- Avatar
- OPENING: 12/18/2009
- STUDIO: Fox
- RUN TIME: 162 min
- ACCOMPLICES:
Trailer, Official Site
The Charge
“You should see the looks on your faces.”
Opening Statement
James Cameron’s event 3D extravaganza has already made sackfuls of money. Apparently no one cares about story or characters or stuff making sense any more.
Facts of the Case
Some time in the future, when mankind has decimated the Earth’s natural resources through pollution and deforestation and non-stop intercontintental plane trips to promote huge blockbuster movies, a shady corporation has traveled to the magical world of Pandora to mine for something called Unobtainium, which is worth big money.
Unfortunately, the natives of Pandora, tall blue-skinned cat-like creatures called the Na’vi, are resistant to the encroachment of the imperialist Yankee dogs, er, I mean, reckless corporate mercenaries, and the two sides are perilously close to all-out war.
In a final stab at diplomacy, the corporation’s science wing has developed the Avatar program, which allows humans to link up with synthetic Na’vi bodies and run around the lush forest world. Enter Jake Scully (Sam Worthington), a paralyzed ex-Marine who finds himself sucked deep within the Na’vi clan. So far so good. Now if only he doesn’t blow it by falling in love with the clan’s princess and going native then the deranged security chief won’t have to commit unspeakable atrocities with the full-throated support of the American GIs, er, I mean the awful bastard hired killers.
The Evidence
Warning: Heavy spoilers below!
You ever feel like you’ve gone through your personal looking glass and the whole world is whacked? Up is down, black is white, cats are dogs are living together and, now, Avatar is being proclaimed as the greatest piece of entertainment ever forged. Just look at some of the fawning reviews over at Rotten Tomatoes; this is a movie that I am convinced has caused critics to take a leave of their senses.
What am I missing? Did I see the same movie as everyone else, or was I one of the few to see the Half-Baked Straight-to-DVD Disney Plot cut? I haven’t had this much of a negative, visceral reaction to a hyped blockbuster since…well, never, since no movie has been as hyped as Avatar. “Movies will never be the same.” “Game-changer.” Etc.
My balls.
Look, before you lay the “lighten up buddy, it’s just a scifi action movie for entertainment,” let me just stop your right there. It’s not. Avatar is a message movie and not a very subtle one at that. While jammed full of pyrotechnics and CGI implemented on a huge scale, the film is interested more in Speaking Truth to Power than pumping out a solid popcorn experience. How else to explain the broad generalizations of the good guys (flawless “Noble savages”) and the bad guys (monstrous ex-Marines following a psychopath without question) and the intrusive chunks of social commentary (Colonel Miles Quaritch: “We’ll fight terror with terror”–what does that even mean, dumbass? What precisely has the Na’vi done to “terrorize” you? They’re perfect creatures that talk to @#$%#$&$ trees!).
Cameron is intent on sticking to his talking points and if that comes at the expense of mirth–this as humorless a movie about dragon-riding cat warriors from space as you’re ever going to find–and plot points and character actions that make sense, then SO BE IT.
Let’s start with the biggie, the lack of interesting people. Our main guy, Jake Scully, is a limp, charisma-free hero who moves between clumsy, nature-hating buffoon (how many times does Neytiri the Na’vi princess have to tell him to stop backhanding the magical butterfly cotton balls before he gets it?) to full-on slaughterer of American soldiers, er, ex-Marine-turned-heartless-murderers. Worse, we find out at the end, thanks to his narration, that the humans are being set back to their “dying world.” Hey, muchos gracias Jake! It’s not our fault down here that Colonel Quaritch is nuts and now all of us on Earth, including your extended family and former high school basketball teammates I might add, are sentenced to a slow death.
Zoe Saldana does a nice mocap job with Neytiri, but she’s shackled with a boring, one-dimensional heroine, the exact type you’ve seen millions of times before. She’s cunning and strong and always right and feels attracted to the outsider but holds back from a carnal entanglement until the worst possible time.
Then we’ve got the villains, who are crafted with the nuance of a Scud missile. Giovanni Ribisi’s slimy corporate head honcho is all evil, even when faced with the horrific fallout of actions taken in direct opposition to his orders. He wanted the Na’vi removed humanely (of course just because it would look bad back on Earth, not because he has anything even resembling a moral code) but when Quaritch defies him and nukes the Na’vi’s home tree, hey, whatevs. It’s not like anyone has a mobile phone camera to grab video of Na’vi children running around on fire to post online or anything. So screw those blue monkeys! (His words).
And then there was Quaritch, a neverending source of comic relief though he wasn’t written like that. This guy is not only psychopathic but utterly incompetent. Look, if the dude got results then maybe we can look past his unrestrained bloodlust, but as a tactician he’s a joke. Why is he so evil by the way? Who knows. He’s not offered a bigger slice of the Unobtainium haul, he doesn’t feel compelled to save Earth, he got a bunch of scratches on his face from the local wildlife but that isn’t genocide-provoking is it? Nope. He’s merely an imbecilic, bat-@#$% insane cartoon character who says stuff like “Come to papa!” and runs around with his shoulder on fire.
Oh, and Michelle Rodriguez is in this as “Michelle Rodriguez.”
No-dimensional characters aren’t anything exotic in Hollywood blockbusters. And if the story is coherent and the action is awesome, who cares right? Well, the action is awesome, but it is precisely because of the plot’s implosion that the mayhem rings hollow.
