"Avatar" takes us back to a home we never had and never will have

Rating: 10/10 (26 October 2010)

The turning point in the life of "Avatar" as a blockbuster was when it lost the Best Picture Oscar to "The Hurt Locker." Not that it lost potential movie consumers, far from it, but by not winning, it was deprived of bragging rights for posterity.
In the run-up to the 2009 Academy Awards night, the two films were locked in a David- and-Goliath publicity contest the likes of which are becoming more and more of an annual event. When the peers of directors James Cameron and Kathryn Bigelow, his ex-wife, chose the $11 million film over his $300 million digital epic, the irony was not lost on us.
It's amusing to describe the movie's main conflict in biblical terms because the film's Davids are 3 meters tall (10 ft.). They are the Na'vis, a tribe of blue-skinned, yellow-eyed humanoids on some planet Pandora. On the other hand, the Goliaths are an army of Earthlings from the military-industrial-complex bent on strip-mining the planet's valuable rock, artlessly called unobtainium. You know the story, how the mission's lead avatar infiltrates the noble tribe, falls for their feisty warrior princess then switches over to the side of the soon-to-be oppressed.
That could well be "Avatar's" biblical dimension, a call to us, the masters of nature by default, to conserve whatever pristine treasures we have left. But short of lecturing, it lightly couches its message in a morality play that melds science fiction, war story, action and romance.
It is a story laced with youthful fantasizing. The corporate exploiters and their mercenaries menace the peace of Pandora, an otherworldly ecological Paradise. At its center is the mystical Tree of Souls that holds the spiritual and genetic fabric of the race. And who best to help them but Jack Scully, the paraplegic ex-Marine avatar who has found acceptance among the literally connects to their beings and creatures. Sam Worthington, the Australian actor who plays him, is a study of a reserved man longing for an inner life.
The plot moves with agility and dramatic logic, culminating in an epic battle between the rapacious villains and the noble Pandorans, who during a crucial battle find their deus ex machina in their wild creatures. The skillfully managed war sequences evoke images from the Vietnam War and America's allegedly oil-motivated wars.
It was only the other day when we journeyed to Munchkinland in the Land of Oz, and only yesterday when George Lucas was transporting us to unknown worlds in galaxies far, far away, to new places and the bizarre creatures inhabiting them. Today, through computer graphic imaging, "Avatar" takes us back home, but to a home that we never had and never will have, not even one that we can hope to have.
The imagined landscape of Pandora and the totally digitized creation of the Na'vi giants are the reasons why the movie will be a durable audience-pleaser for a long time. The planet comes across as a pastiche of Earth's mountain ranges, cliffs and lush rain forests. Except that the mountains defy gravity, floating up to the sky, connected to the lower strata by gigantic vines where Scully's avatar and his Na'vi love Neytiri (an aristocratic Zoë Saldana) can navigate with feline grace. The sky-scape of islands on air is a nod to Japanese animation master Hayao Miyazaki's "Princess Mononoke."
And the plants and beasts appear to be products of several million-year evolutions, or those of a creator who was having a bad day, mixing up their DNAs, resulting in bioluminescent land-based jellyfish, pterodactyls with the beaks of ducks and gills of sharks, and collages of manatee and elephant body parts topped with hammerhead whales' craniums.
Whether they are giving life to flora or fauna, the computer graphics are meticulous down to the last pixel, the tones realistic and the textures palpable. One can even notice the stains on the ivory teeth of a dragon-like creature's fossil. The same care had gone into the creation of the Na'vi beings: elongated torsos and limbs, ultra-slim waists, wiggly ears, hair locks and costume accessories, this last seemingly a collection of those worn by African, Asian and American indigenous tribes.
But for all the attention to detail, or maybe because of Cameron's mythic intent, the movie missed endowing the Na'vis with a clear culture, hinting only at their hierarchical customs and cult-like rituals performed around the Tree of Souls, with rhythmic chants and ecstatic flailing of hair locks. How do they live? Where are the kids? Except for one bite of a fig-like fruit, we get no glimpse of what foods nourish them. There are two especially whimsical visual touches. One is the bonding between Na'vi and Na'vi, or between Na'vi and beast through the tips of their tails, which are equipped with squiggly nematode-like filaments. In one scene, the coupling becomes overtly sexual. The other image is the suspended lacy hammock that gently ensconces a sleepy warrior at slumber time.
The first and only "Avatar" I've seen is the Special Edition, not in IMAX but in 3D. It took me quite a while to enjoy the wonders of 3D, being somewhat bothered by the random blurring of image details in certain frames, apparently not caused by shifts in the depth of field. As for the extra nine minutes added or restored to the original, I doubt very much that they make any difference.
Should "Avatar" have won over "The Hurt Locker" in the Oscars? The question is academic. Unlike a certain winter sport, to make a clumsy analogy, judging films is not a mere factoring of technical brilliance and artistic merits, calculated to the last decimal point. When Academy members vote, their knowledge, taste and intuition are their only guide. "Avatar" may be miles ahead in technical brilliance, and its humble rival may be miles ahead in artistry. But when the accountants split the difference, David slew Goliath.