The Red Circle

Saying James Cameron’s Avatar is a game changer is like saying a $200 million broadway performance of Romeo and Juliet done through live mo-cap render is a game changer. It may be a real looker of a performance, but you already know how the story will end.

And that’s the crux of this movie. Given twelve years to develop his next movie after Titanic, James Cameron immersed himself in an alien culture of his own creation. He thought out their rituals, their ceremonies, their philosophies. He dreamed up their planet, their ecology, their wildlife, and their religion. All of them deeply involved and highly detailed. He hired arguably the best FX team in the business in Weta Digital to bring this world to life. And they did. It’s the most convincing all-CG world yet seen on film. He took over a decade of planning, achievement, work, and dedication and hung it all on the most contrived, trite, cliche, and uninvolving story he has ever written.

It’s understandable that this epic film would need a somewhat “classic” story archetype to get the point across. But this isn’t a variation on any classic tale. This is an amalgamation of scenes directly lifted from other stories. Many folks have already compared Avatar to a video game, so here’s another one: James Cameron has reskinned your favorite story and sold it back to you as a groundbreaking achievement.

Here’s the story so far: Sam Worthington plays Jake Sully, a disabled vet who is thrust into the AVATAR project after his identical twin brother who was working on it was killed. The AVATAR program is essentially the diplomatic wing of a military mission on Pandora to mine the extremely valuable Unobtainium (Yes, I know this is a real-world term, but Jesus.) that is sitting under the central living location of a race of aliens called the Na’vi. Jake, through a whole bunch of future tech, is able to control a genetically crated human/Na’vi hybrid called an avatar so that he can try to convince the native people to move out of the way because we want our minerals, OK? Of course after spending time with the Na’vi and slowly being indoctrinated to their ways (not to mention falling in love with the Na’vi princess Neytiri), Sully starts to like this reality much more than his real reality. This causes some problems for the military part of the mission lead by Stephen Lang’s Colonel Quarich. Since all this peaceful mumbo jumbo isn’t working, Quarich decides its time for a good ole ‘Merican shitkicking. I’ll leave the rest of the story up to you. I guarantee that what you think happens is exactly what happens.

It’s that rote predictability that causes Avatar so much grief. The movie spends its almost entire running time engaging you in a world full of detail. From the opening scenes of the transport ship full of cryo-sleep chambers that go backwards into infinity, to the completely realistic tech of the Earth base on Pandora, to the floating  mountains of the planet itself, James Cameron has given us every reason to fall into this universe he’s concocted. It’s obvious that he spent those twelve years on these exact things. He had a linguist create a language for the Na’vi. He probably had engineers draw up blueprints for the Mecha suits that Quaritch and his soldiers use for battle. He planned every fern, tree, bug, and creature seen on Pandora. It’s astounding that in the decade plus he was planning all of this history and presentation of a world, that he neglected to fill it with any characters.

I mean, there a people that inhabit the world. This is true. Actors showed up on set and performed. This is true. But there isn’t a single character, not one, in the whole movie that couldn’t be summed up in one sentence. And not just a summary of their character. Their whole character. Wes Studi plays the noble leader of a Na’vi tribe. Giovanni Ribisi plays a corporate, government scumbag. Sigourney Weaver plays the environmental scientist who runs the AVATAR program. Stephen Lang plays an evil, hardass military man. It truly seems like that if an actor ever struggled for motivation, all they have to do is read their sentence out loud. They would then be able to perform the scene to their character’s personality. Only the environments are in 3D. The characters are as flat as they come.

Perhaps the lone exception is the most important. Zoe Saldaña plays Neytiri, the princess of the Na’vi. It’s not even that her character is anything above average. She is mostly reduced to teaching Jake how to become a Na’vi warrior and falling in love with him (and the fact that she is a princess is entirely unnecessary – but it’s straight out of Pocahontas, so Cameron is more than willing to rip it off) . But, she is more integral to the story than most because she is the gateway to the Na’vi for the audience. Her character allows us to understand their culture. And despite the flatline of a character she is given, Saldaña achieves this. If there is anything else I want to make a point of, this is it, so I might as well make it bold. If it were not for Zoe Saldaña, this movie would be an utter failure. Without this one performance, no one in the audience could make any kind of connection to this alien race, and the entire film would be an exercise in paying special effects crews. It may be silly to claim it as the best motion capture performance ever because of how little the character actually does in the story, but Neytiri is able to express emotion more realistically than any other completely CG character I have seen on screen. It shows that with enough money, mo-cap is just the new makeup.

Watching Avatar was a divisive experience. On one hand, the world crafted by Cameron and the extraordinary artists at Weta Digital (Hi Ryan!) is so immersive, that its easy to want to get lost in it all. But on the other, there is nothing beyond those exquisite visual veneers to keep that immersion intact.

I don’t want this review to come off as supremely negative. I enjoyed the film as spectacle, but purely on a superficial “hey, that looks cool” level. It’s a frustrating film above anything else. At the expense of being nitpicky, I will skip out on the pacing (a guy next to me walked out after the second act. The movie, so intent on filling you in on EVERYTHING in Pandoran culture, takes forever to get to its conclusion), the politics (America = Evil), the hypocisy (Technology = Bad) and the racism (The Na’vi are blue Native Americans. They even make throaty war cries and wear paint into battle. And they’re led by Wes Studi). There’s no point. It’s all been covered before. I am sure that Cameron meant no harm by his terrible script, even if it does come across as the most expensive Edward Zwick movie ever made.

It is an odd thing to hear soundbytes like “Shock and Awe” and “Fight Terror With Terror,” in 2009. Especially since the film so glaringly is using it to demonstrate how the Earthlings (almost completely played by white Americans) are the ones that are using the terror tactics. The “terror” line especially makes no contextual sense as the Na’vi never once launch any kind of attack on the humans that wasn’t blatantly unprovoked. You rip up their forest with a 200 foot bulldozer, they throw a rock at a camera. Tit for tat?

James Cameron still remains one of our best visual storytellers, and despite the waste of a plot, the film never, ever encroaches on being a “bad.” It’s thoroughly watchable, just like an HD nature documentary. Even though the film drags a bit, what happens on screen is still told with a visual intensity that rivals almost anything this decade. It’s like looking at a Frank Frazetta drawing. It’s cool to see half naked women swinging swords at each other on a volcano, but that’s all there is.

Regardless. Avatar is a truly remarkable achievement in 3D cinema. The world feels real, and feels right. The effect simply deepens the cinematic frame, rarely using it for any kind of “stunt” effect. This feels less like a radical idea than someone just doing it right. I hope to see more of this style of filmmaking, but am aware that no one is going to spend a reported $450 million on a film to achieve this immersion after the financial disaster Avatar will be. The film is tracking for an $80 million opening weekend, and a possible sub-$200 million overall take. When you can;t make back half of the money a studio gives you, this kind of film typically doesnt’ get made again

And that kind of disappoints me. Avatar’s closest cinematic cousin is the first Hellboy movie. You can tell while watching the film that everyone involved loved that world and these characters, but they filled it with a story that didn’t do those characters justice. It’s sad that Avatar will never come close to recouping the budget, because I would love to see the sequel. If James Cameron could sculpt a Hellboy II out of this world (and it is possible – there are so many great parts of Pandora that a truly original story could take this world to the next level), I would be of a changed mind. As it stands, it’s disheartening to see so much time, love, and effort into building a world completely populated by vacuous characters and a predictable plot.

Avatar could be mistaken for a masterpiece; It has a totality of vision that is incredibly rare in filmmaking. The flaw lies in that fact that, past the details, the vision is crushingly dull.

6.9 out of 10

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