Blue Movies

This may come as a shock to you loyal readers, but, I did not really dig James Cameron's new movie Avatar. This does not mean that I hated it. It left me feeling pretty "meh," which is how most big, loud summer blockbusters leave me feeling. And this wasn't supposed to be a big, loud summer blockbuster.

If you haven't heard of Avatar then you must be either 1) A member of the Taliban or B) Living in Ithaca, NY. It is Cameron's first return to film making in over a decade and has been much ballyhooed as the next step in movies. Like George Lucas, Cameron claims to have been sitting on this for years and waiting for special effects technology to catch up to his original vision. The thing cost $237 million dollars to make and has already netted $232 million in worldwide sales in just one weekend. If it hadn't been for all the snow on the East Coast this past weekend, then it could have made A LOT more money, but it will soon recoup that.



Avatar follows Jake Sully, a wheelchair bound U.S. Marine vet that must replace his twin brother on a scientific mission to the new world of Pandora. Pandora holds a rare mineral that an evil corporation wants because it sells for "$20 million a kilo." Going to need a really big Invisible Hand to move that stuff. The planet is also home to an indigenous race of 10 foot tall, blue, quasi-cat aliens called the Na'vi. Human researchers have been able to create biological robots of the Na'vi that humans can pilot with their brains. The science team on Na'vi, lead by the always wonderful to see Sigourney Weaver, uses these creations, called avatars, to communicated with the natives and better learn their culture. The evil corporation, which has an army of mercenaries I dub "Space Black Water," wants to use the avatars to infiltrate the Na'vi, learn their weaknesses and get more of that rock. Sully mans one of these avatars, falls in love with the alien babe and epic battles, training montages, and PG-13 alien sex continue.

A ton of effort went into Avatar. Cameron and his team even created a full, working Na'vi language that you can learn right after you memorize Klingon. To this end, the film is a huge success with visuals that are hyper realistic and engaging. We have scenes that are filled with all non-humans and these feel as solid as any scene with flesh and blood actors. There are moments where the CGI melds into actual stage props. The lush backgrounds of the Pandoran rain forest feel thick and real with the encompassing bird calls and jungle tweets needed to add more gravitas. If you are the kind of person that reads movie reviews before checking them out then, yes, Avatar is a visual wonder with a world that adheres to its own internal and highly detailed logic. Even if that logic is not in and of itself logical.

My problem was that I am getting more and more tired of liking movies because they look cool. I like a damn gun fight, but I really want that to have some substance. And if substance is too much, then I prefer it to be campy and self-aware or fun. When it comes to the actual story, Avatar falls right on its blue face and picks itself up with cliched archetypes. It's Dances With Wolves, The Last Samurai, or Lawrence of Arabia, whichever one you want really, set in space. The final battle reminded me just how dumb indeed it was for the Ewoks to defeat an entire legion of Imperial troops at the end of Return of the Jedi. It made me think of Fern Gully and I don't even remember the plot of that movie except that the rain forest was good and bulldozers were bad.

One reason I did not dig Avatar as much as possible is because I am a nerd. The story reminded me a lot of Dune, which is one of my favorite sci-fi stories of all time. If you haven't read Dune, then please do before you see Avatar because the last thing I want is for people to think Dune is like Avatar! Both stories are a tale about a young man who must go to a hostile, but beautiful, planet that is the only known source of a valuable commodity. The commodity is currently mined by an evil group that must share some of that space with new comers hoping to learn more about the environment they must steward. The boy meets a researcher who has made inroads with the natives who are both stewards of the environment and fierce warriors. After a great betrayal, the boy flees to the wilderness, falls in love with a native woman, learns the native ways and becomes their greatest hero.

There are characters in Avatar that are near clones of people in Dune. Jake Sully is Paul Atreides. The benevolent Navi researcher Grace Augustine is Liet Kynes. Evil general Colonel Miles Quaritch is the Harkonnes except with out the child molestation, which may be a good thing. Neytiri, Jake's Navi love, is Chani and her arranged marriage Tsutey is Stilgar even though Stilgar and Chani don't hook up in the book. All those crazy Pandoran creatures are just trying to be as cool as Shai Hulud, the mighty Sandworm.

Speaking of nerdiness, many of the visuals, particularly the glowing forest reminded me of scenes from the Final Fantasy games and that gets me thinking of bad Final Fantasy fan fiction. And video game cosplayers. And then I imagine someone else thought that and sneered, 'Hey that looks like the forest of the Fayth that Yuna and Tidus have sex in in FFX!" I am bit embarrassed to admit that I thought this as the last thing I want to do is apply plots from video games into my life. Reminds me of the time I tried writing an English paper in the 11th grade based on the flavor text of Magic cards. I was that cool.

Aside from these comparisons, the movie is a pretty standard anti-industrial warning that says it is not nice to mess with Mother Nature. I'm an environmentalist, so I appreciate the idea, but this is also the same idea as Frogs. The end battle is wonderfully rendered digitally, but feels hackneyed and drawn from a hundred much weaker action movies.

Considering all the hype for Avatar, I expected something greater with those great visuals but something to support them with. Lavishing praise on a movie because it looks really great is useful, but makes me feel like we are just watching a video game demo.

Peace!

***Author's note***
I did not see Avatar in 3D, which is akin to watching the Wizard of Oz on a black and white TV. Maybe the 3D does it for most folks.

And yes...I realize that the guy that just wrote this really loved Transformers back in 2007. And Star Wars. One of those was dumb and the other borrowed a lot from classic archetypes of the kinght errant. Both were visually stunning and I will argue both were fun, which I Avatar was not.