Early in James Cameron’s new film Avatar (his first since 1997’s Titanic), a character utters the line, “You should see your faces!” as her aircraft navigates a vista of astonishing splendor. Without a doubt, Cameron was thinking of more than just the occupants of the on-screen transport when he wrote that line. He was speaking directly to every one of us. Avatar is one of those rare movies that can deservedly be labeled an “event film;” you will remember when and where you saw it for the rest of your life. And while its cinematic impact may not quite rise to the hubristic heights some have speculated, it is as bold and audacious a step in that direction as cinema has ever seen.
Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) is a paraplegic Marine recruited to join the Avatar program on the planet Pandora. The Avatar program represents technology on the razor’s edge: artificially created organic lifeforms remotely controlled by human operators. The program is important because it represents humanity’s best chance of winning the hearts and minds of the Na’vi, Pandora’s indigenous population of nine-foot-tall, blue-skinned aliens. Humans set up a remote outpost on Pandora to mine a rare mineral, the largest deposit of which lies directly beneath the Na’vi village. If Jake and his comrades, including Dr. Grace Augustine (Sigourney Weaver), cannot convince the Na’vi to settle elsewhere, Colonel Quaritch (Stephen Lang) and his mercenaries will take it by force. Though Jake is inserted into the Na’vi population as a double agent, it doesn’t take him long to realize he is fighting for the wrong side. As he contemplates the ramifications of going native and his growing love of the Na’vi chief’s daughter, Neytiri (Zoe Saldana), an all out war becomes inescapable. (Both Worthington and Saldana, complete unknowns when 2009 began, are now, thanks to Terminator: Salvation and Star Trek, among Hollywood’s brightest rising stars.)
James Cameron has never made a bad film. Remember the first time you saw the massive queen lurch into the cargo bay in Aliens, or the water tentacle navigate the corridors of the submerged oil rig in The Abyss, or the steely liquid terminator ooze into shape in T2, or the nearly full-scale reproduction of the Titanic sink into iceberg strewn waters? Cameron never does anything small and he never undertakes a project unless he can do it justice. He is constantly innovating, relentlessly bulldozing the envelope of movie-making technology.
Cameron is not a perfect filmmaker. Far from it. He still insists on writing his own scripts, which are more often than not laughably bad. Avatar is certainly no exception. But don’t pretend you’re coming to Avatar to hear Shakespeare. Cameron has always worked with simple canvases and classic archetypes. That’s why his stuff always works. Here he commandeers the world of the New World Western, imagining John Smith as a paraplegic soldier and Pocahontas as a lithe, indigo extraterrestrial. He also manages to get in a few jabs at the Iraq war, the military industrial complex’s coercion of science and ecological mysticism. But rest assured that whatever ideologies Cameron likes to occasionally flex, they all must ultimately bow to his aesthetic vision. Whatever Avatar’s script lacks in depth, it more than makes up for in style.
WETA Digital, renowned for its work on The Lord of the Rings trilogy, employed motion capture similar to that used to create the creature Gollum, to render utterly lifelike CGI characters and completely immersive digital environments. Perhaps the most extraordinary testament to Avatar’s flawless, immersive power is that, rather than stare, slack jawed and drooling for the 162-minute running time, you acclimatize within the first few minutes. As counter-intuitive as it sounds, you forget that what you’re looking at is counterfeit and accept it so completely that your brain ceases registering surprise or wonderment. Avatar creates entire, holistic ecosystems containing floating mountains, trees the size of Manhattan skyscrapers, bioluminescent flora and exotic creatures ranging in size from insects to thundering alien rhinos. Close-ups, even of stylized, alien faces, are breathtakingly photo-realistic. It just may be the most fully realized universe I have ever seen on screen, at once fantastical and familiar. Completing this effect is the inclusion of 3D technology, essential for the full experience. This was the first time in all my years of watching 3D films that I instinctively and demonstrably ducked when a piece of shrapnel hurled from the screen.
Whoever claimed that evolution operates too slowly to be observed by the human eye hadn’t seen this film. Avatar is indisputably the next step in cinematic evolution. The final 30 minutes alone, which move at nearly the speed of light and announce themselves as an unexpected pressure in your chest, are more visually and narratively thrilling than most anything you’ve ever seen. Though Avatar more than lives up to its hype, it must be seen to be believed, an epic spectacle that succeeds brilliantly in spite of a dreadful script and a calculatedly unsophisticated story.
“You’re not in Kansas anymore,” Colonel Quaritch informs Pandora’s new recruits in the opening moments of Avatar. And just as Dorothy’s flying farmhouse shattered the barrier between black and white and brilliant Technicolor, so too has Avatar pointed a way to a cinematic future unlike anything we’ve ever seen. Until now.
© Copyright 2009 Brandon Fibbs. All rights reserved.
3 responses so far ↓
1 Mark // Dec 15, 2009 at 11:22 am
Chills… yep… chills.
2 rick finholt // Dec 21, 2009 at 4:51 pm
Brandon: I agree with your analysis. This is a stunning night at the movies.
But, is this the kind of movie, like “The Wizard of OZ,” that people will still be watching with a sense of wonder seventy years from now? The movie is at least 30 minutes too long, and the many thematic statements Cameron crowds into the narrative keep bumping into each other like all those deadly fast life forms of the Planet Pandora.
Some time during the second act, I found myself drifting in a fugue state of my own, my senses overwhelmed by pastoral set pieces counterpointed against cliff-hanger action scenes, one after another, each replicating itself over and over in the staccato rythym of a windshield wiper beating back the pounding rain. Perhaps this effect was intentional, since the Planet Pandora becomes, for Jake, his liberation from the claustrophobia of the tomb, a waking from the paralytic nightmare, a theme Cameron drives home cinematically with the power of Edgar Allan Poe’s best prose.
But, even this movie experience is not big enough for all the themes Cameron cribs from American Western movies and American History. We get not just a version of the Pocahantas story, as you shrewdly point out, but also evocations of Tecumseh and Blue Jacket.
Essentially a Sci-Fi Western, the movie owes much to “The Light in the Forest” and more to “Dances With Wolves” (“you turned Injun, didn’t you?”), an elegaic vision of the vanishing American “frontier” weighed down by a confused insistence that “the killing of the soldiers at the river was a good thing.”
In the overlong climactic battle sequence of this movie, a gaggle of Marine helicopters lays waste to the “blue remembered hills” of yet another lush paradise. For an American, this is disturbing enough, but more disturbing, in a way I don’t think Cameron intended, is the image of American Marines being thrown out the backs of those helicopters by the warriors of the Na’vi Chief (as played, of course, by Wes Studi). A good script doctor might have helped Cameron get all this under control before the fact. After the fact, a good film editor can probably fix most of what’s wrong with this very good movie.
3 Marla Kleiner // Dec 22, 2009 at 9:25 pm
Great review, Brandon. I think I agreed with everything you wrote. And everything else was so great, that I don’t think I even noticed the bad script!
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