Movie review: Avatar
Jan. 3rd, 2010 12:00 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
seriousficSo where to start with Avatar? Obviously, the spectacle. And yes, the visuals are impressive. That 300 mil obviously ended up on screen, not up James Cameron’s nose. But here’s my thing… spectacle is why people went to see Transformers 2. It’s a bit weird to see critics lose their mind over one movie and crucify the other. Just listen to some of the GOOD reviews of Avatar.
Cameron's eye-popping visuals are the story, particularly because the actual narrative is too simple to sustain the 150-minute run time.
The year's most ambitious film is so breathtaking, it detracts you from the fact that Cameron's characters are caricatures, and too much of the dialogue is stock. The good news? None of it matters.
A wonder to behold, a story to forget.
Like James Cameron's previous film, TITANIC, there are enough good bits to make a really great film and enough bad bits to make a real stinker. Go for what is good and ignore the bad.
There is plenty of gee-whiz technology to keep the audience marveling over how they did this and that, so that, with any luck, viewers won't dwell too long on the derivative, unimaginative story and the shallow characters.
After a second viewing at a better theater, I feel this movie is more fresh than rotten. The stunning visuals are slightly better than the unoriginal plot and horrendous dialogue.
Avatar is great to look at, often astonishing and sometimes beautiful. But, oh, is the story pedestrian.
Nothing destroys a decent movie more than calling it great, and while this one's a little better than decent, it's definitely a long way from great.
Ouch.
That’s not to say Avatar is as bad as Transformers 2. Avatar has better (comprehensible) action, more complimentary racial caricatures, and a far more tolerable amount of Shia LeBeouf, which is to say none. But when the best thing you can say about a movie is that it’s not as aggressively bad as the worst film of the year…
So where’d Cameron go wrong? Let’s start with the story. There’s a reason it looks like Fern Gully, Pocohontas, and Dances With Wolves ran a train on Thundercats, then had a crack baby that was raised by the Smurfs. It’s basically the same movie, only with a fatal lack of Tim Curry, Mary McDonnell, or… whoever the fuck was in Pocahontas.
It’s a complete dichotomy. The planet feels like it took twenty years to bring to life, but the story and the characters feel like they were slapped together in one afternoon. By a sixth-grader. Whose homework assignment was due that day.
Now, I don’t know about your writing process, but me, I like to collect little moments and fit them into the narrative. Something like, say, the hero punches the crap out of a bad guy, then tries to finger-poke him down, but the bad guy is just conscious enough to stay up, so the hero gives him a huge right hand and knocks him right the fuck out. You know, just funny little moments, clever turns of phrase, subverted tropes… If I don’t have enough, the story isn’t worth writing.
After having a story on the backburner for fifteen years, you’d think Cameron would be exploding with tropes to twist, quips to make, and just fun action beats. But it’s just The Last Samurai by way of the Star Wars prequels. The hero assuages his white liberal guilt by becoming blue, and is better at it than anyone who was born blue. At the end, the Blue Man group is still fronted by a white guy, but he’s a Democrat, so it’s alright. And yes, this really is the most childish storytelling you’ll see outside Lucasfilms. The good guys are pure and selfless, the Na’vi are blameless hotties, the villains twirl their moustaches and smoke cigars.
But hey, stories don’t have to be original to be good, right? Lots of stories are derivative. Cameron just wants an excuse plot with boo-hiss villains and Dudley Doright heroes. It’s all only there to justify dragons fighting helicopters. So how’s the execution?
Again, not good. Yes, the battle in the third act is spectacular, but we don’t care about any of the characters, or what they’re fighting for. That’s because every one of the characters is a shallow, boring stereotype. The Evil Military Commander, the Weaselly Corporate Executive, the Square-Jawed Hero, the Wise Scientist, the Noble Savages, the Chieftain’s Daughter Love Interest, the Douchey Rival, Michelle Rodriguez. Despite the engorged running time, the story never delves into any of them. You’d think there’d be some interesting layers to, say, a ten-foot-tall blue woman who falls in love with a ten-foot-tall blue guy who’s really a six-foot-tall honky. But no, she’s just kinda wise and pretty. Say what you will about the stereotypes in Titanic, but at least they were two-dimensional stereotypes. This is the first one-dimensional 3D movie I’ve seen.
