Avatar (USA, 2009)


I will remember the opening moments of Avatar as one of the greatest cinema experiences of my life. Seeing Jake Sully emerge from cryo-sleep and move in a zero-gravity space, with a deep well disappearing far beneath him, astonished and delighted me. It was my first experience of the new 3D tech (if you don’t count the Alice in Wonderland trailer that immediately preceded it) and the visual shock lived up to the billing. That and Cameron’s customarily polished production design, and some very efficient early storytelling, started the film on a tremendous high.
The rest of the film was a steady roll downhill. By the end I was completely disengaged from everything that was happening in front of me, and occasionally resenting it. Even the lush natural world, surely an incredible accomplishment, wore out its welcome – too many spectacular lava lamp plants, not enough moments of genuine wonder.
It’s a film with its heart in the right place, but all the subtlety of a Captain Planet episode. The storytelling was perfunctory at best, often laughably so – Our Hero meets the natives, and they establish in two lines that the hot girl he met is the chief’s daughter, and the tough warrior is betrothed to the hot girl. The chief tells the hot girl to train Our Hero in the native ways, but she better not fall in love with him! We’ve all seen this movie before, right? We all knew that was going to be the case, why waste any extra words on it?
And it had all the clumsy you would expect from a tech-fetishist’s attempt to depict a holistic/shamanic worldview – they can measure the web of consciousness with their scanners because it’s made of electricity!
But mostly, the film annoyed me for buying in so thoroughly to the White Man Saves The Natives fantasy. I knew it was coming, but I didn’t expect just how egregious it was going to be.
It isn’t just a white man learning to become a high-functioning highly-respected member of the tribe in a spectacularly short time – no, Our Hero actually proves to be the awesomest native in history, not only becoming one of the few people ever to do the most difficult thing (apparently because of a tactical insight any ten-year-old could replicate), but also being the only one ever to do this other amazing thing that, um, why does it work for him again? No justification is presented. He’s just awesome is why.
And he’s a tool. Seriously, the hero of this movie is not a nice or charming guy, and Sam Worthington is not the actor to convince you otherwise.
Lets not get into the roles of the non-blue people of colour in this film.
Jim Cameron, this is the one that tips you over. I was with you through Titanic, which I really enjoyed and (though I haven’t seen it for a decade) am confident I’d still like. I stand up for you when people point at that and laugh at its cartoonish storytelling and grand excess. But Avatar, I cannot defend. (Still, it keeps getting four-star and five-star reviews. So what the hell do I know?)
Good points: the opening sequence, everything with Sigourney Weaver, all those Maori men and women in space.
I genuinely recommend watching this in a foreign language, untranslated. That isn’t sarcasm, I think it’d improve the experience tenfold.

11 thoughts on “Avatar (USA, 2009)”

  1. I must completely agree. When asked about the film by work-mates this morning my comment has been “Looks/sounds like nothing else. Shame about the story.”
    However you’re far too kind to Titanic.

  2. I’ll argue some points and concede some others.
    This isn’t a deep story. You generally don’t get deep stories in Hollywood action films these days. Dark Knight he exception. This is a shame as a science fiction is best when it is deep and deals with layers and deeper meaning.
    Was the potential for that there in the story. Hell yes. The howl of Pandora, the mind meld, the symbiotic nature between animal and world conciseness is all good stuff. That is wasn’t really explored outside of the need to move the narrative forward is a shame. That Sully could call on the planet for aid made sense. That the planet answered his call specifically was probably maybe a bit naff. In fact it would have been much cooler of Neytiri had done that. Afterall she is supposed to be the next whatever the heck her mother was priestess of the tribe.
    But I didn’t think Sully learned their warrior ways too fast. It was about 3 months, which given that he was already a decorated human warrior, had rehabbed a broken spine, and while clumsy in his avatar body at first was clearly an agile and exceptional physical human. It stands to reason that he could learn to be a Na’vi warrior in 3 months.
    Learning the language, maybe not.
    Another review you linked to says that Sully is a bad man. On this I disagree. Selfish maybe. Not thinking for himself definitely. He is a solider. His superior officer asks him to do something and he does it. Soldiers first. He has never been asked to think for himself. IN fact it is likely that that had been drummed out of him. So over the course of the film he starts to think for himself, and even that is hard for him. The fact that being given his legs back – especially after having been given the gift of an Avatar body with legs – is an added incentive makes it even harder for him.
    As for the clan accepting him back in. The only one that really matters is Neytiri. The other guy never liked him. And Neytiri had mated with him for life and no matter how much she hates him because of what he did, she is forever bonded to him. Tough to break that. Kind of like the link with the flying bird.
    But all that said I don’t think it is elements of the story that are strong in this film. It’s a really simple tale that has been told a million times. I think while it can be seen as “white mans saves the natives fantasy” it is really a story about breaking away from peer pressure to do something right. That Sully is white in this film makes no difference. He could have been any type of human, and it might have been more interesting if he was (Michelle Rodriguez had a similar journey in some respects, possibly a more interesting one), but the film portrays the human race as the clique that Sully has to break from.
    Anyway I’m rambling now. Avatar certainly had a better story than Transformers Revenge of the Fallen, but as far as Cameron goes it isn’t as good as Abyss or Terminator.

