Poking Around Pandora

As an achievement in technical innovation, Avatar is phenomenal, a ride worth taking more than once, but as adventure movies go, it is impressively new in every way except the way that matters most. Its look will last. But its heart won’t go on. — Jeffrey Overstreet

Deep down, Avatar is bone-headed, but it’s also beautiful — not just exciting and technically impressive, like Jurassic Park, but wondrous and exhilarating. How many movies can you say that about? It may be an inch deep, but it’s a mile wide, it gushes and roars like Niagara Falls, and it’s a sight to behold. — Steven Greydanus

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The ever-interesting Jeffrey Overstreet and Steven Greydanus both do a fine job of summing up my jumbled thoughts after last night’s viewing of Avatar. I’m not sure I’m inclined to watch it more than once, or to be as generous to Cameron as they are willing to be. But with the understanding that I did actually enjoy yesterday’s theatrical experience, and did greatly appreciate the imagination and beauty of Cameron’s Pandora, here is my less amusing, excessively critical, and much too long-winded attempt:

The undeniable vibrancy and boundless imaginativeness of Cameron’s vision and the supreme ease and skill with which he manipulates the many cinematic tools at his disposal stand in stark, ironic contrast to the paucity of any original, genuinely interesting ideas and to the childish brutality with which he bludgeons home what few ideas he does have. The story is a thin, tasteless gruel of tired old Hollywood tropes, predictable plot points, and cartoonish stereotypes that were unappealing the first time one was unfortunate enough to experience them; time and repetition has only served to make the brutal, sadistic military officer, the open-minded, humanitarian scientist, the “tough-as-nails-but-soft-on-the-inside” military chick, and their many cousins from the family tree of Screenwriting 101 even more tired and tasteless now than they were originally. How many more times must we see the kind-hearted, naturally virtuous and perfect indigenous peoples stand up for themselves against the corrupting advances of civilization before we acknowledge that not all progress is bad, and not all indigenous peoples (or their weird, ethereal pantheism) are worth emulating?

The lack of back-story held up by some as one of the film’s strengths – “Look how completely Cameron has immersed us in Pandora; we don’t even think or care about what Sully has left behind!” — struck me as a severe weakness. The few passing references to the decaying earth left behind by the strip-mining Marine thugs could have been used to help explain the driving forces behind the brutality and insensitivity that seemed to be their currency. But such a back-story would almost certainly have undermined that very cartoonishness that Cameron clearly values so highly; the economic and environmental troubles left behind on Earth would have made such behavior implausible, rendering the environmental message of the film severely (if not fatally) damaged. And Cameron’s thinly-veiled attempts to “borrow” iconic imagery from our cinematic or historical past only served to underscore his own work’s lack of such iconic imagery. With the possible exception of the wraith sequences or the moment when Sully first happens upon some of the more unusual Pandorian flora, one cannot help but feel that, while the visual wardrobe of this particular story might be quite a bit sharper and more ornate than usual, we have seen this particularly bony clotheshorse far too many times in the past. Cameron’s cautionary tale is so simplistic in its depiction of both the film’s heroes and its villains that it is difficult to imagine it applying to any actual “real-life” situation. It’s unfair to the issues he raises (and to the audiences he’s addressing) to paint with such an unsophisticated brush.

As for the film’s technical details, I would say this: the backdrops Cameron (and WETA) created with such painstaking detail are absolutely extraordinary; the numerous settings and the creatures in them feel seamless and profoundly real. But the digital characters moving and interacting in front of these backdrops were nowhere near as believable. The “avatars” in which our story’s heroes and heroines spent the majority of their time felt like pale shadows of the actual performers they were trying to replace, moving with an odd stiffness that made it difficult to forget their non-being; I found myself looking forward to those moments when Sam Worthington’s damaged jarhead was actually on-screen, or wishing that the audience had been given the opportunity to watch Wes Studi, rather than his huge, gaunt, blue doppelganger. Moments when humans and N’avi interacted in the same cinematic space were particularly jarring. Zoe Saldaña’s Neytiri might be the single exception to this rule; her performance seemed much more life-like than those of her counterparts, and there were moments when the romance between her and Sully’s N’avi warrior displayed some of the emotional heft Cameron clearly sought to weave throughout the entire film. (The fact that we never see the human half of her humanoid character played a large part in this success.)

I am happy to report that, no matter how earnestly The King of the World and his cohorts hope and labor to replace “actual actors” with digital avatars, that time has still not (and, I sincerely hope, never will) come.

To me, the visuals felt like nothing more than an impressive (but predictable) expansion of WETA’s work on The Lord of the Rings, particularly the work on motion capture that brought Gollum to life. (Interestingly, it was while watching Gollum in The Two Towers that Cameron became convinced that the technology had advanced to a point where his film could finally be brought to life.) The effects were seamless, immersive, and even surprisingly restrained, for which I was deeply grateful. But all this talk of “groundbreaking” is far too breathless; the “real vs. animated” conflict still seemed fairly obvious to me, though I suppose that may say more about my ability to “suspend disbelief” than it does about Cameron’s film. A noteworthy cinematic advancement? Yes. A film that will serve as inspiration to filmmakers for years to come? Undoubtedly. But let’s get out of this “Film will never be the same again” territory. That’s just crazy talk.

(In fairness to Cameron, I did not experience the “revolutionary 3D” everyone has been raving about, which almost certainly caused me to focus more on his story’s weaknesses than I would have otherwise. Living in the Wilds of Wyoming does have its drawbacks, after all.)

Author

  • Joseph Susanka

    Joseph Susanka has been doing development work for institutions of Catholic higher education since his graduation from Thomas Aquinas College in 1999. Currently residing in Lander, Wyoming — “where Stetsons meet Birkenstocks” — he is a columnist for Crisis Magazine and the Patheos Catholic portal.

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