Okay, so I contributed to the James Cameron Self Love Fund and saw AVATAR. Yesterday we went to the 3-D showing (no way I would spend money on the normal view, I can wait for the DVD the way I do with 99% of the movies I see anymore). I’ve had a day to think about it now and I’ve come to some conclusions, which are hardly profound, but I think worth saying.
Let me say up front that I wasn’t bored. Visually, this is a stunning achievement. But that’s what everyone is saying. It is, in fact, the best 3-D I’ve ever seen. Often in the past the effect is minimal and the cost in headache high. This was neither. And it fully supported the visuals rather than masking mundane or poor image elements. Pandora, the planet involved, is magnificently realized. Cool stuff. Real gosh wow.
The biology is problematic. You have a wide mix of lifeforms analogous to Earth. Some big lumbering critters like hippos or rhinoceri that also have features of a dinosaur, and some small things that are clearly wolves, and one big nasty cat-like thing that’s like a sabertooth tiger. It’s unclear if any of these creatures are mammalian, but it doesn’t matter much. Dinosaur analogs. Most of them apparently four-legged. But the “horses†the natives ride are six-legged, reminiscent of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ thoats. How does that play out in evolutionary terms? Well, maybe that’s a quibble.
How then do you evolve humanoids out of this? Well, maybe that’s a quibble, too. This film is not about science on any level, regardless of the few bits of dialogue suggesting there are, you know, scientists, and that there is a studyable cause to any of this.
Because the story, basically, is hackneyed, cynical, and cliched. I have to hand it to Cameron, he rips off the best. Strong elements of Anne McCaffery’s Pern in here, as well as Heinlein’s Starship Troopers and a nod to LeGuin (The Word For World Is Forest), Poul Anderson (Call Me Joe), even Joe Haldeman (All My Sins Remembered). If I dug through my memories I could probably come up with at least half a dozen more clear “borrowings†all mixed in. There’s not an original idea in any two minutes.
The plotline, however, is straight out of post-colonial self-loathing and Western angst and while there is much to be mined from that pool that is legitimate for drama, its deployment here was purely sentimental button-pushing. All the triggers were in place, with strong connections to the American Indian, Vietnam, and even a bit of Afghanistan just to bring it up to date. And it was all thrown into the mix regardless of the logic behind it, which is profoundly flawed. The few genuinely interesting touches are overhwelmed by the self-righteous indignation Cameron clearly wished to evoke. We see Pocahontas, Dances With Wolves, and Custer’s Last Stand all in service to making a statement about…
The Big Bad Nasty Western Corporate Oligarchy Bent On Destroying Everything To Mine The Last Fragment Of Coal.
In this case, Unobtanium.
Which is somehow worth the cost of an expedition that would bankrupt the planet for the next century.
Which, if we buy the premise that interstellar travel is now practical, would be a pointless exercise in colonial assholery with no upside in terms of profit or prestige, because that one assumption means we’ve solved our energy and resource problems and the scenario depicted rests upon a 19th Century mindset that would no longer be supportable—just as it pretty much isn’t now.
Which makes AVATAR a rather stupid movie.
Not that there wouldn’t be a way to actually sell this with a little extra work. With a bit more imagination. With less desire to beat up on a cultural motif that doesn’t actually need a half-billion dollar 3-D piece of propagandistic hyper sentimentalized derivative schlock movie to achieve.
Very simply posit that these trespassers are rogues. It could be done in any of a number of ways and actually make a better story. Not much better, perhaps, but it might be a little less cynical…
Why am I bothering to detail all this? Because, beautiful as this film is—and it is beautiful—it pisses me off to see so much money dumped into a third-rate piece of hack writing when there are fine artists and projects begging for a little support, who have stories that would benefit the world much more than this dead-end preaching.
End of rant.