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 (122609) Arriving, appropriately enough at Christmas, James
Cameron's Avatar is very much like receiving a tie in a package wrapped by Frank
Lloyd Wright: innovative and gorgeous on the outside but terribly bland inside.
The television ads, trailers, and marketing promos for "Avatar," James Cameron’s
("Titanic," "True Lies," "Terminator 2: Judgment Day," "The Abyss," "Aliens,"
"The Terminator") return to narrative film-making (after a twelve-year hiatus)
promise a revolutionary, game-changing experience. Never one to shy away from
grandiose, hubris-influenced claims, Cameron hopes "Avatar," a 3D science
fiction/action/fantasy epic, will transport audiences to a singularly immersive
experience. That he comes close is a testament to that oft-used, oft-abused
word, “vision” (that and an estimated production budget anywhere from $250
million to $500 million). Vision is exactly what Cameron brings to "Avatar" and
its photo-realistic alien world, but it’s a vision undermined by clunky
dialogue, awkward plot points, superfluous voice-over narration, clichéd
characters, and an over-earnest, over-obvious environmental message.
Avatar is set 145 years in the future, in a dystopian future, a bleak, dystopian
future where humanity has continued down the environmentally destructive path
set in our time (a message Cameron, in "serious" filmmaker mode, conveys with
sledgehammer subtlety). Humans have burned through most non-renewable resources,
rain-forests are gone (a comment about the absence of green plant life on Earth
indicates as much), resource wars are the norm, and mega-corporations use the
military to provide security for resource exploitation on- and off-world. And if
the lead character is any indication, disabled veterans still don't care the
care they need and/or deserve and universal health-care is still a progressive
dream unfulfilled (his disability can be corrected through modern medicine, but
he can't afford the surgery).
The military protects a corporate-owned colony on Pandora, a lush, rain-forest
moon orbiting Polyphemus, a Jupiter-like planet in the Alpha Centuri system 4.3
light years from Earth (it takes six years to reach Pandora from Earth), so they
can mine “unobtainium,” a rare, expensive ($20 million/kilo according to one
character), superconducting metal. Cameron has described Pandora as “the Garden
of Eden with teeth and claws.” Populated by fierce, dangerous animals,
six-legged, multi-legged carnivores and herbivores on the ground and dragon- or
pterodactyl-like creatures in the air, humans are too frail to exist on Pandora
without the help of advanced military technology, including 12-foot tall A.M.P.
(Advanced Mobility Platform) suits and heavily armed gun ships.
To interact with the Na’vi, 10-foot tall blue humanoid aliens, humans have
turned to "avatars,” human-Na’vi hybrids operated via neural link. Over the
objections of Grace Augustine (Sigourney Weaver), the scientist running the
avatar program, the corporation’s Pandoran representative, Parker Selfridge
(Giovanni Ribisi), turns to Jake Sully (Sam Worthington), a paraplegic
ex-Marine, to take his dead brother’s place (avatars are extremely expensive to
grow and maintain). Along with a second scientist, Norm Spellman (Joel David
Moore), Augustine, and Sully (in their avatars) leave the mining colony to
explore Pandora. Almost immediately, Jake is separated from Augustine and
Spellman, forced to fend for himself against a massive, puma-like predator, a
Thanator. He escapes, but becomes the prey for a pack of viperwolves as night
falls. Luckily for Sully, Neytiri (Zoe Saldana), a warrior princess from a
nearby Na’vi clan, steps in to save him.
From there, Avatar follows the standard assimilation/acculturation story (e.g.,
The New World, Pocahontas, Last of the Mohicans, Dances With Wolves, A Man
Called Horse, John Carter on Mars), with Sully overcoming resistance from
Neytiri, Eytucan (Wes Studi), her father and clan leader, Mo’at, her mother and
spiritual leader (CCH Pounder), and another Na’vi warrior (and next in line for
clan leadership), Tsu’Tey (Laz Alonso). The Na’vi refer to themselves as the
Omaticaya (the "people"). They're a Neolithic, warrior-based culture (they have
bows and arrows, spears, and knives), but they’re also deeply spiritual,
believing in an all-protective Earth Mother (Gaia to us, Eywa to them) and a
Force-like connection between all living things, literalized through the
tendril-like queues that allow them to bond with animals and one another. On the
other hand, the humans on Pandora are at least partially defined by their lack
of spiritual beliefs or an unwillingness to express any beliefs whatsoever.
The Na'vi would be all the more clichéd if they were Africans (in their physical
appearance) or Native Americans (in their culture). And they’re blue-skinned
because few alternatives exist (green is already taken, for obvious reasons) and
anything resembling human pigmentation (i.e., from pinks to blacks) would add an
unnecessarily problematic subtext to Avatar, something Cameron was obviously
intent to avoid. Whatever his artistic pretensions and political beliefs,
Cameron strove to make a film with wide demographic appeal for audiences in the
United States and elsewhere. The production budget 20th-Century Fox gave Cameron
for Avatar demands nothing less.
Sully's CO, Col. Quaritch (Stephen Lang), has other ideas: he wants Sully to
infiltrate the Na’vi and pass back information that might prove decisive in a
military confrontation and that, of course, is exactly what Cameron delivers in
the third act (he rarely, if ever, subverts expectations). Cameron gives us a
persuasively photo-realistic battle scene, complete with gunships, A.M.P. suits,
Na’vi warriors, and Mountain Banshees engaged in battle. The animation may not
be as revolutionary or game-changing as the pre-release hype claimed, but it’s a
major step forward for computer animated, human-like characters, significantly
better than anything Robert Zemeckis (A Christmas Carol, Beowulf, The Polar
Express), Peter Jackson (The Lord of the Rings trilogy), or any other filmmaker
has delivered in the past.
Performances by the cast are hamstrung by the lacking script. Worthington as
Sully never is fully realized as a fleshed out character. He, like all the other
characters are types. The actors do what they can but they are done no favors by
the screenplay. Lang's character is a generic military heavy. The usually
reliable Sigourney Weaver does her best to breathe some life into the
proceedings but is fighting a losing battle. Indeed, Cameron's screenplay is so
heavily derivative, that I found myself playing a game while watching Avatar, to
pick out just where Cameron lifted his plot points and characters. He even rips
off himself with Rabisi's corporate executive. It is the EXACT same character
that Paul Reiser played in Aliens. There is, however, one performance in Avatar
that stands out from the pack. Zoe Saldana's ( Uhura in this years Star Trek)
performance as Neytiri may be all motion capture, but she lives and breathes a
realism and purity into the animation that feels alive.
Unfortunately, Cameron failed to write a screenplay equal to his talents as a
visual storyteller (or the best visual effects money could buy). Clichéd,
predictable plot points, on-the-nose dialogue, redundant voice-over narration
(from Sully, mostly via a video log), and underwritten characters were all
problems that could (and should) have been fixed at the screenplay stage. By his
own admission, Cameron wrote the screenplay (actually a “treatment”) fifteen
years ago and put it aside when he realized the technology wasn’t available to
actualize his vision for Pandora and "Avatar." Instead, we’re left with
pretentiousness that works against the visually immersive experience Cameron has
crafted over the last four years ("Avatar" began pre-production four years ago).
Whatever its faults (and it has many), "Avatar" is worth seeing for its visuals,
preferably on a 3D or 3D-IMAX screen.
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