Despite a weak plot, Avatar's remarkable technical achievement makes it a must-see.
I wasn’t around in 1939 to watch as Dorothy first opened the door to the world of Oz, vibrant in the bright hues of Technicolor as no film had been before. But I imagine the experience was something akin to what I felt watching Avatar—the utterly enthralling feeling of seeing the future of immersive visual storytelling unfold before my eyes. And Avatar recognizes this fact. When one character says, “You’re not in Kansas anymore,” it’s both an acknowledgement of the game-changing Oz precedent and a statement of purpose for what Avatar intends to accomplish. That is: to transport audiences to a cinematic world so unlike Kansas it’ll make your head spin.
James “king of the world” Cameron has done it again. His 12-years-after-Titanic epic is yet another landmark film is his canon of landmark films (Alien, Terminator 2, etc.). Though it isn’t quite as character-driven or emotionally resonant as his other films, Avatar is certainly his most technologically mind-blowing. Utilizing technologies that were invented for the film (CG advances, a new “Virtual Camera” and some sort of motion capture head-rig thingamajig), as well as employing 3D in a respectably understated manner, Cameron gives us an extravagant experience of sight and sound that demands to be seen by anyone who’s ever liked an adventure at the movies.
As forward-thinking and futuristic as the technology is in Avatar, however, the plot is supremely clunky and dated. Coming as it does in the final weeks of the first decade of the 20th century, Avatar’s narrative preoccupations are largely an unseemly hodgepodge of issues and concerns that dominated headlines in the 2000s: things like 9/11, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, global warming, the environment, etc. When a skyscraper-sized tree is attacked by evil humans and collapses midway through Avatar, the terrifying scene unmistakably evokes memories of the World Trade Center towers collapsing. But that’s just the beginning of Cameron’s “hey, this is a film for our time!” heavy-handedness.
The story concerns an alien planet, Pandora, populated by an alien race, the Na’vi, which has been invaded by militant throngs of humans from earth—which in 2154 is apparently clean out of natural resources and needs to colonize foreign worlds for minerals and things. In order to smooth over tenuous relations with the Na’vi natives, the humans utilize an avatar system in which they can inhabit Na’vi bodies (tall, blue, reptilian) so as to learn and live among the alien race, with the intention of diplomatically convincing them to relinquish their planet and its natural resources for human colonial interests.
One of the human-avatar diplomats, Jake Sully (Sam Worthington), begins to like his “out of body” avatar experience a little too much, however. A former Marine now confined to a wheelchair, Sully falls in love with the Na’vi way of life (he can run!) and especially one of its most cherished young maidens, Neytiri (Zoe Saldana), with whom he becomes romantically entangled. It’s all very John Smith/Pocahontas, and I’ll be darned if I didn’t think of Terrence Malick’s The New World on more than one occasion. The world of Pandora is certainly as wild and wonderfully exotic as the Americas must have seemed to the first explorers, and the Na’vi are suspiciously similar to Native Americans in the way they talk, hunt (bow and arrow) and conceive of God (God, or “Eywa,” is in nature/everything is connected).
More at home among the alien race than in his own world/body, Sully takes sides with them against the increasingly impatient humans, led by a crazy businessman (Giovanni Ribisi) and an even crazier military colonel (Stephan Lang) hell-bent on getting what they want from the planet through conspicuously familiar methods like “preemptive attacks,” “shock and awe” campaigns, and “fighting terror with terror.” The film climaxes with a rip-roaring, gotta-see-to-believe battle between the good guys (Sully, the Na’vi, and a few other nice humans including Sigourney Weaver and Michelle Rodriguez) and the bad guys (the military industrial complex … white men in helicopters who carpet bomb serene tropical nature, Vietnam style).
In terms of plot, Avatar is achingly predictable and unsparingly clichéd. In any other movie, this would be a problem. But Avatar isn’t about plot. Like a videogame, plot in Avatar is second to the immersive experience.
It may be inexcusable that Cameron couldn’t find time in all the years of developing Avatar to actually write a script that didn’t suck, especially given the fact that the “avatar” idea is so rife with interesting philosophical and existential potential. But if all the nerdy doo-dads, camera advances and “world building” truly required all his attention to make Avatar as breathtaking as it is, I suppose we can forgive him.
At the end of the day, Avatar is about what it’s like to escape. The journey of Jake Sully is one of escaping his planet, his handicap and his “old life” by rediscovering himself in a world of complete newness and foreign wonders. It’s his chance to live in another body, in another place, outside of the confines and limitations of his “real” life.
Cinema works in the same way for us, and Avatar is a glorious example of the screen’s transporting potential. It’s utterly escapist—immersing us in a world that doesn’t exist and yet feels like some sort of reality. There is reality in fantasy too. We feel the “reality” of striking colors, beautiful floating mountains, and the sensation of flying on the back of a winged dragon.
The glistening photo-realistic lights, otherworldly colors and explosions of Avatar add up to a truly “out of Kansas” experience. And even if Dorothy is right that Kansas is still preferable, that “there’s no place like home,” and even if Sully is correct when he says, “you always have to wake up …” we can at least enjoy the dream while it lasts.
