predictable visual feast

Rating: Null/10 (11 January 2010)

I finally got a chance to see Avatar today after several failed attempts due to snow, crowds, theaters only showing it in 2D etc. Below are my impressions which assume you already know the story and maybe have formed your own opinions already.
First of all, I agree with everyone that complains about the lack of dialog and the predictable story. I remember when Titanic first came out and people were complaining back THEN about how insipid was the script and Jack's character, etc. Well, Jack Dawson was much better fleshed out as a character than Jake Sully! I mean, it seems our standards for dialog have dropped another notch in the past ten years. Jake is an appealing character, and I think pretty well suited to the role. He also narrates the story a bit. But he basically is not given even a moments worth of meaningful dialog (unless you consider lines like "count me in" and "teach me" meaningful dialog) I think they could have basically scripted him as mute as well as paraplegic, and the movie would not have had any less impact. This is remarkable when you consider the deep, personal crisis he confronts midway through the film. Oh well, we must not let anything get in the way of the visuals...
Anyway, the story unfolds very quickly here, and we're not given much time to think about characters. I felt like I was being immersed in Pandora before I was really ready. Its always nice to build a little suspense and audience expectation up before going some place so fantastic. Unfortunately here, though, the wonders of Pandora were treated in a pretty matter of fact way, almost as if we were expected to already know a bit about it. I think it would have really been nice for Grace (Sigorney Weaver), the primary advocate for the planet, to show a little more excitement about her world and a little less jaded attitude. I mean, if Pandora was the star of this movie, it was not given the reverence it deserved by Grace. That reverence was reserved for the Na'vi, but their's was from a wholly different perspective, being that it was THEIR world and the only one they have ever known.
But on to the main plot here - politically, what you get with Avatar is a healthy dose of left wing morality. A VERY healthy dose. Western man rapes a planet and threatens an indigenous culture in the process. THis sad tale pits a cocky soldier thug (Stephen Lang) and military industrial complex dweeb (Giovanni Ribisi) against the Navi, a noble, indigenous tribe of Indian-like people. The princess of this tribe is Neytiri who is both strong and confident as well as sexy and emotionally fragile. Her "West Side Story" love affair with Jake, the reluctant warrior, is what adds personal triumph and tragedy to the story that already is designed to tug at your heartstrings quite a bit. You are suppose to cry for the Navi, and I imagine many did. Others undoubtedly saw this as blatant political propaganda and squirmed in their seat. But If you were in the latter category, it might have been best for you to just skip this little morality tale all together. This was not a military propaganda film. THe "good guys" - mother nature, the Na'vi, tribal values, etc triumph in the end.
Anyway, but superimposed on the main plot is Jake's personal story and his relationship with his Avatar. This I thought was fascinating and one of the movie's main draws apart from the visuals. I thought that what really facilitated Jake's conversion to the Navi lifestyle and his political about face was the thrill he got from having legs and mobility again. This theme of returning to ones childhood and/or to a more primitive state (but more robust physically) is a key to understanding the love interest and from there, the conversion Jake experiences. The "love" Jake suddenly finds himself experiencing is really a love of nature and of his youthful, more athletic self. Disabled as he was, who would not want to return to the garden of eden and be given a second chance at life? So I enjoyed this sub plot which played a key role in bridging the fantasy and the reality, the animated and the non animated characters and bringing unity to the story.
Well, I just remembered there is a limit on how much you can write in a review. So, on with the visuals. The visuals were stunning like I expected, but one does not get a good sense for the overall scale of it all. Were they traveling miles, hundreds of miles, or what? And, well, the floating mountains just kind of didn't really make much sense from a ecological point of view. So this lent more of a fantasy element to Pandora than one based solidly in science. And as for the plant and animal life, I preferred the plant life. The luminescence was kind of cool and made the Na'vi's lives seem mystical and enchanting. But the animals were crude and hostile by comparison (except for the "horses"). And they were also not well suited for the rain forest environment either. Basically, they just stuck big, fast, aggressive game animals into a thick, wet forest, which I guess is why so many of them kept running into trees...:)
So in conclusion, Avatar is a visually stunning, well made film but with a predictable, time honored love/war theme. Thankfully, the Avatar sub plot though is refreshing and breaths originality into the romance. But overall, maybe the best thing about Avatar was that it introduces us to a totally new world and teases us with the potential for some really great sci-fi movie-making. So we'll see what develops in the way of a sequel...