Avatar is ridiculous.
I’ve been chewing it over for the better part of a week (or at least attempting to chew it over – a movie this digitally amplified is so vaporous as to almost refuse mastication), and I’m tempted to upgrade my reflections to ‘fucking ridiculous’. I hold back on the profantiy-enhanced judgement largely because Avatar isn’t solid enough to bear the insult. To label this trifle ‘fucking ridiculous’ would be an insult to the films that are truly fucking ridiculous.
Normally a movie this slender wouldn’t even be worth mentioning, except that the specific gravity inherent in a $300 million USD price tag and the megalomaniacal boasts of its creator that it will change cinema forever warrant an appropriately slight response. So ridiculous it is.
First, hasn’t anybody else choked on the irony that hundreds of millions of dollars were spent to deploy state of the art computer technology to tell the story of a bunch of barefoot people running around in mud worshipping a tree?
I find this myth of the ‘noble savage’ to be odious. Count me in the Fox News camp on this point, but people who need to exalt the touchy-feely-one-with-mother-earth-equates-to-moral-superiority ethos have some deeply unresolved issues of personal guilt that need to be worked out, preferably in a therapists office lit with electric lights, heated by piped-in natural gas, on a comfortable sofa free of twigs, and roofed with a sturdy, rain-repellent, mass-produced shingles.
Mr. Cameron, if you find life enhanced by modern trappings such as metal alloys, supercomputers, and meals that don’t need to be chased for miles to be spiritually unfulfilling, perhaps you might eschew their conveniences in your next production.
You find me a village of tree-dwelling people living without shoes who would scorn grocery stores, the conveniences of mass production, and indoor plumbing and I’ll change my tune. My money, however, says that the majority of the developing world would be absolutely ecstatic to wake up tomorrow and find that everything around them resembles suburban New Jersey.
All things require balance, and if you can’t find spiritual satisfaction in the material world around you, the answer isn’t to take the stuff away. As the first Rabbi says in A Serious Man: “Look at the parking lot. Just look at that parking lot!” Sure, it’s goofy, but it is well-intentioned, and a much better answer than Avatar‘s position of “Damn you to hell, evil soulless gods of corporate technology, mother Pandora’s magic tree will take care of me!”
As a side-note for the nature-lovers out there, please note that nature is pretty much the exact opposite of the tender, nurturing earth mother myth. The wild is a cold, brutal place where life truly is kill-or-be-killed, where a sprained ankle means you’ve just become dinner for the next step of the food chain. Every religion has it’s dark side, but only the worst breeds of religious fundamentalism have downsides as brutal as mother nature’s. Please remember that the next time you sing fairy songs while airbrushing moons and wolves onto your formal t-shirt collection.
As for Avatar‘s raison d’etre is the 3D, and it’s lovely as 3D goes, but it’s just a gimmick. Take away the techno-fetishism and you have a leaden lump of a story left behind. It’s Dances With Wolves meets Giant Smurfs. Without Photoshop and a hundred million or so for ‘botanical design artists’, you have a story about as compelling as Disney’s Pocahontas, which is great if you’re a ten year old girl.The effects are groundbreaking, perhaps, but the term ‘groundbreaking’ for digital cinema has lost all perspective. The dinosaurs in Jurassic Park were groundbreaking. Bullet-time from The Matrix was truly eye-popping. But both of those effects were grounded in real, practical locations. Even the stellar effects work in The Lord Of The Rings trilogy was a staggering mix of practical camera tricks, oversized props, and carefully deployed digital work.
Avatar falls into the same trap that Lucas’ execrable modern Star Wars trilogy bungled into – when everything on-screen is created digitally, nothing is special anymore. Audiences can feel the work that goes into creating an image, and real imagery will always generate more emotional power than an army of typists inserting physically implausible waterfalls in places they don’t belong. A decade from now, the sweeping landscape panoramas of New Zealand in Lord Of The Rings will humiliate any of the epic vistas in Avatar. Projected on a big screen today, the epic landscapes from Lawrence Of Arabia or even Raiders Of The Lost Ark, will generate more awe than the meticulously rendered forests of Avatar.Simply put, most of the sweeping visuals in Avatar wouldn’t look out of place if they were airbrushed onto the side of a blue 1976 Ford van. The poster for Avatar should have a sticker that says “if this van is a-rocking, don’t come a-knocking” stuck on it. And by the time Avatar 2: Pasty-Faced Bureaucrat’s Revenge comes out, the Pandoran landscapes will look irredeemably dated.
