By Faris Tanyos for KDRV
 
Grade: B+
 
December 24, 2009
 
"There's this sense of bifurcation, that really true artistic, cutting-edge filmmakers make these indie pictures, and that CG films are these clanking machines. I've tried to fight to inhabit both spaces. There's a way to take all these technical tools and have them come from a place where the artist is still running the film. It's not easy."
 
- James Cameron, speaking to The New York Times.
 
Oil and water... Metallica's S&M...
 
Recorded with the San Francisco Symphony, it meshed two polar opposites.
 
Not only did the two entities coexist on the same plane in S&M, they achieved something that each could not have alone. S&M wasn't about adding a string section to a pop song (Bittersweet Symphony) or tinkering with the experimental (A Day in the Life). It was about creating something balanced, beautiful and raw, monstrous and powerful and bittersweet. It was two genres with no business sharing the same space; in conflict, in struggle, and the resulting thrash was transcendent. That thrash made it the best live album in history. Listen to Four Leaf Clover and tell me it doesn't rip you to shreds.
 
James Cameron desperately wants Avatar to grip you, to rip you to shreds with its clashing worlds, like S&M. It wants to be, in his words, "a true hybrid, a full live-action shoot, with CG characters in CG and live environments. Ideally, at the end of the day, the audience has no idea which they're looking at."
 
There's two contrasts in Avatar: The lush, deep, stunning world of Pandora, inhabited by the peaceful humanoid Na'vi and a vast, mesmerizing array of flora and fauna, versus the brash, single-minded colonizers, disguised as goodwill ambassadors, with their selfish, corporate and economic interests (Subtlety ain't one of Monsieur Cameron's strengths). Then there's the real vs. the virtual; whether we will, as Cameron says, "have no idea what we're looking at".
 
Cameron wrote the script over a decade ago, but says he had to wait for technology to catch up before moving forward with production on the $300 million-plus project (too bad his script didn't progress with the technology). Reportedly, the film's principal innovation was the use of a new camera developed by Cameron's team that allowed the filmmakers to place the actors in their virtual environment during the live shoots.
 
A major issue, Cameron said, was avoiding with the CG characters what is known as the Uncanny Valley. In an interview with the Los Angeles Times, he described this as "a negative effect that is created when something approaches human [in appearance] but isn't quite there, it creates this creepiness. Our goal right from the get-go is that we had to get over the uncanny valley. These characters have to be real, they have to be alive."
 
Avatar also faced the challenge of not having an inbuilt audience, like recent comic and book-based blockbusters such as Batman, Twilight, Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter and Spiderman. "We have no brand value," Cameron told the LAT. "We have to create that brand value. Avatar means something to that group of fans that know this film is coming, but to the other 99 percent of the public it's a nonsense word."
 
Not anymore. But let's avoid the dance. Avatar isn't cutting edge or edgy or endearing or memorable. It isn't uncomfortable and it has absolutely nothing new to say. It's derivative and unremarkable. But that's not the issue. Forget for a second the analogies you've heard: "It's _____ (Pocahontas, Dances with Wolves, Lawrence of Arabia, A New World, Last of the Mohicans) in space ... Yes, they're all right, but they're all missing the point.
 
Avatar is absolutely, unequivocally, the most stunning visual experience I have ever had at the cinema. It is breathtaking and fresh... and I say this having watched it in 2D. Cameron doesn't fall into the uncanny valley; he gives his CG characters personality and elasticity...
 
Story: The Na'vi (Whose lifestyle and language seem to strangely parallel the stereotypes -Be they false?- of Native American culture.) live in perfect harmony on their planet Pandora. Human colonists, made up jointly of military and corporate groups, show up seeking Unobtanium, a mineral that will solve the earth's energy crisis. To get to the mineral they need to drive the Na'vi out. Humans can't survive in Pandora's atmosphere. However, scientists have developed a Na'vi-human hybrid body, called an Avatar, that humans can inhabit and control, allowing them to explore the planet at will. Here's Cameron describing the Avatar to Time Magazine:
 
"It's an incarnation of one of the Hindu gods taking a flesh form. In this film what that means is that the human technology in the future is capable of injecting a human intelligence into a remotely located body, a biological body. It's not an avatar in the sense of just existing as ones and zeroes in cyberspace. It's actually a physical body."
 
