BOTH AN eyeful and a brain drain, Avatar is like meeting a gorgeous, high-cheekboned fashion model who has just had a lobotomy. Avatar caps a year that was to animation what 1939 was to studio films—the increased color range and delicacy of CGI were essential to 2009’s banquet of 2-D and 3-D animation, and Avatar‘s visuals are part of that triumph.
Despite what’s been claimed, though, you know you’re watching animated characters. Motion capture doesn’t always mean motion release. The timing appears off and the facial expressions oversimplified. It’s clear that we’re looking at synthespians.
And another thing: director James Cameron’s script is an absolute embarrassment. Avatar‘s financial success or failure isn’t my problem, but this time maybe Cameron will be exposed. Something needs to test his faith in his own ability to source other people’s plots without being detected.
In the future, an unnamed Very Big Corporation is shipping mercenaries to the planet Pandora, where 9-foot-tall, blue-skinned noble savages called Na’vi live in a phosphorescent forest full of saurian beasts. The earthling invaders have excavated a vast open-pit mine, guarded by mercenaries.
Jake (Michael J. Fox avatar Sam Worthington) is the paraplegic brother of a dead soldier who has agreed to take his brother’s place in an experimental program. The idea is to link Jake’s brain to a genetically engineered Na’vi shell; the program is under the direction of a chain-smoking biologist (Sigourney Weaver, no help). And—after the usual rituals—Jake becomes a member of this peace-loving people’s tribe, helped by the space Pocahontas Neytiri, played by a motion-captured Zoë Saldana.
This princess sports giraffe ears and spots, brandy-snifter-size golden eyes and a literal Barbie-doll physique, with an elongated torso and teeny hips. Wide-set eyes are essential to movie glamour—if you can’t tell what a person is looking at, they are mysterious. The Na’vi’s long Zardoz-like braids conceal filaments; they can plug into the plants and animals of Pandora to commune with their spirits.
Jake spends his days learning Na’vi lore, reverence for “Eywa,” the mother goddess of them all, and how to pray for the spirits of animals he skewers. But he is also reminded of his duties by a Marine colonel (Stephen Lang) who proudly wears his scarred face as a reminder of how the Na’vi can kill you—and also that scar-faced people are always evil. The plan to relocate the Na’vi will include deadly force.
There’s a kind of romance in the idea of a forest giantess and a crippled human gasping in the thin air; the movie will appeal to men who love strong women for all the wrong reasons. Yet it’s also an insult to the women in the audience when Neytiri tells Jake to break a Pandoran horse, “You must choose him, and he must choose you,” but it’s up to him, the male, to choose a bride for life.
Plotwise, Avatar is a blue-dyed remake of Dances With Wolves. Politically, Avatar has resonance; it fits in with our horror of redwood and rainforest crunching and the terror that no one will ever be able to fix the environment on Earth.
There are certain references to the Forever War in Afghanistan and guilt at the terrible age of colonization. In actual history, there are shades to this tragedy: there are usually wars between tribes, and conquerors always use disaffected tribespeople as intermediaries. Cameron glosses over this potential plot thickener. Why go to all the trouble to infiltrate the Na’vi by disguising as them, especially when it’s clear to them right away that the humans are “Dreamwalkers”—fake Na’vi?
The cast stumbles around the knowledge of the all-interconnected life on Pandora, as if no one had heard the Gaia hypothesis. Perhaps we’re supposed to approach the movie so wowed by the visuals that we won’t ask any questions. As a line reminds us, “It is hard to fill a cup that is already full.” (“That’s what the Moonies tell you,” retorted a friend.)
Cameron purées a lot of non-European cultures into a blueberry-colored pudding. The Na’vi engage in South Pacific–style seated dances and they paint initiates into their tribe as Australian aboriginals do, but they’re also like Plains Indians, yipping as they ride. A cavalcade of movie references (“We’re not in Kansas anymore”) will still be in effect a century or two from now, and this planet’s witty name is one of the only references to a broader Earth culture. Strange, though, that there are so few Philip K. Dick references to the question of who Jake is, even as he loses sleep trying to lead two lives at once.
The action sequences, however modified by the backdrops, are fairly routine: some relatively good early jungle-adventure moments give way to a neo–helicopter armada attack on a fortress of floating rocks or the bulldozing of a sacred tree several miles high. A very improved Michelle Rodriguez plays one of the pilots; she has certainly learned how to give a little to the camera since her first films. Much is recycled from Aliens in a new location despite the whirligig birds, the air jellyfish (seeds of the sacred tree) and the modified dinosaurs.
Fans who insist that there’s no reason to make an intelligent story to go with superior graphics hold back the cause of science fiction. Umberto Eco wrote that Casablanca wasn’t a movie, it was the movies. Similarly, Avatar isn’t a movie, it is the tragedy of the movies: a thrilling technology capable of uniting the world in the hands of types who can’t see past the good-guys, bad-guys rites of a playground.
Local theaters, show times and tickets at MovieTimes.com.
AVATAR (PG-13; 162 min.), directed and written by James Cameron, photographed by Mauro Fiore and Vince Pace and starring Sam Worthington and Zoë Saldana, opens Dec. 18.
