AVATAR – james cameron – 4.4 / 10

An awful lot has been made about James Cameron’s first film in twelve years being some kind of game changer that takes cinema to a new level or some such nonsense. To be sure, Avatar is visually very impressive both in its utilization of 3D and in its photorealistic environments that only ever existed in a computer mainframe. Unfortunately, being visually stunning is only enough to occupy the audience’s mind for half an hour or so. At that point there needs to be some kind of story or character development in order to sustain the audience’s interest for the remaining two hours, and Avatar provides none.

Nothing that happens in this film is the least bit surprising to anyone who’s seen a movie before. And if you happened to see Dances With Wolves or The Last Samurai then you’re really going to be bored because Avatar is pretty much the exact same movie: a wounded / broken soldier finds his true self as a member of the tribe his people are oppressing, becomes their leader and eventually fights against his former people. The twist this time around is that, rather than simply living amongst the Native Americans or the Japanese as in Wolves or Samurai, Avatar’s hero, Jake Sully (his people are ‘sullying’ the aliens’ homeworld, get it?), actually gets to become one of the blue creatures by plugging himself into a machine that lets him control an alien body.

While living amongst the blue alien monkey cats (the Na’vi), Jake learns their ways, comes to see the value of their society and, of course, falls in love with the chief’s daughter. Eventually, as it must in this sort of movie, the military and the evil corporation that wants to strip mine the aliens' homeworld of Pandora decide that all this trying to negotiate with the natives stuff is bullshit and decide to just destroy the place and take what they want. Leaving aside the fact that this decision is made by a company VP (who’s named Selfridge, get it?) and a Marine colonel (without so much as a phone call to a general or the CEO of the company), this whole scenario is obviously supposed to be an allegory for the ways the Native Americans were eradicated by our European ancestors when they first arrived on this continent. Just in case the point wasn’t clear enough, the Na’vi wear feathers in their hair, talk about the spirit gods, commune with nature and refer to themselves as ‘the people’ just as many Native American tribes did. This time, though, the natives have a white guy on their side and they’re going to kick some ass.

If this all sounds uncomfortably like an epic case of white guilt on Cameron’s part, well, yeah, it pretty much is. Avatar is basically an apologia for the Native American genocide our ancestors perpetrated a couple hundred years ago. And I’d actually be fine with that (though still bored because we’ve seen it a dozen times already) if the Na’vi didn’t end up needing a white guy to save them. Without Jake’s help, the Na’vi suffer a crippling defeat and watch their hometree burn to the ground. With his help, they’re able to mount a massive counter attack that demolishes the humans and their spaceships and sends them home is shame. And thus, what had been a simple case of white guilt morphs into something much darker: the impulse to become one with, subsume and eventually lead the race your people are oppressing (oh, and to have sex with the hottest hottie in the tribe, too).

This is the ultimate liberal fantasy. And it’s as fundamentally racist and paternalistic as outright hating another race just because they look different. That the Na’vi need a human to save them means that they really are as inferior as the evil characters in the film think they are. These characters go on and on about how they’re only trying to bring civilization to the Na’vi but are being rebuffed because ‘the natives are stupid.’ As Jake spends time with the Na’vi, the audience is supposed to come to understand that though they live differently than we do, their way of life is equally valid. But when, at the climax of the film, Jake becomes their leader and starts handing out military hardware and comlinks to the natives, the message is hopelessly lost. The Na’vi (and by extension the Native Americans and any other indigenous people white Europeans have eradicated over the years) might be people too, but they need humans (white people) to give them technology and leadership. Without that, they’ll surely die. Cameron is basically saying that, yes, white people are naturally superior in every way; they just shouldn’t act like it all the time.

Okay, okay, that’s going pretty deep into a film whose major selling point is just that it looks cool. And, to be sure, it does look awfully cool. But even that gets tiresome after a while. There’s a reason people think sunsets are beautiful but hardly ever notice how interesting the sky looks the rest of the day. And that’s because sunsets are short. If the sky looked like it did at sunset all day long, people would hardly notice after a while. And so it is with Avatar. It’s impressive, sure, but it’s only impressive for a while. Then you start to focus on other things and there’s really nothing else to the film besides the fact that it looks amazing.

Even the much vaunted ‘fully realized’ world of Pandora isn’t all that impressive when you think about it. The whole place is pretty much a jungle, a one-planet one-ecosystem concept borrowed from the Star Wars films (which have an ice planet, a desert planet, a jungle planet, etc.). All of the creatures on Pandora look like some sort of weird mash-up of creatures that already exist on earth. And all the land-based creatures except the Na’vi have six legs. You would think that if every other creature has six legs, there has to be a reason for it. Why then would the Na’vi only have four limbs? And speaking of the Na’vi, isn’t it convenient how they don’t really look much like humans? That way Cameron and his VFX crew can sidestep the problem of the Uncanny Valley (this is the reason that Tom Hanks’s character in The Polar Express, who’s supposed to look human, looks weirder somehow than the human characters in Up who are more cartoon-like).

The mere fact that I had time to wonder about all this tells you everything you need to know about Avatar. There’s just not enough cool looking stuff in the world to hold your attention for two and half hours. There needs to be some semblance of character development or plot or the movie’s not going to work. And make no mistake, Avatar absolutely does not work as a narrative film. It’s predictable, boring, borderline racist and more than a little offensive. If you go to the movies for story and characters, stay well away from Avatar. If you go to see cool looking stuff blow up real good then you might be entertained, for a while at least. But calling this the future of cinema is a flat out lie. If the future of movies is cool looking stuff exploding while characters no one cares about spout awful dialogue then we’ve been living that future for a while, arguably since Cameron’s last film twelve years ago.