James Cameron’s long-awaited Avatar, sold for months as a cinematic “game-changer,” is finally here and both the best and the worst thing that can be said for the visionary director’s decade-long pet project is that it is exactly what it looks like.
On the one hand, it is a leap forward in action film-making from one of today’s foremost auteurs, marrying real-life acting with breathtaking computer-generated imagery on a scale never achieved before. On the other hand, Avatar is a disagreeable by-the-numbers morality tale about capitalism and colonialism which predictably pits bloodthirsty, profit-hungry marines against a native population of noble earth worshipers.
Avatar 
Directed by James Cameron. |
We are introduced to the world of Pandora through Jake Sully (Sam Worthington), a disabled former marine given the opportunity to earn himself a new, working pair of legs by infiltrating the society of the indigenous Na’vi culture.
Pandora’s most valuable mineral resource – named “unobtainium” in a vexingly cutesy moment that must have seemed to Cameron as though it would get lost in the minutiae of his world-building – is concentrated right beneath the temple-like Hometree of the local Na’vi tribe, and human business-types want it.
Running the corporate operation is administrator Parker Selfridge (Giovanni Ribisi), a brash entrepreneur with no belief in the existence of setbacks. And heading security – perhaps contributing to Selfridge’s myopia – is the bigoted and abrasive Colonel Quaritch (Stephen Lang), essentially Cruella de Vil in army fatigues.
With bulldozers en route to the Na’vi Hometree through the dense Pandoran jungle, Jake and his research team have a matter of weeks to gain the trust of the Na’vi and convince them to relocate from their traditional territories to avoid all-out war.
However, Jake’s time spent with the Na’vi causes an inexorable acculturation, for which Avatar was lampooned on a South Park episode as “Dances with Smurfs.” Ultimately, “Dances with Pocahontas in FernGully” would be more apropos, but the underlying issue is that, having been marketed as a wildly original story, Avatar is in fact anything but.
Even overlooking the question of originality, Avatar’s slavish adherence to convention nearly eclipses the natural beauty of Pandora’s landscapes and wildlife.
The Na’vi are a gentle, spiritual and communal people with profound respect for nature – bien sûr. Set against them are the tyrannical military caricature and the icon of heartless corporate greed, two broad-stroke clichés neither relatable nor understandable as human characters, despite traces of plausibility. When Jake is lost in the woods, of course he meets a beautiful Na’vi – the daughter of her tribe’s chieftain, no less – who ultimately falls deeply in love with him. Of course he will love her back, change his allegiance, and help to lead the Na’vi against human colonization. Of course it will climax with awesomely violent warfare.
Aggravating this numbing predictability is the disappointing familiarity of Pandora. The inhabitants are bipedal humanoids, with the generic African tribe as their terrestrial analogue. Sure, the forest is sprinkled liberally with bio-luminescence, but the flowers are just deep-sea tube worms and the fauna – including hammerhead-rhinoceroses and parrot-pterodactyls – are symmetrical reconfigurations of earth animals.
However – and this is a big however – Avatar’s saving grace is the sheer audacity of its vision and execution. Even when we know exactly where he’s going, which is most of the time in Avatar, Cameron makes the journey enjoyable.
For example, there is a classic stock scene – as recycled in King Kong, Star Wars and this year’s Star Trek – in which the hero is attacked by a monster which is then devoured by an even more fearsome monster, and so on. Cameron gives it to us once more in Avatar, but with such breathless energy that it almost feels new again.
The film is full of moments of sheer awe, from Jake’s discovering the wildlife of Pandora to his first experience of flight, from the ceremonies of the Na’vi to the beautifully shot chaos of total war. And make no mistake, there is enough action here to satisfy the fans Cameron earned with Terminator, Aliens, and True Lies.
If anything, Avatar’s real weakness is that it does the representation of native peoples a disservice (as did The Last Samurai, among others) by depicting indigenous populations as reliant on external salvation when they conflict with “civilization.” And by assigning worth to the Na’vi partly on the basis of their functioning biological Wi-Fi network, Avatar begs uncomfortable questions about the status of their real-world analogues, whose spirituality does not manifest in breathtakingly visible ways.
But most important, despite impossible hype, Avatar succeeds on the fundamental level of transporting us to a different world. The message is an important one: might does not make right. The medium is an effective one: lush 3-D as you have never seen it before. Like Jurassic Park on steroids, Avatar is a rollicking good time.