  3. I told my workmate this morning not to see Avatar for the story, but to go to the 3d version to experience the pretty.
    I thought it was over-long and simplistic, but it really made me want to watch Fern Gully again.
    OTOH I kept thinking about the way the Na’vi looked as I fell asleep last night so there was *some* sort of impact.

  4. I really do think some people hook onto the Noble Savages thought a bit too much and allow that to colour their bias in the film.
    It’s a simple action movie and while the world is incredibly detailed and there is a clear message about the risks of corporate greed (remember that SecFor is *not* a colony, it is more akin to an oil platform – it exists not to colonise the planet but to take its resources) over cultural understanding.
    I also disagree that Sully is a bad man. He is a fairly in depth character – and part of his return to the Na’vi plays into his need for a family. This is a running theme in the movie for Sully is family. Afterall, his brother dies leaving him alone and he falls back into the comfort of being a soldier only to be accepted by the Na’vi and initially doing what he thinks is right for them.
    The thing is while the Na’vi are modelled off Native Americans, I can’t shake the feeling this is deliberately done to throw viewers off the scent a bit – to make you think like the humans in the movie.
    The big mistake that the villains make is that they assume they understand the flora and fauna of Pandora. They think that the Na’vi are noble savages in need of education.
    But they are a sophisticated *ALIEN* race that is in touch with their obviously bio-engineered world. (And again, there are a number of visual clues in the film that suggest a designer of the world, the biggest being near the spirit tree.)
    The Na’vi society is remarkably complex and sophisticated. It’s apparent shamanism is due to the reality that they are a transhumanist race that is still able to commune to a degree with their ancestors via Eywa. As for Sully’s plea helping – that isn’t him being better than Na’vi – it’s again about two cultures understanding each other.
    Until Sully communes with Eywa, there is no way for the planet consciousness to really understand the humans. Sure, there is Sigourney Weaver’s character’s consciousness – but that is what allows the planet to understand Sully’s plea.
    I don’t feel the film is particularly deep – but I do think a lot of the Dances with Wolves comparisons miss what the film was about by putting too much of the White man saves the savages bias into a film that really – to my mind – goes the other way. The Noble “savages” save a broken man.
    Sully is redeemed by turning away from humanity to embrace the Na’vi. Heck, that’s where the film ends – with him eschewing the last of his humanity to become truly like them.
    Conan

  5. I haven’t yet seen Avatar, but I’m going to go out on what seems to be a limb here and stick up for Titanic. Yes the central story is facile and cartoonish, but what seems to be constantly overlooked for me in the Titanic bashing is the dazzling technical and production achievement that the film remains. So there are no acting or writing oscars, since when has Cameron ever picked these up regularly? SFW.
    As someone with a lifelong interest in the real ship, there are many details to appreciate on screen that the average punter probably wouldn’t notice, a fact which allows me to ignore the breathless cliches of the plot and enjoy the ride.

  6. Avatar’s story and storytelling are flawed, but it is some sort of cultural watershed when the 300 million dollar action movie of the summer is basically running pro-holistic-spirituality anti-exploitation-of-nature-for-profit messages, at the same time as the Copenhagen talks fail.

  7. Sorry guys, I still think the same way about the noble savage/white man’s burden stuff in Avatar. Might try and compose a response at some point that doesn’t just go over old ground.
    I agree with Billy though.

  8. I liked it. I should say it was better than I thought it’d be (if you’re going really for the effects….)
    That being said, of course it was a cliched story: Hollywood wouldn’t risk that much money for something that wasn’t.
    And: I thought Weaver was the worst part of the movie. her early acting was pedantic, high school production level almost….
    The Hoff would have been a better Jake Sully!

  9. Hey, I saw Dances with Wolves on TV the other day and, for me, it strikes a chord with this post about Avatar.
    I’m not a fan of Costner at all but, for me, in Dances with Wolves he smoothly and pleasingly pulled off the whole alien to a culture thing, the love story and all that stuff.
    I don’t know if that matches up for you though?

  10. I thought Avatar was dreadful. It’s hard to see how the story could have been any more trite and it also went on for far too long. Were it not for the 3D I’d have walked out. Incidentally I liked Titanic although it was flawed and the central love story tremendously naff- so my standards aren’t *that* high.

  11. This post has just been slammed by spammers. So I’m closing down comments. People with more to say on Avatar (and really, is there anyone out there who doesn’t have an opinion?) are invited to comment instead on the most recent post. Why not. Let subject-line anarchy reign!

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