Review: Avatar

What is there left that hasn’t been said about Avatar? First of all, yes, it’s gorgeous to look at. James Cameron really puts the emphasis on immersing you in a weirdly beautiful world of fluorescent trees, glowing dandelion pods, and flying dragons.  The big blue people are beautiful (and yes, sexy) as well, moving through the jungle with preternatural grace.  The fight scenes are big, but they’re not poorly edited and impossible to follow as in the style of so many action movies these days.

Second, to agree with the second point everyone else has raised, the story is mindnumbingly predictable post-colonial white guilt claptrap.  The dialogue is almost George Lucas bad, and everything that’s going to happen is telegraphed ages in advance (sure, let’s spend a whole scene describing some great heroic act that only happens every few generations- you don’t suppose the hero will do that very thing before the end of the movie, do you?).  I agree with the comparisons to Ferngully and Dune and Dances with Wolves (although I admit I’ve never watched Dances with Wolves, I’ve pretty much got the idea). The one comparison that sprang to mind which I haven’t heard anyone else make is to The Dark Crystal, in which the creators got so wrapped up in building a beautiful and internally consistent world from scratch that they didn’t leave any time for building an equally interesting and unique story.

I think Annalee Newitz is right that this film has a serious problem in its (metaphorical but inarguable) depiction of race, and I further think that SEK is right that we should go ahead and call that problem what it is: racism.  Cameron sets out with clear intentions of respecting indigenous people, but you can’t just fall into the same old “noble naked savages with feathers in their braided hair communing with horses and being one with the Earth Mother” trope and act like that’s okay.  It’s not okay, and we need to move past it.

I did think it was kind of interesting how Cameron finds a reasonably believable pseudo-scientific justification for the whole “connection to all living things” idea by giving the aliens a cluster of tendrils (like a biological USB port) that they can connect to plants and animals to communicate psychically with them.  Usually, when science fiction features psychic powers, there’s a big suspension-of-disbelief pill to swallow in the idea of dualism (that our minds exist outside our brains), since real science has repeatedly found that it just doesn’t hold up, as much as we might like it to.  By creating a physical, nervous connection between two discrete beings, Cameron gets around that problem.  Of course, when it’s all in the service of creating an imaginary race that’s even more like we want American Indians to be than American Indians actually are, it’s hard to really appreciate this innovation.

I also have to say that I’m really, really sick of the “military asshole” archetype embodied here by Colonel Miles Quaritch.  Wasn’t this exact same guy in District 9 too?  The problem with a character like this (aside from the fact that he’s obnoxious for every moment he’s on screen) is that it embodies everything that’s wrong with militarism in one cartoonishly villainous character, and then the audience waits in great anticipation for the scene where he gets his, and then he does, and everyone cheers “Hooray, we’ve defeated militarism!”  I’m sorry, Hollywood screenwriters and action movie fans, but you can’t kill a noxious ideology by putting arrows through some asshole’s chest.  For that matter, you can’t rid the world of greed by packing Giovanni Ribisi into a spaceship and sending him away, but whatever.

In closing, I’ll say this: If you have any interest at all, even a little bit, in ever seeing Avatar, SEE IT IN THE THEATRE.  The spectacle is all it has going for it, and it will be totally pointless on a TV (no matter how big, flat, and HD).