthington is in the same scene when Lang is there. Weaver does her very best with not even a single memorable line or quip.  But her "avatar" does get to wear a belly tank, so that's cool, I guess.

Perhaps in a tribute to the battle of Endor, Mother Pandora and all her overly-designed creatures are staunchly led by Jake in a climactic final battle. It's the standard spears against missiles scenario, home field advantage against fire power and it is spectacular.  If James Cameron and Michael Bay had an explosion baby — this is what it would look like, a cacophony of meticulously choreographed violence and destruction.   

Avatar is a rehash of an ultimate and tired old fallacy — the brave white man as messiah for the primitive, yet spiritually wise savages. Only he can save them. It's a fantasy antidote for eons of colonial guilt, a futuristic tome of reparations. No matter how advanced the weapons get, the problems of displacing inconveniently located populations still remains. The over ethnic cat people with their lack of written language and dependency on religious signs given to them by a big tree, their nakedness and childlike thought process — it's all so boring even with the stunning visuals. And at least with cowboy and Indian movies, the indigenous get to wear pants.

The phony spiritual message is further hammered home through the Na'vi ability to literally plug into all living things on Pandora. Their umbilical cord of sorts is located at the end of their hippie braids.  When Jake plugs into his flying lizard bird thing, Neyteri instructs him to "feel her" and "look inside her" and it comes off as tasteless instead of a solemn natural experience.

That said, the cinematic experience here, the actual act of watching, is so new, engaging and amazingly beautiful perhaps it's OK that this time the story is not any of those qualities. I can't help but feel that next time will be even better, even with Cameron at the reigns.  Avatar is big, beautiful, dumb and predictable with a blatant disregard for tiny tears in the plot. It dances around big concepts about life, the universe and everything without getting its pretty, blue, four-fingered hands dirty. It's visually mesmerizing despite its tired hero archetype and lazy portrayal of "the other."

One gets the feeling that plot issues got lost somewhere along the way. Perhaps they spent the rewrite time deciding how much bare alien breast they could get away with in a PG-13 flick.  Blue nipples are oddly distracting , okay?

***/*****

Avatar

open now

162 min and it feels like it

Writ/Dir/HMFIC*: James Cameron

Staring: Sam Worthington, Zoe Saldana, Sigourney Weaver, Stephen Lang

Rated: PG-13 for "intense epic battle sequences and warfare, sensuality, language and some smoking" oh, and epic corniness.

*Head Motherfucker in Charge. The acronym is written on his baseball cap on set.