There’s an abysmally long second act where Jake Sully, out hero, falls in love with Pandora and, by extension, Neytiri (and yes, she literally is the chieftain’s daughter and yes, she is in an arranged marriage to add some forbidden to their romance. Odd that such a Nice Guy civilization has arranged marriages…). It plays out like a Discovery Channel special on aborigines that don’t happen to exist. We don’t learn anything new about the characters, we just see them go through the motions of being a Na’vi. It’s like the ‘we’re so in love’ scenes from Casino Royale, stretched into an entire movie. The love story feels completely unearned.
In Star Trek, Spock and Uhura have about ten minutes of screentime together, but their relationship feels so much more real. This is being bludgeoned over the head with romance, which STILL never rings true. I feel like the restaurant critic who complained that the food was bad and the portions were too small. There’s a scene where Neytiri is telling Jake about all the Na’vi he could date, how one’s a great hunter and another can sing really well. Jake, of course, says “I love you.” He doesn’t go into reasons, but I think it’s because she has top billing. What about this story made Cameron want to spend three hundred million dollars on it? Does he just have that big a hard-on for giant blue catwomen?
Now, there could be some tension here, since Jake is lying to her, but the villains are so openly evil that the only question you’ll want answered is why Jake would buy their crap for a second. For Christ’s sake, they openly refer to the Na’vi as savages. These days, when you can get in trouble for calling someone black instead of African-American, that strikes such a false tone that they’d be more believable kicking puppies. In fact, they actually do mock people in wheelchairs. Just so you know they’re mean.
Unfortunately for the movie, the bad guys are the only ones who look like they’re having fun, and I’m betting most people share their healthy contempt for the Na’vi’s New Agey treehugger crap, which really reminds me of Star Trek: Insurrection. There, Picard denies life-saving medicine to billions so that a couple hundred people can live forever. Just like the Na’vi, we’re meant to find the Ba’ku charming instead of selfish.
(I should note that the movie misses an excellent opportunity to make the villains more complex, simply by making the “unobtainium” something they need, rather than just a McGuffin. The movie literally never says what unobtainium is used for.)
The problem being, both movies are sci-fi, not fantasy. The difference isn’t that people fire arrows in one and bullets in the other. Fantasy tends to be conservative, taking place after a golden age of heroes, with the protagonists trying to restore the natural order of things. Sci-fi is more progressive, with the heroes using science to solve problems and create a better future. Now, that’s a very simplified dichotomy, but I’d like to think it’s fair, mostly because of the ur-examples of Lord of the Rings and Star Trek, which cast a pretty long shadow. So a sci-fi movie about the wonders of Luddism, especially one that’s only worth watching because of the CGI, is completely disingenuous. I think most people would prefer indoor plumbing to being blue and Amish.
We end up with an unoriginal story, poorly executed, with its only saving grace being the special effects. If that’s what you want from a movie, more power, but… you’re basically Hollywood’s bitch. Why not just watch 2012 and be done with it? At least that doesn’t make you wait through two hours of Animal Planet on Mars to get to the wholesale destruction.
PS. The Na’vi are literally in touch with nature. They can plug their hair into animals and telepathically control them. Which doesn’t seem that nice, tentacle-raping animals into doing their will. Imagine if a midget came up to you with that offer.
“Hey there. I see you’re eating a burrito, nice, nice. Look, I need to get to Georgetown, so do you mind if I jam a tentacle into your brain and ride you around? Cool? Thanks. Oh, and then I’m going to war with some guys who blew up my apartment building. You’ll probably be killed horribly, since they have guns and we only have bows and arrows, but hey, circle of life.”
ETA: The Na’vi are also pretty racist when you think about it.
Humans: Hi there! We want to learn your ways and understand your culture.
