Shock and awe: separating the beauty from the hype

Rating: 8/10 (18 December 2009)

'Avatar' is a fancy word -- an appropriate one, I guess, for a movie that is both awesome and silly. As the movie explains, it's a Hindu term for the incarnation of a god on earth. But actually, just as in the recent movie 'Surrogates' (which Cameron was involved in) and 'The Matrix,' somebody is lying in a room all wired up while he or she is running a virtual second self doing stuff out somewhere. That's what an "avatar" is. In 'Surrogates' the virtual selves are mainly just misbehaving. In 'Avatar,' we're on the planet Pandora, where a private corporation, RDA, whose boss, a pale nasty named for a British department store, Selfridge (Giovani Ribisi), is aiming to extract major quantities of a super-valuable mineral called (I said silly, remember) 'Unobtainium.' There's a bunch of gung-ho racist military earthling types headed by a Robert Duval substitute called Col. Quartich (Stephen Lang), ready to speed up this enterprise by blowing away the "humanoid" locals, which they refer to as "blue monkeys," who're sort of sitting on the Unobtainium, in a lush forest. As in Duncan Jones' rather intriguing little movie 'Moon' (released in June), earthlings in 'Avatar's' world, set over a century in the future, have run out of terrestrial power sources and gone to outer space for new ones.
There's an opposing group of culturally sensitive scientists headed by the ever-tough and soulful Sigourney Weaver (known here as Grace), who know better. They realize that the tall, thin, and yes, blue indigenous people of the region are in fact the Omaticaya clan of the Na'vi. Led by Grace, the scientists have been learning the Na'vi language and making friends with the Omaticaya -- winning the "hearts and minds," you know? They work with the Omaticaya in the form of "avatars" that are tall, blue, skinny people like them. This allows them to "pass," so to speak, and make up for the fact that the air on Pandora is too thin to breathe. Meanwhile Quaritch and his boys are talking "shock and awe" and "fighting terror with terror." Yeah, the references are as simple and schematic as that.
There's a whole lot going on in Cameron's's 'Avatar' -- and at the same time not very much. It takes a while to explain the setup, but after that it's pretty simple what happens.
Grace is very disappointed when Jake Sully arrives on Pandora. He's a Marine corporal sent to replace his dead twin brother, because he's got the right DNA to operate his brother's avatar, but while his brother was a scientist, he's just a jarhead who's been rendered paraplegic in a recent war. Jake's background makes him appeal a lot to Col. Quaritch, but Grace starts to like him when he takes so well to working his avatar that he connects right away with Omaticaya princess Neytiri (Zoe Saldana) and is quickly adopted by her tribe. It's sort of an 'Emerald Forest'-cum-'Dancing with Wolves' situation -- Jake goes native. And he picks up a good speaking knowledge of Na'vi -- though the locals, due to Sigourney's teaching, tend to speak excellent English -- which might disappoint Professor Frommer of USC, whom Cameron engaged to invent a complete Na'vi language. There are speeches in Na'vi (with rather ornate subtitles, as if it were a medieval language), but the whole cultural thing is focused more on what we might call the neuro-spiritual element.
Cameron has spent hundreds of millions of dollars and engaged thousands in making this movie, and the fun of it is, for a while anyway, in the elaborate way the details of Pandora have been worked out. Quaritch describes it as worse than hell, and the six-legged dino-horses, hammerhead rhinos, shell-covered snarling tigers, four-armed lemurs, and so on, as well as the little floating jellyfish creatures, are pretty challenging for avatar-Jake his first night in-country. But since he bonds with Neytiri right away (her name even sounds a bit like Tommy/Tommee's Amazon forest girlfriend Kachiri in 'Emerald Forest'), and learns to turn terrifying flying beasts into his docile steeds by connecting the end of his pigtail to their neural tendrils, Jake's avatar life becomes way more exciting than anything he's ever done before, and in a running video journal he keeps, he admits he's begun to forget what the rest of his life was even like before this.
New York Times film critic A.O. Scott exclaimed recently that 'Avatar' is unusual as a blockbuster in that "it doesn't come from a comic book, it doesn't come from a novel, it doesn't come from a line of toys, it comes from James Cameron's imagination." Well, the material here is very much like lots of sci-fi novels (the kind I used to read as a teenager), comic books, lines of toys, and video games, so there's nothing so extraordinary about Cameron's imagination. What's extraordinary is the mise-en-scene, and the way "motion-capture" is used to give the avatar's expressions and movements, and then they're digitalized to incorporate them in these rather sexy tall skinny figures with their rather corny Amerindian outfits and hairdos; and the elaborate flora and fauna of Pandora.
Unfortunately it all ends in a noisy, protracted shoot-out that makes it like the dreadful, but intermittently atmospheric, 'Terminator: Salvation' -- which, lo and behold, co-starred Sam Worthington. Watching this, as the noise and explosions became steadily drearier and more familiar, I realized that Cameron's 'Titanic,' which I loved much more than this, mainly because it had real people and events in it, however romantically magnified, also went on far too long. There are things about 'Avatar' that are very fun, but the Na'vi, even at their sexiest, still look like plastic-y video game dolls, and those who declare this to be a cinematic spectacle that's wonderful beyond anything since 1915 and D.W. Griffith (David Denby in the same interview) are really falling prey to the hype.