Review: Avatar

SIGH-FI

The visuals are expectedly eye-popping, especially in 3-D, but couldn’t they have diverted a few dollars more towards the script?

DEC 20, 2009 – JUST BEFORE LANDING AT PANDORA – a distant moon in the not-too-distant future, described simply as the most hostile environment known to man – Col. Quaritch (Stephen Lang) roars to his troops, “Out there, beyond that fence, every living thing that crawls, flies or squats in the mud wants to kill you and eat your eyes for jujubes.” An instant frisson ran up my spine. What a sumptuous threat! And what a chilling prospect, coming from James Cameron, the director who invaded our imaginations with merciless cyborgs and the mother of all chest-ripping aliens! If he could conjure up those searing visions in mere 2-D, imagine what he could achieve with the extra dimension of depth! Would Avatar turn out to be the first sci-fi thriller where the oft-employed movie descriptor “plunged into an adventure” is rendered literal?

Each one of these expectations was thwarted, to my utter bafflement, when Pandora turned out to be a benign New Age haven, whose natives live in commune with nature. These creatures, called Na’vi, are tall and lithe and slender, with blue zebra-striped bodies and swishing tails and enormous yellow eyes, and they seem about as capable of the kind of violence Col. Quaritch hinted at as the furry, button-nosed Ewoks from The Return of the Jedi. As for that much-ballyhooed “hostile environment,” it’s just the air, which humans cannot survive on. (On Pandora, therefore, they transform into Na’vi avatars.) Otherwise, this is a gorgeous rainforest-Disneyland, dappled with shafts of sunlight and iridescent blooms and scuttling insects and growling CGI beasties that are so patently artificial as to pose little threat, at least to those of us expecting to cower in our seats – they don’t have the realness of the Jurassic Park dinosaurs, whose skin rippled like worn leather and whose teeth had yellowed with age.

Avatar, on the other hand, has no teeth. It feels like a sci-fi story envisioned by a tree-hugging schoolgirl from the 1980s, who wrote the first draft in longhand in a pink diary, probably after watching the Billie Jean video on MTV. (Isn’t that why the ground lights up every time the Na’vi put a foot forward?) It must something in the water in Hollywood these days – like David Fincher gave up chronicling bottled-up male angst and sought out his touchy-feely side in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Cameron is no longer the ballsy B-movie director he once was. The staggering success of Titanic appears to have convinced him that to truly shatter box-office records, he needs to move beyond a core base of sci-fi addicts and thrill-seeking teens – and hence the neutering of that initial promise of Pandora. Clearly, screams don’t stoke the appetites of a global audience as much as oohs and aahs, sprung from an easy-to-follow plot reassembled from easy-to-remember scraps of earlier global hits.

And yet, it was Gattaca, a relative underperformer, which I recalled as a switcheroo plot point began to play out. Jake Sully (Sam Worthington), a crippled Marine, takes the place of his dead twin in a mineral-mining mission to Pandora – one that will help humans solve their energy crisis but at the cost of displacing the Na’vi. Gattaca, however, was true sci-fi – more thought than thrills – and what Avatar wants to be is more of a myth. And so we have the Na’vi who, like the Jedi, believe there’s “a network of energy that flows through all living things.” (In a scene where the phosphorescent anemone-like “seeds of the sacred tree” cluster around Jake, symbolising his specialness, I half-expected Darth Vader to pop up and whisper, “The Force is strong with this one.”) Even the final battle of the Na’vi against the giant machines of their would-be conquerors is conceived along the lines of the battle at Endor where the Ewoks , with bows and arrows and slingshots, brought down Imperial walkers. And as no sci-fi film of the modern age can escape the influence of The Matrix, there is the contrivance of Jake being plugged into a sort-of simulacrum of Pandora and transformed into his Na’vi avatar.

The problem with Avatar isn’t that it’s derivative. (The story takes every single expected turn, as Jake goes native and adds another chapter to the cinematic continuum of the Joseph Campbell hero.) It’s surely no sin if a filmmaker uses these inspirations to fire his own imagination. But Cameron is so interested in the oohs and the aahs of his budget-buster that he’s content (or perhaps constrained) to leave these constructs hanging in the air – he doesn’t make them his own. The problem with Avatar, therefore, is that it’s generic. There’s nothing here except the extraordinary visuals, and after about an hour of kid-in-a-candy-store enchantment, I began to switch off. The relentless parade of oil-slick-rainbow colours of Pandora, instead, made me want to return to the sci-fi bleakness of the space shuttle. Among the more interesting images – and the ones the older Cameron would have dwelt on – are those of Jake moving about in his wheelchair in a chamber filled with machines (and no other people), or that of Jake documenting his experiences in a videolog.

