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Tagged as: review

Avatar (2009) is yet anoth­er movie in the vein of Star Wars: The Return of the Jedi (1983), The Last of the Mohicans (1992) and Apocalyto (2006) about the “fact” that white peo­ple are tech­nol­o­gy-dri­ven gold-dig­gers and indige­nous com­mu­ni­ties are pure-spir­it­ed naturelovers.

I think we all get it already so I’ll spare you a lengthy analy­sis of how this is a para­ble for numer­ous such sto­ries from his­to­ry, includ­ing that of the Native American strug­gle, or even the cur­rent sit­u­a­tion in the Middle East. Therefore, it would be a good idea to for­get that paper-thin premise and just focus on the glo­ri­ous visu­als, where the movie quite lit­er­al­ly shines. But first allow me to rant a bit more.

I inten­tion­al­ly read noth­ing about the film going in, so all I knew was that it is set in an unspec­i­fied future and that I get a nifty pair of 3D glass­es (read: com­put­er-gen­er­at­ed spe­cial effects galore). My igno­rance was not a prob­lem though, because I could imme­di­ate­ly hear (and see) the sto­ry cogs creak into motion as I was told in glo­ri­ous voiceover (yuck) some cocka­mamie back­sto­ry so gener­ic I had already for­got­ten it by the five-minute mark.

“I want to live on Pandora!” sobs Nadia for half an hour after the movie.

Jake Sully (Sam Worthington), a young Matt Damon-type marine in a wheel­chair, some­how joins a mil­i­tary megapro­ject to mine unob­ta­ni­um (no joke), a valu­able sub­stance con­cen­trat­ed under a patch of land on the moon Pandora. The only way to do that is to uproot a large alien com­mu­ni­ty, ide­al­ly by con­vinc­ing them to leave, or by using force “if nec­es­sary.” Nadia tells me James Cameron spent the last five years work­ing on this film, but beyond this premise I doubt he spent one month on char­ac­ter devel­op­ment. Good thing the movie was in 3D, oth­er­wise I would have grown tired of the two-dimen­sion­al char­ac­ters well before the juicy bat­tle sequences began.

The mil­i­tary sends an under­cov­er team of recruits to min­gle with the natives, vicious-look­ing but ulti­mate­ly lov­able Smurfoids with long sinewy limbs. To help them fit in, the recruits are put in tan­ning beds on steroids, where they hiber­nate and “dream” through alter-egos, or “avatars,” that take on the form of the natives, in a man­ner some­what rem­i­nis­cent of La Jetée (1962), which I should men­tion is still one of my top five sci-fi movies of all time.

Upon land­ing on Pandora, hero Jake’s avatar gets into a scuf­fle with the local wildlife and is sep­a­rat­ed from the rest of his team. He is saved, in typ­i­cal movie “meet cute” style, by Smurfette (a nuanced per­for­mance by Zoe Saldana and one of the few intrigu­ing char­ac­ters in the movie). Eventually, he is accept­ed by the natives as one of their own and sym­pa­thizes with their plight, but not before hand­ing his supe­ri­ors all the nec­es­sary intel to bomb the hell out of the natives.

This mega­bat­tle takes up the last third of the three-hour opus, yet I was pleas­ant­ly sur­prised to find myself enter­tained even after hav­ing sat through end­less scenes of Jake and Co. tam­ing a series of wild beasts then fly­ing them all over the place. The visu­als are extreme­ly detailed, very rich in tex­ture and col­or, and beau­ti­ful­ly ren­dered. For once we have com­put­er-gen­er­at­ed char­ac­ters that don’t talk and walk like they’re her­ni­at­ed, and bat­tles that are not just a mish-mash of explo­sions, but rather well-chore­o­graphed sequences dur­ing which I was able to fol­low the actions and emo­tions of all the main characters.

Besides a mild headache, which I assume was brought upon by the 3D, what I felt by the end is both fas­ci­na­tion that I could actu­al­ly sym­pa­thize with a bunch of blue com­put­er graph­ics and frus­tra­tion that I did not get the chance to learn more about their com­mu­ni­ty aside from the fact that they enjoy slip­ping into mass trances as their spir­i­tu­al leader chants to some tree-god.

Corinne gave the movie a 10/10, argu­ing that it’s OK for sto­ry and char­ac­ter to take a back seat to such enter­tain­ing visu­als. To that I say fair enough, despite rec­og­niz­ing ele­ments from count­less oth­er sci-fi movies like Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978) and RoboCop (1987). However, con­sid­er­ing the fact that I donat­ed almost three hours of my life to the movie (and I’m 33, so every sec­ond counts), I wish Avatar had one less fly­ing-beast sequence. Instead I might have enjoyed a cou­ple of more inti­mate char­ac­ter-dri­ven scenes, say of Papa Smurfoid cook­ing lunch with his daugh­ter and maybe Mama Smurfoid telling her about the birds and the bees, or their Pandora equivalent.

Rating ⁶⁄₁₀

Directed by James Cameron • Starring Sam Worthington, Zoe Saldana, Sigourney Weaver, Stephen Lang, Joel Moore, Giovanni Ribisi and Michelle Rodriguez