Techno-banality

Rating: 3/10 (25 April 2010)

Avatar is a grand feast for the eyes, which is a good thing, because there's almost nothing else there to engage your sensibilities. You don't have to turn your mind off while watching this epic movie because Avatar turns it off for you.
Avatar tells a simple story: In the future, a WASP marine infiltrates a tribe of natives, called the Na'vi, on a planet called Pandora, using new technology that enables him to live inside the body of an "avatar" that looks just like the natives, so they accept him as one of their own. He's working for the scientists, who want to understand and help the natives, but he's also secretly working for the corporation and their private military, who want the Na'vi land to mine some kind of valuable mineral. As the story goes on, surprise, our hero falls in love with the Na'vi babe, turns against the corporation, and ultimately saves the native world. Who woulda thunk it? Once again a white guy saves the savages.
Ripping off A Man Called Horse, Little Big Man, The Mission, and so on and so on, at times its almost like a remake - a hodge-podge remake - of every "white man among the natives" movie that's ever been made. Cameron is absolutely shameless, he practically lifts scenes whole from these other films, there's even the bit where our hero hunts a beast for food and "mercifully" kills it, thanking it for its sacrifice and giving its soul to the spirit of the earth. Or some such nonsense. There's all kinds of hokey mumbo-jumbo about "the deep connection the natives have with the forest" and "a network of energy that flows through all living things" and other such blah-blah. Cameron doesn't do any of these stolen scenes justice, they feel perfunctory, he's just wants to score his "green" points and move on to the next really cool CGI shot.
And they're certainly cool, no one could argue that Avatar isn't visually spectacular. But I started to get really bored about an hour into this almost 3 hour show. Cameron knows his audience though, just when one might start to nod off from all the banality, he gives us amazing effects like the massive floating mountains or soaring flights on winged beasts. Personally, as far as the FX, I preferred the military hardware - the fighting robot gizmos with men inside wearing them like clunky suits of armor, or the helicopters with their double rotors soaring around their ginormous mothership - to the glowing phosphorus jungle and all its "natural" beauty.
Even in this big video game of a movie, there are some nice performances that transcend the banality of the roles. Sigourney Weaver has a scene where she pleads with the bad guys not to destroy the forest, some kind of babble about how the jungle is one big living entity (this movie should have opened on Earth Day) and she's so impassioned that her eyes light up, she's so damn good she almost sells it. As Colonel Quaritch, the leader of the corporate private army, the mostly unknown but great actor Stephen Lang does a parody of every movie gung-ho military leader that ever went gleefully and ignorantly to his Little Big Horn. Lang's over-the-top macho zeal is so dead-on perfect that one can only feel sorry for the idiotic critics that thought he was playing it straight (he's not, he's not). As the Na'vi alien "Neytiri", Zoe Saldana somehow manages to give a believable, charming, unique performance within the confines of her strictly CGI character. When her father is killed she's very touching as she wails and thrashes about in grief; later, when she faces off with the Colonel in battle, she turns and hisses at him like an enraged, cornered beast and we really do feel her primal connection with the jungle world in which she exists. And drop-dead gorgeous Michelle Rodriguez continues to be one of the sexiest women currently working in TV and film, and she just happens to be a darn fine actress. She always has that likable toughness about her, but not at the expense of being a total babe.
But the story and the theme of Avatar is just so much crap. It's pure corn, pitting the pure-hearted scientists against the evil military industrial complex. Much has been made of its political bent, but you don't have to be a conservative to hate the whole setup. As a liberal I resented it just on the basis of its manipulative superficiality. And as a movie-lover, I hated it for the same reason.
Avatar is not just a movie anymore, it's success has made it a phenomenon. In the 60's and 70's, when American film really came into its own, the big hits had titles like Bonnie and Clyde, The Godfather, Jaws, and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. Movies that registered with youth culture were stuff like The Graduate, MASH, Shampoo. Even hits like Star Wars and Empire Strikes Back had a real quality to them, even if they were just candy, they were great candy, full of the joy of real film-making. These weren't just cool movies, they were really good, even great movies. Today, Avatar, in all its bland, boring, pretentious grandiosity, is both mega-blockbuster and hip strictly on the basis of being a techno-marvel. Cool just ain't what it used to be.