Avatar (2009)
James Cameron’s best movies – The Terminator, Aliens, the director’s cut of The Abyss – bring to the sci-fi action picture what Stephen King brought to the horror novel: working class grit, a contrast to the fantastic that eventually arrives. People, even fans, commonly accept that Cameron is a good director limited by his inability to write, but that’s a generalization that needs to be put to rest. His bad dialogue brings you into his best movies; Cameron’s jokes are bad in that way that a co-worker’s jokes are bad over coffee in the early morning after being up all night with a bad cold or in a fight with a girlfriend. Cameron’s dialogue used to be bad in that good country music way – it had tang. And a screenplay, of course, isn’t just dialogue, it’s, more importantly, structure – and Cameron has an instinctual understanding of structure, setting you up for beats you didn’t even know you were being set up for.
I had a number of problems with Avatar, but my most nagging is that it’s being marketed as a “revolution” towards something I’m not remotely interested in seeing realized, and that might be because I’m tired of overlong sci-fi fantasies with animated hoozywhatsits spouting nonsensical jargon. There’s nothing in Avatar that rivals the claustrophobic intensity of Aliens, nothing here that rivals the wonder of the water snake in The Abyss, because there’s no contrast. It’s a three-hour animated video game with 3D that imprisons you; you can’t look beyond a narrow tunnel, and the image, despite the hype, is still blurry. Champions of the picture are brushing aside issues with script and story, implying that people stuck on these points are those who don’t understand the pure, primal visual nature of cinema. For one, Cameron clearly values this story, and for two, I’ve supported that kind of argument for better movies, but Cameron’s cinematic game isn’t on that level, Avatar isn’t a consistent vision, it’s a hodge-podge constrained by its, yes, stupid, scenario.
Cameron is really tossing his hat into the Lord of the Rings sweepstakes: a computer generated battle ground of his own creation, in 3D because we’re currently in another cycle of that fad (it resurfaces about every twenty years, the only difference this time being that real directors seem to be falling for it). Cameron’s world, Pandora, is a mixture of rain forests and underwater plant life brought to land populated by creatures that remind one quite a bit of those to be found in Jackson’s King Kong. There are poetic flourishes worth seeing the picture for: a glowing jelly-fish tree that sets the stage for the consummation of the leads’ love, mountains that float majestically in the sky, and, of course, Pandora’s most prominent dwellers: a tall, slender, blue humanoid species called the Na’vi, which stand in for all the good qualities white people project onto others.
Let’s put the Vietnam/Iraq/Native American stuff away, that’s so obvious it speaks for itself. There are also the other typical contradictions: Avatar is a tech-heavy movie decrying technology, an anti-war movie that comes most to life during long scenes of savage, tragic destruction and carnage. The baddie is a typical (and the weakest) Cameron villain: the military hard-on indifferent to the culture he seeks to plunder. In this case, its Stephen Lang playing, pathetically, Michael Biehn in The Abyss led by Giovanni Ribisi playing, amusingly, Paul Reiser in Aliens. The military outfit, thrillingly laid out in quick shorthand by Cameron in Aliens, is reduced to laughably inadequate war-mongering clichés in Avatar, and that’s purposefully in the service of a larger, almost offensive, laziness: so we can see them slaughtered by the Na’vi at the end with no contradiction or guilt. It’s the V for Vendetta trick over again: photogenic, glamorous revolt for the young and fashionably disillusioned.
Avatar is said to be a Cameron dream project and I can believe it: it’s static and overstuffed in that way that so many recent dream projects are. Peter Jackson always wanted to make King Kong, and his go at it was occasionally wonderful but more than occasionally tedious and stupid and overly explicit. Scorsese’s Gangs of New York, on the back burner for decades, emerged an interesting failure, all over the place, sometimes great, sometimes bad, never boring, but never the movie its maker so clearly wanted it to be. Spielberg’s shot at Peter Pan, a theoretical sure thing, is bloated and devoid of the director’s even most-taken-for-granted gifts. There are dozens more examples, and its no coincidence that Cameron’s dream project suffers from similar issues and lapses in common sense: it’s because these directors already made these movies; their dream movie, the best parts, the drive, the point, was also the driving force of the better movies with which they thought they were settling. Cameron has made Avatar: it’s called The Terminator, Aliens, The Abyss and Titanic. And all the toys and money in the world can’t change that. Literally realizing their dream, these filmmakers discover that all they have left is a skeleton of the great movies they already made.
Re-reading this, I find that I’m sounding harder than I care to; Avatar isn’t a masterpiece, its not even a good movie exactly, and by no means is it some D.W. Griffith-style reinvention of the form (it’s basically animated, and, as animation, its less involving that this year’s Fantastic Mr. Fox or Coraline)., but the picture is still worth seeing, Cameron is a major director with a phenomenal nuts-and-bolts grasp of filmmaking; he doesn’t have Spielberg’s elegance (no one besides De Palma does) but he uses his blunt edge to his advantage. Avatar’s reason for being, its climax, is an exhilarating mixture of Heavy Metal and the toy battle of your dreams: a collision of decidedly old-fashioned war copters and pterodactyls and monster elephants and those body-controlled bull dozer suits from Aliens. An earlier sequence, a day-ride between lovers on their pet dinosaurs, is swooning and romantic, because of Cameron’s undeniable, unbendable conviction.
There is also subtext that gives the picture a bizarre poignancy that might draw people in for more than just the first weekend talk. Avatar, particularly in 3D with the glasses and the dirt and machines jutting out in our faces, is a clear metaphor for gamers and movie-addicts, for troubled lonely people longing to join a pretend world. This is why the lead, hunky marine Sam Worthington, is crippled in the beginning: he’s stuck, he needs something to be liberated from. Worthington has caught flack from even admirers of the picture, but I found him, as I did in Terminator Salvation, a convincing, appealing, of course idealized, avatar for the every man. Worthington doesn’t try too hard, and he has a way of looking diminished by his surroundings (understandable given these surroundings) that draws your empathy, most prominently as his body seems to shrink from more and more time spent in his Na’vi stand-in.
Zoe Saldana, the beautiful Na’vi warrior woman who converts Worthington to the right cause, is considerably better. In Star Trek and Guess Who, Saldana was a gorgeous babe with enough delivery to get her by; in Avatar – under layers of animation – she has a break-out role. The role, Neytiri, a daughter of the head of the tribe of whatever, is typical – but Cameron’s faith in his hokum is intense and infectious, and Saldana has the presence to give his fantasies the beyond-life grandeur they need; you understand why a man would waste away in a huge metal coffin to get back to her (and this also recalls Somewhere in Time). I won’t reveal the ending, but it’s as canny as Titanic’s in audience wish fulfillment, and it sends Avatar out on a high note. For a few moments a wizard of working-class action-fantasy returns, and you damn near forgive him of everything else.
I completely and utterly disagree with just about every point you make in this critically-praised film, which for me is one of the best of the year. It’s a rapturous film of awe and wonderment and it moves and stirs on a level that few films even aspire to, much less achieve. ALIENS is nowhere near it in aphilosophical sense, not is anything Cameron has done prior.
Happy Holidays Chuck! We are still friends of course, this has just been a year for disagreement on a number of films. next year we may completely agree.
Ha, yeah Sam, if we proved anything in 2009, it’s that we look at movies pretty differently. Hope you and your family have a wonderful holiday.
I find myself between two worlds on AVATAR, but without my own Avatar for walking within both.
I do believe that without the 3D, the film would suffer. I have no desire to watch it in 2D.