Na’vi: Do you look exactly like us?
Humans: Uh… no.
Na’vi: FUCK YOU THEN!
Avatars: Hi, we’re Avatars! We were created to look just like you.
Na’vi: Welcome to the club!
Cameron's eye-popping visuals are the story, particularly because the actual narrative is too simple to sustain the 150-minute run time.
The year's most ambitious film is so breathtaking, it detracts you from the fact that Cameron's characters are caricatures, and too much of the dialogue is stock. The good news? None of it matters.
A wonder to behold, a story to forget.
Like James Cameron's previous film, TITANIC, there are enough good bits to make a really great film and enough bad bits to make a real stinker. Go for what is good and ignore the bad.
There is plenty of gee-whiz technology to keep the audience marveling over how they did this and that, so that, with any luck, viewers won't dwell too long on the derivative, unimaginative story and the shallow characters.
After a second viewing at a better theater, I feel this movie is more fresh than rotten. The stunning visuals are slightly better than the unoriginal plot and horrendous dialogue.
Avatar is great to look at, often astonishing and sometimes beautiful. But, oh, is the story pedestrian.
Nothing destroys a decent movie more than calling it great, and while this one's a little better than decent, it's definitely a long way from great.
Ouch.
That’s not to say Avatar is as bad as Transformers 2. Avatar has better (comprehensible) action, more complimentary racial caricatures, and a far more tolerable amount of Shia LeBeouf, which is to say none. But when the best thing you can say about a movie is that it’s not as aggressively bad as the worst film of the year…
So where’d Cameron go wrong? Let’s start with the story. There’s a reason it looks like Fern Gully, Pocohontas, and Dances With Wolves ran a train on Thundercats, then had a crack baby that was raised by the Smurfs. It’s basically the same movie, only with a fatal lack of Tim Curry, Mary McDonnell, or… whoever the fuck was in Pocahontas.
It’s a complete dichotomy. The planet feels like it took twenty years to bring to life, but the story and the characters feel like they were slapped together in one afternoon. By a sixth-grader. Whose homework assignment was due that day.
Now, I don’t know about your writing process, but me, I like to collect little moments and fit them into the narrative. Something like, say, the hero punches the crap out of a bad guy, then tries to finger-poke him down, but the bad guy is just conscious enough to stay up, so the hero gives him a huge right hand and knocks him right the fuck out. You know, just funny little moments, clever turns of phrase, subverted tropes… If I don’t have enough, the story isn’t worth writing.
After having a story on the backburner for fifteen years, you’d think Cameron would be exploding with tropes to twist, quips to make, and just fun action beats. But it’s just The Last Samurai by way of the Star Wars prequels. The hero assuages his white liberal guilt by becoming blue, and is better at it than anyone who was born blue. At the end, the Blue Man group is still fronted by a white guy, but he’s a Democrat, so it’s alright. And yes, this really is the most childish storytelling you’ll see outside Lucasfilms. The good guys are pure and selfless, the Na’vi are blameless hotties, the villains twirl their moustaches and smoke cigars.
But hey, stories don’t have to be original to be good, right? Lots of stories are derivative. Cameron just wants an excuse plot with boo-hiss villains and Dudley Doright heroes. It’s all only there to justify dragons fighting helicopters. So how’s the execution?
Again, not good. Yes, the battle in the third act is spectacular, but we don’t care about any of the characters, or what they’re fighting for. That’s because every one of the characters is a shallow, boring stereotype. The Evil Military Commander, the Weaselly Corporate Executive, the Square-Jawed Hero, the Wise Scientist, the Noble Savages, the Chieftain’s Daughter Love Interest, the Douchey Rival, Michelle Rodriguez. Despite the engorged running time, the story never delves into any of them. You’d think there’d be some interesting layers to, say, a ten-foot-tall blue woman who falls in love with a ten-foot-tall blue guy who’s really a six-foot-tall honky. But no, she’s just kinda wise and pretty. Say what you will about the stereotypes in Titanic, but at least they were two-dimensional stereotypes. This is the first one-dimensional 3D movie I’ve seen.
