Avatar

I saw Avatar yesterday.  Anyone that knows me knows that I’ve been lambasting this film since August when me, John and Derek saw the 16 minute sneak-peek preview in Imax 3D out in Seattle.  My experience in that sneak peek was that the special effects did not live up to my expectations, that the whole thing felt like a weird black-light videogame, and that the dialogue and story were hackneyed, predictable and trite.  I walked out of the theater saying it should be called “Dances With Aliens” and I was not nearly the only person that came up with that moniker nor had that experience from the sneak preview.

But, I also have learned to trust Metacritic, and when the reviews started pouring in and they were near uniformly positive and glowing, I decided I may need to admit that I could be wrong.  And I decided to find out for myself.

The movie is an immersive, absorbing and all-encompassing cinematic experience.  If you like movies.  Really like movies.  If you love movies.  As I do.  Then you’ll almost certainly very much like Avatar.  It is simply stunning to watch.

The special effects that did not live up to my expectations in the preview overwhelmed my expectations in the actual film.  I don’t know why there was such a difference.  But the world of Pandora came to life in a way that it hadn’t in that preview and it was worth the price of admission to watch all of the beautiful creatures and landscapes.  And to think of the imagination and the force of will that made all of it possible.  The movie is simply enormous.  So much to look at.  So much to take in.

The story is still completely and utterly predictable.  And, ultimately, for me, there’s no real there there from an intellectual perspective.  And the dialogue is trite.  And you kind of wish James Cameron had roped somebody in to tighten it up a bit, adding one more layer of nuance and intelligence to the script.  But, in the context of the film, you forgive him for that.  You can spend all your time bitching and moaning about it but, ultimately, I think you’d be hard-pressed, as a film lover, to disregard the film for predictability.  It’s a big bold old-style Hollywood film and the reason those films still work is because they speak to something in all of us that wants the heroes to win and wants joy and wants synchronicity and completeness in our stories.  We have enough ambiguity and existential angst in the rest of our existence.  At some point, and again, maybe it’s just me, but if you really love movies, you have to be willing to surrender to a grand adventure even if you know how it will end.

As I wrote on this little-known micro-blogging service, the movie is impossible to dismiss and impossible to discard.  It overwhelms you and beats you into visual submission.

And I’m a sucker for a touching love story.  Towards the end, when the Nav’i (however you spell it) girl and Sam Worthington meet and he’s out of his Nav’i body and she’s cradling him in her arms, towering over him but still loving him as a human and for his persona beyond his species.  That’s a big moment.  I sucked up a few tears watching that.

That dichotomy, in fact, is one of the things that makes the movie so interesting.  Because it’s not just this story of humans meet aliens, or industrialized materialists meet hippie nativists.  It’s also about this notion of duality and how this guy, who is acting like something else, is always trapped back in his old body in this little pod.  And the tension created between his reality as a human and his reality as an alien.  And the damage that duality and separateness can do to someone.

Overall, the movie is of course flawed.  But it’s good.  And it’s entertaining.  And it’s what the movies are for.

Three other thoughts/observations:

I am not a big proponent of the philosophy espoused by the Nav’i, if only because it seems like there’s ultimately nowhere to go with it.  The movie is essentially about the difference and the tension between an American/Western notion of imperialist capitalism and a different, more naturalist philosophy espoused by the native race of this planet, Pandora.  Of course, these aliens tend to resemble Native Americans here in the States and so there’s an obvious visual reference to movies like “Dances With Wolves” or “Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee” where the same contrast is portrayed and a cultural and historical reference to America’s treatment of the Native Americans.  And, of course, in the movie, you want the Nav’i to triumph over the craven, heartless miners and soldiers that only want to rape the planet of one particular resource rather than appreciate it for its beauty and learn about neural networks by studying the relationship between the planet and its denizens.  And I did, of course.  I rooted for the Nav’i to win.

But the other thought I had as I watched was, “Well, what happens next?”  Do the Nav’i have a written language?  Do they have books?  Do they have an economy?  What do they do all day?  Is it like old societies where the men hunt all day and the women stay home and take care of the kids and tend house?  Because that kind of sucks.  Are they all vegetarians or something?

Basically, after this big war is over and the bad people leave, I thought I’d be pretty fucking bored hanging out with the Nav’i.  No economy.  No specialization of labor.  Not a ton of media.  The whole enterprise felt kind of like a dead end.  Despite all the bad things that industrialization has bought the world, it’s bought many good things as well.  And one of those good things is that there are a lot of ways to pass the time and lots of interesting things to do and the world is a more interesting place with the economic systems that produced things like newspapers, and computers, and books, and recorded music, and Pro Tools, and movie theaters.  I’m just not down with primitivism I guess.  It’s cool and all.  But then what.

Also, the way it works in the Nav’i culture is that, as near as I can understand, the first person you have sex with you’re married to for the rest of your life.  Given that Jake Sully had known this chica for three months when they first made love, it seems like a rather short period of time to be making such a big decision.  Very romantic and moving and I do believe in love.  But still.

Finally, it’s kind of odd and amusing that the most expensive movie ever made has, at its core, a fairly preachy tone about the importance of environmentalism and naturalism.  The amount of money spent on posters, merchandise, advertisements, etc is enough to feed most of the world’s population.  The absence of any irony as it presents a message of conservation and environmentalism while representing a huge number of multi-national corporate interests and while consuming an incredible amount of the world’s resources to produce and distribute  is strange and, again, very funny.  I personally don’t have a problem with it.  But it warrants an eyebrow raise I think.

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