Avatar (James Cameron, 2009): USA/UK

Reviewed by Richard Feilden.  Viewed at Metropolitan Camino Real Cinema, Goleta, CA.

AvatarWell, it’s the season of goodwill and you’ve been a good boy/girl (delete one, both or neither as appropriate), so my present to you is not one, but two reviews.  I’m going to review James Cameron’s Avatar not once, but twice.  First I’m going to review the story, and then all the technical frippery that has garnered the film so much attention.  Unlike you though, James has been a very bad boy, and the two reviews can be summed up in two words: lazy and excessive.

Avatar is the story of Jake Sully (Terminator Salvation’s Sam Worthington).  A marine, he is shipped out to the planet Pandora, where he is telepathically linked to an alien/human hybrid body, using it to communicate with the indigenous alien species, the Na’vi.  A huge corporation wants to mine the planet for its Unobtanium resources, but the Na’vi, a primitive species with a close bond to nature, stand in their way.  As Jake spends longer and longer with the aliens, he begins to question his loyalties.

At over two hours and forty minutes, Avatar is certainly long enough to warrant two reviews.  It is also the first reason why this film is lazy.  If the film had been closer to two hours than three, like Cameron’s benchmark films The Terminator and Aliens, it could have been a great, fun romp, but Mr Cameron has decided that this should be an EPIC!  It is only sixteen minutes shorter than The Fellowship of the Ring.  So, has he made use of that time to tell an intricate tale, or build a close relationship between the audience and the characters on screen?  Not even close.

I’m not going to be able to add anything to the ‘Dances with Wolves in space’ discussion, nor the awkward ‘white man meets the natives and within days manages to be a ‘better’ native than they ever were’ trope that rears its ugly head here, so I won’t bother.  Instead I’m going to look at whether or not it is actually entertaining.  Cameron opens the film with a voice over, explaining the idea of the alien world, the Avatar program, and the fact that Jake, a crippled marine, has been accepted to it because his brother, was killed in a mugging just before shipping out to Pandora.  It is the laziest opening to a film I’ve seen in a long time.  Let’s compare it to one of the other animated spectaculars of the year, UP!, managed in ten minutes and with barely any words to not only show two peoples entire lives together, but to move people to tears in the process.  Cameron sadly didn’t feel the need to give us an emotional connection to his characters, nor to use the tools that cinema provides him.  It seems he just wanted to get the preliminaries out of the way as quickly as possible and get us to the computer generated world of which he is so proud.  ‘Audience be damned’, he cries, ‘I want to play with my toys’!

The issues with the story don’t stop there.  This is a film with no narrative surprises whatsoever.  Every plot turn is telegraphed from miles away with a smaller version earlier in the film.  And with the nearly three hour running time, there is more than enough space to get that telegraphing done, with room to spare for pointless scene after pointless scene.  The film skips the start, flounders for about two hours with no idea of how to get from set-piece to set-piece, and then launches into the, admittedly spectacular, finale.  It just feels like they didn’t try, or perhaps were afraid of either the budget or distracting us from the pretty pictures with something so insignificant as narrative.  Uninvolving, bland and boring from start to finish.

So the story is an abject failure, but what about those toys?  Well, Avatar certainly is spectacular.  In particular, the world of Pandora, from the floating mountains to the gargantuan trees, from the bioluminescent marshes to the rolling seas, is absolutely stunning.  The sheer density of the flora makes this a computer generated word that knocks for six any that have come before it.  Cameron can justifiably be proud of his realm.  The same can’t be said of the creatures that inhabit Pandora.  Many of the animals have a strange plastic sheen, reminiscent of early CGI creations.  Even the Na’vi are never truly believable .  They are great computer generated creations, but they are always, obviously, not real  , particularly in the few scenes where they directly interact with ‘real’ people.  Avatar is, at the end of the day, a high-tech, sci-fi, Muppet movie.

Unfortunately, with that huge running time, Cameron is determined to fill the screen with scene after scene of high-tech wizardry.  Again and again we are bombarded with glowing bogs and soaring cliff faces and, after a while, they all blend together and lose their impact.  It’s the Alien versus Aliens argument, and less sometimes really is more.  As the protagonists once again ran across a tree branch, leaving yet more little illuminated footprints behind them, my sense of wonderment slipped and I began to wonder whether the film had any new tricks to show me.  And as soon as that happened, it lost me.

The 3D effects also bring problems.  Outside of the computer generated world of Pandora, this is the big selling point of the film.  Again, Cameron doesn’t seem to think that too much is ever enough.  In interior scenes the 3D effects are exaggerated to the point that rooms become nausea inducing, with layer upon layer of imagery placed on screen, drawing the eye through transparent display screens to people and objects behind.  The same is true outside, where dirty windows and carefully rendered.  The problem is that, in reality, you can only focus on one plane at a time.  If you are looking beyond a smeared piece of glass, you no longer see the glass.  The dirty windows and computer screens do nothing but confuse the audience.  Well, nothing apart from show off yet another tool at Cameron’s disposal.   Oh, and for all of Cameron’s claims that this would be a film that uses 3D in entirely new ways, that eschews the old ‘wave a pointy thing at the audience’ effects for an ‘immersive experience’, he is incredibly fond of sticking spears and arrows in things, then having them stick straight out of the screen…

This then is the problem with Avatar.  We’ve been told that Avatar is the herald of a new age of cinema.  But it is all messenger and no message.  It is more showboating than showpiece, as insubstantial as its virtual protagonists.  It’s a lump of coal in my cinematic stocking and I’m sorry, but if this is the future of movies, then count me out.

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Published:
12.30.09 / 10am
Category:
Films