Riveting stuff. I'm interested.
 
Our hero, Paraplegic Marine Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) is sent to Pandora to fill the shoes of his deceased twin brother, a scientist with the Avatar Program. Sully is his brother's genetic match, and hence the only one that can take over his avatar body. On Pandora Sully discovers a myriad of competing interests. Dr. Grace Augustine (Sigourney Weaver), head of the Avatar Program, sees the planet as a rich opportunity for scientific enrichment. The malevolent U.S. Colonel Miles Quaritch (Stephen Lang) and greedy businessman Parker Selfridge (Giovanni Ribisi) want to use Sully to convince the Na'vi to abandon their home. Meanwhile, Sully slowly gains the Na'vi trust, while falling in love with Neytiri (Zoe Saldana), assigned to teach Sully the Na'vi ways... But Quaritch has offered Sully the opportunity to get the use of his legs back if he's willing to...
 
Please tell me you can see where this is going.
 
The real disappointment with Avatar is that its stunning visual smorgasbord deserves an equally stunning story; it's the only way to do it justice. The visuals are so spectacular, so awe-inspiring, that what we end up with is a chasm, a disconnect with the blandness of the narrative. It's not that the story should have been better. It's that it needed to be; to keep up with what we're experiencing in our minds' eye. Avatar could have been Lawrence of Arabia in Space, and there's nothing wrong with that. It's story is conventional and blasé and played, but that's not the problem. Cameron didn't need to change it. Movies steal from each other all the time, and at this point, it's almost impossible to make a film that hasn't already been made in some form. It's how you form it that's at issue.
 
The failures:
 
Avatar shouldn't have used earthly mercenaries and military personnel to play the role of the antagonists. It's too obvious, unimaginative and just downright lazy storytelling. Cameron & Co. went through all this effort to create, from nothing, this incredible futuristic fantasy world, and should have gone the whole nine yards to craft a new group of colonizers from another planet; and could have done so without changing the principle message of the movie...
 
Whether Cameron did this to make the content more palatable and relatable to the current issues it seeks to address is irrelevant. It comes across as simplistic, and might even be interpreted by some as blatant liberal propaganda. Again, nothing wrong with that, Cameron has the right to make whatever movie he wants. However, as a filmmaker, he should have put more effort into working his message more subtly into the story instead of beating us over the head with it...
 
Avatar believes itself to be providing divisive, complex commentary on America's foreign and environmental policies. But the message is neither bold nor complex enough to say anything that hasn't been said a thousand times before in a thousand better movies. Cameron hopes that Pandora's beauty will only further intensify the contrast between the Na'vi and the barbaric attitudes of the mercenary soldiers; thereby turning the mirror onto us, forcing us to reflect on the actions of our society and government... but again, it fails to do anything but exaggerate the banality of the picture, because instead of getting us to think, Avatar tranforms into a Michael Bay flick. We're watching The Rock or Armageddon; And we stop thinking. But maybe that's what Cameron wants us to do, stop thinking...
 
Second point: The dialogue is horrendous. Beautiful images of nature in motion are intercut with clunky, cliché, boneheaded scenes on a military base that made me cringe repeatedly. Again, Cameron did this to highlight the utter barbaric blah, blah... HE DIDN'T NEED TO...
 
Avatar's final act consists only of mindless action. Nothing wrong with mindless action movies; but by its own high standards, Avatar deserved to give us something deeper and more substantial. It deserved a real screenwriter. Cameron came up with a fantastic idea with the Na'vi-human avatar hybrid, but then he should have handed over the narrative reigns to someone else.
 
Thirdly, while Avatar successfully avoided the uncanny valley with CG characters that are alive and radiant (Sigourney Weaver's avatar-likeness is truly uncanny)... they are too one-dimensional... they lack soul. Both Sam Worthington and Weaver put in poor performances, but much of that wasn't their fault; they didn't have a lot to work with. The supporting cast is weak and lacks cohesion. The characters aren't interesting or surprising. The relationship between Neytiri and Sully feels too calculated, too cold...
 
There it is... too cold. I came out of Avatar with the same feeling I had walking out of the Art Institute of Chicago. Impressed... but affected? Not at all.
 
ftanyos@kdrv.com