Set aside the corny predictability of our goofy hero turning into a tribe leader, banging the princess (whose fiance, by the way, gets over the humiliation fairly quickly), going native and fighting against his own people, there is a gaping example of storytelling sleight-of-hand here: the fate of Earth.
Remember when Parker reels off his handy bit of exposition to Sigourney Weaver’s character Grace (who you would think would be up on the whole point of the mission seeing she’s the one in charge of the Avatar program) he makes a passing mention of Unobtainium and how it’s a powerful mineral and that it’s worth a lot of money. And that’s all we get as far as why the mineral is important, right? So as the audience member I’m just going along thinking this evil corporation and the soulless dickheads who work for it are looking to displace the poor Na’vi to make a lot of money, but it isn’t until Jake’s final voice-over that we discover that, what do you know Earth’s dying and this mineral would have saved it. Which then means at one point, unless everyone involved in the excavation is brain-dead, someone talked to the Na’vi–Grace, for example, seeing as she helped build a school and had lots of pictures taken with native kids–and laid out how an entire planet was screwed if the Na’vi didn’t let the humans dig under their tree, or, at least point them in the direction of the second-biggest Unobtainium deposit. The Na’vi would have have obviously said “F— off” or something to that degree and, well, you can’t have that because then they’d have a character flaw and that’s not happening. They are the oppressed and the Yankee dogs are the oppressor and that is it. Cameron dropping this inconvenient truth at the end of the film, once we’ve presumably pumped our fists at the sights of American soldiers-er, I mean, Disgusting Corporate Mercenaries That Eat Baby Fingers is a hack manipulation of the highest order.
Anyway, here’s a bulleted list of other things that made no sense:
1. Jake knows the bulldozers are coming in three months. You’d think letting the tribe know about this detail would be of a slightly higher priority than, say, boning the betrothed of the village’s top warrior with his synthetic wiener.
2. Speaking of those bulldozers, they were rolling up to that site the whole time, right? And none of the Na’vi heard them? How about Enya, or whoever the planet goddess is? She couldn’t have sent out a message, maybe have the puffy butterfly things write out DANGER! YANKEE DOG DOZERS INBOUND!
3. Doesn’t take much to shut down those bulldozers though, huh? A few slaps at the remote control camera and they’re done. A three month trek for nothing. Strikes me as a design oversight.
4. How about that “flux,” the magic in the atmosphere that disrupts laser lock-ons and forces the American Imperialist swine-er, the lawless hired gunmen to stack ordnance on pallets and drop them out the back of the cargo hold. I suspect the name “flux” came about from “I’ve written myself into a predicament, how am I going to get the ‘flux’ out of it?”
5. Nuking the holy site of the Na’vi is the primary goal at the end so how about making a carpet bombing run out of the range of the dragons and birds and spears? Or spread out your aerial attack force and give them each some bombs to drop separately. Nah, I guess having your entire force bunched together is the smart move. I defer to your tactical genius, Colonel!
6. Wait a minute. I remember seeing a map of the Unobtainium deposits in the control room. They can get a read-out of mineral veins, but can’t pinpoint a tree?
7. Hey, and there was that other map that showed thermal readouts of all the Na’vi congregating at the very same tree during Colonel Genius’s pep talk. There you go, boys. Bomb that place with all the yellow blobs.
8. These are ex-Marines, right? And we know the economy is bad (Jake says so) so isn’t it possible that these guys couldn’t find civilian jobs after leaving the military and signed on for this work? And if so, wouldn’t you think at least more than one of them would have second thoughts of annihilating little blue cat-toddlers? Not so. Everyone except “Michelle Rodriguez” is all amped up to get their genocide on.
9. Not that “Michelle Rodriguez” was that much of a prized recruit for Team Noble Savage anyway. She paints her freaking gunship blue and white. You’d think it would be more helpful for her to infiltrate the fleet incognito and take out the Colonel’s flagship or something.
10. Real subtle 9-11 imagery James. If the hometree is the World Trade Center and the Na’vi are, I suppose, the victims of the al qaida attack that would make the guys trying to excavate the magic mineral to save planet Earth terrorists, right? Oh wait, we don’t know Earth is in mortal danger yet. We just think they’re in it for a steady paycheck and dental benefits. Never mind. Screw them!
11. Really, building schools and roads and offering Western medicine, er, I mean Earth medicine didn’t sway the Na’vi, huh? What was your first hint they weren’t digging your technological gifts, the fact they sleep in giant leaves or get from place to place on flying dragons?
12. Jake going to the magic tree and saying “I know you’re just a tree…” Dude, what else do you need to see to convince you that this place is magic?!
13. Neytiri showing up soon after saying that Enya the Planet Goddess doesn’t take sides. Uh huh. I’m sure She’s going to send some hammerhead rhino monsters over to the Colonel, give him a hand in the ensuing battle.
14. Jake’s motivation to screw over Grace and the Na’vi by feeding the Colonel intel was to get himself some new legs. I’m sure the woman who invented remote controlled alien bodies could probably give you a discount on the procedure, Jake. You might have saved a few lives there. Oh right, you’re a @#$%#@&*$ idiot.
15. Grace insults Colonel Quaritch by calling him “Ranger Rick.” I don’t get it. Ranger Rick is a park ranger, not an Army ranger. And he was a gentle raccoon, not a delusional murderer.
Closing Statement
If a movie has a Happy Meal tie-in do we still have to take the heavy-handed moralizing seriously?
The Verdict
Guilty of making me want to hurl abusive insults at my cat and go outside and punch a tree. Great job Jimbo.
2/10
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