Cameron’s Titanic was enhanced by the megalithic scale. A story about one of the biggest technological follies of the 20th century, that required even larger doses of hubris to produce worked hand-in-hand with each other. The story and the meta-story fused into a moebius strip of ambition, and the result worked spectacularly well, despite the embarrassing horrid dialogue that made everybody but ten year old girls cringe. It’s a film that needed to spend $200 million USD simply to be the film that spent $200 million USD. On a $50 million budget, Titanic simply wouldn’t have worked, even if you were a ten year old girl.
Two years from now, when you flip past Avatar on FX, it’ll be little more than a novelty. If you catch Terminator, T2, or even True Lies while channel surfing, they’re all worth at least a half-hour of your time. Stumble across Avatar, and at best you’ll look at the blue-tinted weightless digitalia, and shrug while you vaguely remember “oh yeah, that was OK.” Then you’ll surf on to something far more real and tangible, like season 7 of The Kardashians.
Jeffrey…you’re my hero
[ a slightly revised version of my views posted elsewhere]
… “From the trailers I’ve seen, this film is a piece of entertainment which, while pretending to be about a love-story is, instead, a subliminal work of self-referential pop-psychology in which we see the entertainment-media technology-culture glorify itself through its very favorite vehicles: dazzling and sanitized images of war, the presentation of nature and of non-High-technology cultures as idealist utopia, and, therefore, imaginary, unreal and impossibly vain hopes.
As usual, proponents and apologists of the dominant High-technology culture, as represented in this film, are seen and heard to say, “I need your help,” even as they are engaged in the systematic and violent destruction of an alien culture. But, instead of recognizing ourselves and feeling real shame for what is an everyday aspect of modern society, the film invites us to simply objectify all that and reduce it to a simplistic morality play while the more subliminal messages soften up viewers—who’d adamantly protest their being so susceptible—to an ever-growing alienation from all that is genuine and life-affirming.
My poster-blurb for this film would run:
‘A techno-warrior-glorification entertainment masquerading as a love-story and intended to mollify, distort and manipulate what’s left of the critical faculties of an infantilized mass-entertainment culture.’
The viewer probably watches this film, stuffing the coffers of a major film studio, and never suspects that it’s deeper irony is that it is he, the viewer, who is the object of a clever corporate act of dupery, and not the characters portrayed by actors, real or computer-generated, on the screen. This is Hollywood’s supreme specialty: subtly justifying itself and its attendant technology and the anti-social cultural forms which go with them while leaving the audience in a state of thumb-sucking satisfaction.”
It would be a mistake to suppose from my comment that I think the director, James Cameron, was trying to do harm with this film. He wasn’t trying to do harm—and that’s the case with most people as they go about their daily lives. That, however, doesn’t mean that the film’s messages and the social consequences to which it contributes are benign.
Lolz 1Billion+ in box office sales. Yep huge failure for sure.
One of the biggest trials I have ever had to overcome was to write this review of Avatar without using any profanities. It was outrageously presumptuous of James Cameron to assume that anyone should want to endure three time-consuming hours of the 3-D Sci-fi film that is Avatar. The film set in 2154 on the planet of Pandora was disappointing for more than a few reasons.
Despite having several rooms of freshly emulsioned walls to watch I feel the need to comment on this film for these reasons; Avatar has been in development for an astonishing 16 years, which would suggest that the long awaited film set to top Cameron’s ‘Titanic’ would undoubtedly be somewhat of a masterpiece. Unfortunately Avatar failed greatly to accomplish this.
The film infers to modernity and the effects on nature and indigenous populations through the pursuit of money. The film hints at empire building in Africa and deforestation. However, this is done in a poor fashion. The inference is clichéd and unoriginal. I am bored of being preached at by wealthy hypocrites with their giant carbon footprints, elucidating the notion that the human race is destroying nature. Cameron is paying homage to ‘Jurrassic park’ type films, reinforcing the notion that we shouldn’t mess with nature. This is only tolerable in masterpieces such as ‘Frankenstein’ which took Mary Shelley only two years to write as opposed to Cameron’s sixteen and in which time she bore two children. Avatar carries a $300 million price tag which could have replenished an entire forest in South America. I wonder whether any of the proceeds went to such a cause.
It is becoming awfully tiresome, reading continuous reviews saying that a film about destroying foliage is tree-mendous!
The Computer-generated Imagery is aesthetically pleasing; however the appalling storyline makes this futile and pointless. The dialogue is infantile and cringe-worthy. An episode of the children’s show Teletubbies, contains more intellectual conversation than Avatar does. Although saying that, Avatar would have been acceptable had the demographic been children. In polite terms I have concluded that Avatar was; rather clichéd, a little predictable, lacking in substance and somewhat patronising. Wait, no, it was F**cking S**t!!! Oops!
great review. looks like Cameron’s pulling in a pretty good sized chunk of unobtainium, though.