There’s an abysmally long second act where Jake Sully, out hero, falls in love with Pandora and, by extension, Neytiri (and yes, she literally is the chieftain’s daughter and yes, she is in an arranged marriage to add some forbidden to their romance. Odd that such a Nice Guy civilization has arranged marriages…). It plays out like a Discovery Channel special on aborigines that don’t happen to exist. We don’t learn anything new about the characters, we just see them go through the motions of being a Na’vi. It’s like the ‘we’re so in love’ scenes from Casino Royale, stretched into an entire movie. The love story feels completely unearned.
In Star Trek, Spock and Uhura have about ten minutes of screentime together, but their relationship feels so much more real. This is being bludgeoned over the head with romance, which STILL never rings true. I feel like the restaurant critic who complained that the food was bad and the portions were too small. There’s a scene where Neytiri is telling Jake about all the Na’vi he could date, how one’s a great hunter and another can sing really well. Jake, of course, says “I love you.” He doesn’t go into reasons, but I think it’s because she has top billing. What about this story made Cameron want to spend three hundred million dollars on it? Does he just have that big a hard-on for giant blue catwomen?
Now, there could be some tension here, since Jake is lying to her, but the villains are so openly evil that the only question you’ll want answered is why Jake would buy their crap for a second. For Christ’s sake, they openly refer to the Na’vi as savages. These days, when you can get in trouble for calling someone black instead of African-American, that strikes such a false tone that they’d be more believable kicking puppies. In fact, they actually do mock people in wheelchairs. Just so you know they’re mean.
Unfortunately for the movie, the bad guys are the only ones who look like they’re having fun, and I’m betting most people share their healthy contempt for the Na’vi’s New Agey treehugger crap, which really reminds me of Star Trek: Insurrection. There, Picard denies life-saving medicine to billions so that a couple hundred people can live forever. Just like the Na’vi, we’re meant to find the Ba’ku charming instead of selfish.
(I should note that the movie misses an excellent opportunity to make the villains more complex, simply by making the “unobtainium” something they need, rather than just a McGuffin. The movie literally never says what unobtainium is used for.)
The problem being, both movies are sci-fi, not fantasy. The difference isn’t that people fire arrows in one and bullets in the other. Fantasy tends to be conservative, taking place after a golden age of heroes, with the protagonists trying to restore the natural order of things. Sci-fi is more progressive, with the heroes using science to solve problems and create a better future. Now, that’s a very simplified dichotomy, but I’d like to think it’s fair, mostly because of the ur-examples of Lord of the Rings and Star Trek, which cast a pretty long shadow. So a sci-fi movie about the wonders of Luddism, especially one that’s only worth watching because of the CGI, is completely disingenuous. I think most people would prefer indoor plumbing to being blue and Amish.
We end up with an unoriginal story, poorly executed, with its only saving grace being the special effects. If that’s what you want from a movie, more power, but… you’re basically Hollywood’s bitch. Why not just watch 2012 and be done with it? At least that doesn’t make you wait through two hours of Animal Planet on Mars to get to the wholesale destruction.
PS. The Na’vi are literally in touch with nature. They can plug their hair into animals and telepathically control them. Which doesn’t seem that nice, tentacle-raping animals into doing their will. Imagine if a midget came up to you with that offer.
“Hey there. I see you’re eating a burrito, nice, nice. Look, I need to get to Georgetown, so do you mind if I jam a tentacle into your brain and ride you around? Cool? Thanks. Oh, and then I’m going to war with some guys who blew up my apartment building. You’ll probably be killed horribly, since they have guns and we only have bows and arrows, but hey, circle of life.”
ETA: The Na’vi are also pretty racist when you think about it.
Humans: Hi there! We want to learn your ways and understand your culture.
Na’vi: Do you look exactly like us?
Humans: Uh… no.
Na’vi: FUCK YOU THEN!
Avatars: Hi, we’re Avatars! We were created to look just like you.
Na’vi: Welcome to the club!