And once the phantasmagoria of the visuals has worn off, you realise you’re sorely deprived of a story to sink your teeth into and characters to care about. (Despite the facial features of the Na’vi being modelled on real actors, it’s sometimes tough to tell them apart. As a result, only Sigourney Weaver, as a dryly witty scientist, gives anything close to a performance.) The questions keep coming. How is Jake accepted so easily by the Na’vi, who are otherwise so suspecting of outsiders? Even if the anemone-seeds singled him out, wouldn’t a trial by fire have made for more involving drama? Why did Cameron shortchange his most interesting conceit, that Jake could be unplugged, at will, from his Na’vi avatar? Why is the love story, between Jake and a Na’vi played by Zoe Saldaña, so lame? (It’s hard not to giggle when they “mate,” their tails wagging with coital contentment.) There are no answers – only messages. We should live in harmony with nature. We should live in harmony with our fellow creatures. And so forth.

Given this material, it’s tempting to think what a filmmaker working on a smaller scale could have gotten away with. Like the Ewoks, the Na’vi are aboriginals, their faces pocked with Maori tattoos and topped with Indian hairstyles. As the Indians did, most famously in Dances with Wolves, the Na’vi refer to others by colourful descriptors – the Na’vi avatars of humans are called “dreamwalkers” (what a great name!) because they are created while their hosts are asleep. (One of the Na’vi is even played by Hollywood’s resident Indian, Wes Studi.) And to depict these indigenous people – and “coloured” people; they are, quite literally, blue – routing a white race would be a startlingly revisionist take on American history, a parallel-dimension wish-fulfillment fantasy along the lines of how Quentin Tarantino, with Inglourious Basterds, reimagined the Jews vanquishing the Germans.

But while Cameron glosses over these subtexts – understandably so, given his budget and, more importantly, his intent of creating, above all, an all-ages 3-D spectacle – he isn’t above inserting “contemporary” political references. (A military campaign is described as “shock and awe.”) This is what happens when filmmakers of a certain stripe achieve a certain stature – they realise they need to play to the gallery, but because they’re elder statesmen now, they also feel the need to pontificate. There was a strong message about the dangers of attempting to colonise the universe in Aliens as well, but it was buried deep beneath the action-adventure aspects. Here, befitting a 3-D experience, everything is thrown at your face. Even the relationships that Cameron used to show and not tell earlier – the mother-child bond that animated Aliens, the father-son shadow that loomed over Terminator2: Judgment Day – are now spoken about rather than shown. The goings-on are so garrulous (and, after a point, so endless) that I began to long for someone to some to cut through the shamanistic mumbo-jumbo and talk some practical humanese. (My wish was granted by the corporate sleazebag embodied by Giovanni Ribisi. He plays a version of the corporate sleazebag Paul Reiser portrayed in Aliens, and when informed about the holiness of Pandora, the land he’s attempting to annihilate, he snaps sarcastically, “You throw a stick in the air out here and it’s going to land on a sacred fern or something.” It’s the one time I laughed out loud.)

It’s a relief, then, that Cameron still remembers how to stage a spectacle. If visual wow is all you seek from the movies, Avatar is a truly religious experience – especially parts of the apocalyptic battle sequence at the end, led by the good Col. Quaritch, who clearly loves the smell of napalm in the morning. The digital trickery isn’t all that different from that employed in the all-that-money-can-buy dogfights in the latter-day Star Wars installments, but the third dimension makes all the difference. And it is fun to see the old Cameron signatures – an action heroine in a white vest and aviator sunglasses, Sigourney Weaver with cigarettes, characters waking up from deep sleep in space – in their buffed-up 3-D avatars. This is a film best experienced in the IMAX format, which is the one way to ensure you get the you-are-there-ness of the visuals. For the non-IMAXers among us, a Gertrude Stein quip comes to mind: there’s no there there.

Star Ratings

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Posted in: Cinema: English