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.