Review: Avatar (2009)
Mark R. Leeper
(a film review by Mark R. Leeper)
CAPSULE: AVATAR is very much a DANCES WITH WOLVES
set on an alien world. It brings to the screen some
great imaginative sequences and some great lapses
in imagination. It is about great evils in our
past, but becomes a simplistic and self-righteous
polemic. Like James Cameron's previous film,
TITANIC, there are enough good bits to make a really
great film and enough bad bits to make a real
stinker. Go for what is good and ignore the bad.
Rating: high +1 (-4 to +4) or 6/10
Spoiler warning: There are some spoilers in this review.
When I was growing up in the 1960s, what I considered the most
beautiful science fiction images would show up on the cover of the
science fiction magazine ANALOG. An artist named Jack Schoenherr
painted many of these covers. To me science fiction worlds and
alien species looked exactly like Jack Schoenherr painted them.
Science fiction films always fell a little short of creating that
imagery, though I felt his influence in STAR WARS, DUNE, and LOST
IN SPACE. (Admittedly this art was not all by Schoenherr, but it
still showed his influence.) James Cameron is the first director
to create a world in a science fiction film that reminds me of
Analog. AVATAR has the most fully visually realized science
fiction world I can remember in a science fiction film. Cameron
has envisioned a beautiful alien world complete with only semi-
Earthlike creatures. Some of his images could be from ANALOG and
some from Cameron's own film THE ABYSS. There are dragons and
forest predators. There are horses and flying reptiles. The film
is a joy to look at. But it is not an unalloyed joy. The visuals
still had their problems. But I am getting ahead of myself.
The year is 2154 and Earth humans have a mining operation on the
alien world Pandora. Huge machines move the earth operated by men
who must wear masks in this atmosphere. The goal of the mining is
to get even miniscule amounts of the valuable mineral unobtanium.
The mining operation is running into trouble from the local
population, the Na'vi, who are so-called "savages". They are on
about the level of sophistication that the Native Americans were
when the Europeans came to the New World. The natives want the
mining operation to stay out of their sacred lands. To study the
local people Dr. Grace Augustine (played by Sigourney Weaver) uses
Avatars. These are alien-like bodies that humans when asleep, can
project their minds into. The humans basically created alien
bodies for themselves. One human who does this is Jake Sully (Sam
Worthington), a former Marine and now a paraplegic. He no longer
can have a good life as a human so after some coercion he agrees to
project his sleeping mind into an alien avatar. But being able to
put himself in the place of the Na'vi things go much the way they
did in DANCES WITH WOLVES or THE WILBY CONSPIRACY or DISTRICT 9.
He begins to appreciate them as people and to respect their
culture. Each film goes much the same way and makes the same
statement. There never is any doubt that that is what Cameron, who
wrote AVATAR as well as directed, is going to do with this story.
What surprised me was how heavily and pretentiously he lays on this
message.
Now what did I dislike about the visuals? Well, the aliens are
basically human-like with faces and tails like big cats. This goes
back to the imagery described by Edgar Rice Burroughs whose alien
creatures on Mars were chimera-like combinations of Earth
creatures. How likely is it that something would evolve with human
bodies and cat faces? How much different would the story have been
had the combination been pigs with cat faces? We have that "Star
Trek" conceit working for us that almost all aliens look like us.
The females all had luscious bodies that were only minimally
covered. It is convenient that in their culture they have chosen
to cover the same anatomical bits that we do. And there seem to be
loose-hanging bits of their harem-like costumes. Somehow they are
not all scratched up. It makes for enjoyable images, but it does
not take much thinking. The animals of the planet come in shapes
and much like variations on Earth creatures. When we see a native
horse, there is no doubt in our mind that it is a horse even if its
lines are somewhat different. It has six legs, but it still is
obviously a horse. Cameron does not stray too far from Earth
animals on Pandora.
The story is very much like the history of what happened to Native
Americans in our own country, very likely the Lakota of the Black
Hills of South Dakota. The had their sacred lands, and they were
sitting on the their own version of "unobtanium", namely gold. But
there is in the film no one who asks if the situation is not a lot
like how the Native Americans were treated in the Americas and
isn't history's verdict that that was a terrible injustice? It is
possible that a supremely irresponsible government might ignore the
rights of the indigenous population, but that nobody even notices
the parallels needed some serious explanation in the script and it
is just not there. Cameron takes shots at the American military
(or the government) from the Indian Wars up to the Iraq War. He
makes a comment about how we find some resource we want and then
declare the people who have it "the enemy". I may sometimes feel
that was the reason, but it is a bit of an oversimplification.
Even if I agree with Cameron, I respect the alternative view and
not think this particular piece of politics belongs in this film.
Ironically, the same corporation that brings you Fox News produced
the film. The Fox Corporation is so big occasionally pieces it try
to sue other pieces and have to be reminded that a company should
not sue itself.
Some problems could have been fixed. Apparently cigarettes and
attack helicopters will be a lot the same in 2154 as they are
today. So will be phrases like "in *this* economy" and "shock and
awe" that are more from our time than of 2154.
