Avatar

To say I love films of every creed & colour would be blatant lie. I don’t, for example, get my knickers in a twist when a new Twilight movie flashes its cute teeth, and I can easily contain myself when Michael Bay wanks his robots all over my screen. What I do love though, is to go & watch a movie that isn’t based on anything else; that comes from a director whose action flicks are among the most exciting things captured on 35 mm film, and that’s also such a big-dicked venture that it’s bound to get a lot attention.

You know, a movie like Avatar.

What the fuck it is

Avatar is a far-future science-fiction film from James “Titanic” Cameron, and it’s also the first movie he’s made since Titanic became the second biggest grossing movie in the history of moving pictures (after “Gone with the Wind”, adjusted for inflation o’ course). It also stars Sam “Who?” Worthington, best known for starring in a film (you didn’t see) called Terminator: Salvation, and Sigourney “Ripley” Weaver, best known for starring in the Alien franchise.

Worthington plays Jake Sully, a crippled marine on wheels who takes over his twin brother’s job on a scientific mission to the alien planet called “Pandora” – a lush & dangerous planet full of monsters, valuable minerals & native humanoids called Na’vi (Big Ass Thundermurfs).  His twin brother, you see, was a highly trained professor who’d trained long & hard to be a part of the “Avatar” programme. “Huh?” you say? Well, the “Avatar” programme is really a process where your mind is transferred to a Na’vi body that’s specially grown to be finely tuned to your nervous system. All this is done in an effort to study Pandora & get closer to the natives, so that they can understand them better and so on.

Jake Sully, then, is introduced to the Na’vi, a tree-hugging race that has no trust or use for us regular humans. But you see, there’s something special about Jake. He’s taken into their tribe & taught their ways, and it doesn’t take long until you see the makings of a sweeping story of love & heavy-handed messages about environmentalism (all though with better explosions than Al Gore’s version).

The other major characters include Sigourney Weaver’s “Chief scientist” role, a native princess of sorts called Neytiri (i.e. the love interest)  & a trigger-happy Colonel with a hard-on for clichéd one-liners & Full Metal Jacket-esque speeches.

The Easy Reason to Like It…

… isn’t very hard to pin point: It’s drop dead gorgeous. And I don’t mean gorgeous as in “I’d like to see that movie with its tits out”, but in the “I’d like to take this movie to the park, pour it a glass of wine & tell it why I’m actually a lot like that Richard Gere”.

Avatar is the first movie I can remember having so good CGI that I had no trouble what-so-ever believing in this alien environment. But while the landscapes are enough to gape at, the real accomplishment is the facial subtleties that are so convincingly delivered by the avatars & the Na’vi. It didn’t feel like there was a man behind the curtain with his hand up their bums at all, which is why you don’t spend most of the movie slightly amused by the fact that you’re essentially watching an epic version of Dances with Thunder Smurfs.

The Easy Reason to Make Fun of it…

… isn’t the lame Smurf jokes I’ve been pulling. No, the easy reason lies with the script, and especially with dialogue. Now, James Cameron has never been accused of being very gifted in this regard. He always goes for the pathos filled lines that often get so clunky that you can almost hear them fall rattling to theatre floor, causing ripples of mirth to spread throughout the audience.

I could, however, give those a scenes a pass if the movie wasn’t so darned… well, stupid is harsh word, so I guess I’ll go with simplistic. After we’re introduced to our characters & have gotten a feel what’s going on, you actually know what’s going to happen. There’s no surprises, no plot twists you don’t hear coming like a god-damned T-Rex stomping through the forest, and a couple character motivations border on caricatures. There’s no middle ground in Avatar; no black & white (maybe that should be blue & white, harr harr), and any character arcs beside the main character’s, are virtually non-existent. I mean, there’s a pilot that you maybe could make an argument for, but she was a really minor character that really didn’t add anything to story other than moving the plot forward.

Oh my, we’re in the nitty gritty now!

In other words, Avatar is about as subtle as a brick to head. First off, the imagery & heavy-handed metaphors almost as bad as something you’d find in a Brother’s Grimm fairy tale. Now, you may think this is a criticism from my part (it is), but it’s also kind of a relief. Stories now-a-days have become so de-constructed that I sometimes just wish someone could tell me a straight story and be done with it, which is exactly what Avatar is.

But telling a straight story doesn’t mean you can get away with being stupid. Avatar essentially takes its plot from tales mired in history, like Pocahuntas or a Dances with Wolves, but where those stories actually make sense, Avatar doesn’t. I mean, the movie begins with Jake Sully getting out of five-year long cryo-freeze. It took them five years and only-Cameron-knows-how many light-years to get to Pandora, and then they spent a shit-load of money on an avatar programme? To do what? To get the Na’vi to move their homestead away from the riches mineral deposit inside 200 km of their base? You mean they just spent billions of dollars to avoid the bad press of killing Na’vi, just because they couldn’t be arsed to go further than 200 km? And you’re telling me that while we’ve aquired the tech to transfer our minds into alien bodies, we haven’t developed a mining method more nature-friendly than a bull dozer?

Fuck you, script-writer. I ain’t buying it.

I Guess This Would Be the Part Called the Conclusion

That’s just it, though. Avatar might be simple-minded, but that might also be why it kind of works. It’s so full of archetypes & familiar plot lines that all pay off that you have no trouble whatsoever being blinded by it by the amazing visuals & the surreal experience of trying to care about blue people. Avatar is that ol’ magic trick that you’ve seen a thousand times before, but instead of pulling a rabbit out of the hat, Cameron pulls a sparkly, fully CGI-rendered bunny out of his gorgeous assistance’s pixelated  ass.

It’s a neat trick, and I wouldn’t say no to a repeat viewing, but I’ll be damned if it’s subtle.