AVATAR is what I call a film of high standard deviation. Parts and
aspects of the film are a lot better than other parts. So with
some ambivalence I give AVATAR a middling rating of high +1 on the
-4 to +4 scale or 6/10.
Film Credits: <http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0499549/>
What others are saying:
<http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/avatar/>
Mark R. Leeper
mle...@optonline.net
Copyright 2009 Mark R. Leeper
Tim Skirvin
way or the other, you get to enjoy an over-the-top action-fest with lots of
eye candy and miscellaneous silliness; and sometimes, you even end up with
something worth seeing and thinking about later. Sure, they're also
generally reviewer-proof, but isn't that part of the fun? And the most fun
comes when you get to see the movie on opening night, with as big and
motivated of a crowd as you can find. There's just something about getting
home at 3am after a sci-fi blockbuster...
Of course, that's not quite how I saw _Avatar_. The good son and
brother that I am, I decided to hold off and see the movie with my father
and brother after Christmas. I tried to avoid the reviews, I insisted that
we find an IMAX 3D theatre to see it in, and I planned ahead enough to
order tickets the night before. But in the back of my mind, I thought about
how I'd missed out on the proper "experience" of the movie, and how I'd
converted it to just (just?) a family bonding moment. I was a little bit
disappointed, but in a "I have done my duty" kind of way. Family comes
first, especially good family.
Shockingly, in this case the experience was just as good a week
after the movie's release.
Two things made the difference. First of all, the movie was
*packed*. Ordering those tickets ahead turned out to have been vital; and
getting to the theatre a half hour ahead of time was just barely enough
time to get our popcorn before the movie began, and even then we had to sit
in the second row (a *horrible* idea in an IMAX theatre). And second, the
movie really was big and shiny enough to make up for the week's delay. The
movie took a decade to make; what's an extra seven days at that point?
The special effects were, of course, the star of the show. Were
they as good as all that? Well, yes. Yes they were. The 3D was top-notch,
adding to the scenes in every case and never seeming gimmicky. The
motion-capture characters finally looked *good*, after years of
adequate-at-best experiences with movies like _Beowulf_ or _The Polar
Express_. The models were detailed, interesting to look at, and thematic.
And the effects as a whole seemed both flashy and *necessary*, a
combination that I haven't seen often in the last few years.
(But... revolutionary? I don't know about that. There wasn't
anything particularly *new* there; there was just years and years of
*refinement*, the sense that the technology could be used by the filmmaker
for the good of the movie. The question is not whether the effects have
changed the world; it's whether they show a world where such effects can be
used to advance a story, instead of replacing the story. I suppose that
could be a revolution.)
The story was better than I had been led to believe. Yes, the story
was shallow; presumably the detail were available in the visuals or the
back-story, but somehow even that didn't feel like the point. Yes, the main
character's story arc resembled _Dances With Wolves_ - but I rather enjoyed
that movie, to be honest, and my personal opinion is that the overall
structure more resembled _Dune_ than anything else (and what more worthy
story is there to copy, I ask you?). And yes, the other humans were
*beyond* shallow, having a first-degree motivation at best (and sometimes
not even that). Still, this wasn't *garbage*, which is what I had come in
expecting. So I was content.
The acting was, oddly, pretty good. Some parts of it were
over-the-top, but mostly those came from the humans; the parts played by
the CGI Na'vi were, for the most part, pretty darned good. The decision to
have the eponymous Avatars look like their actors really did work for me,
even it was a bit odd to see a Na'vi Jane Goodall (Sigourney Weaver).
And the science and technology portrayed in the movie - well, yay!
I got a little bit of computer interface design, which always perks me up;
I got a lot of organic interface technology, which was fascinating and
oddly plausible-sounding; I got mecha; I got a fairly interesting
ecosystem, including a Protoss-esque alien race; and I got a few
interesting anthropological ideas tossed in that took advantage of the
above. As an added bonus, I even got a Stanford sweatshirt.
And so, I came out satisfied. I'll be a bit disappointed if this
wins any Oscars outside of technical categories, but that's okay.
That's not to say that I came out *content*. I wish that the
dangers of the planet Pandora had been *shown* to us, rather than just
told. I wish that an explanation had been offered for what made
"unobtanium" so important besides sheer economic value. I wish that there
had been some nuance as to the corporation's motivations, rather than just
"profit GOOD!". I wish that the final battle had offered some useful
tactics and/or strategies, rather than just consisting of "let's put all of
our forces in a general area and have them fight it out". I wish that the
time frame had seemed less... arbitrary. And, most of all, I wish that
somebody had looked at the movie as a whole, and realized that all of these
points could have been provided with less than five minutes of additional
footage, total. The mistake was made to cut the movie too much, and that
irked me pretty seriously.
So, all of that said (with as few spoilers as I could offer): it's
flawed, but it's worth seeing, fun, and a whole lot better than it could
have been. I do recommend seeing it, and I recommend seeing it in 3D on the
best screen you can see it on. I don't recommend going in expecting the
next _Star Wars_ or _Titanic_; you're not going to get either, and you
probably don't care.
***
- Tim Skirvin (tski...@killfile.org)
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