Visually arresting, intellectually insulting

Rating: 3/10 (22 December 2009)

I think it is great that movies can be used to highlight current social issues, or even past ones - the plight of the Tuskegee airmen, for example, or the Holocaust. I don't even mind "heavy-handed" emotional overtones - i.e. the American flag in Saving Private Ryan used to bookend the movie. I'm a sucker for that stuff. But Avatar is not just overblown with heavy handed writing, it actually insults any number of categories of viewers.
If one listens to the commentary track of Valkyrie, for example, the writers mention that the obvious "villain" of the piece could not have been written as a villain. Hitler's public speeches were almost always about prosperity and peace, he never killed anyone personally, never signed an execution order, never visited a death camp, never witnessed a murder. And so in Valkyrie, you had a quality of which apparently Mr. Cameron is not possessed - subtlety. The only "mustachio-twirling" moment, as the writers called it, was when one of the teletype operators is told by his boss to cut off communications to the orchestrator of the coup against Hitler, and he makes a faint smile. That's it. That's the moment of villainy for the film. The rest is cloaked in ambiguity.
Avatar, of course, has scenery chewing galore, or would have if not for the excellent actors. Stephen Lang is well known to Civil War buffs is certainly no over-actor. But the writing does him no great service, ditto Giovanni Ribisi, another familiar face to war movie buffs from his service in SPR.
What is most insulting, though, is that Hollywood almost always dumps on religion out of ignorance up until the point it can serve a story in some hokey way. The only time religion is used to service a story is if some scientific grounds can be found to 'legitimize' it (in Star Wars, it was mitichlorians, whatever they are, and in this one, it is electromagnetic impulses connecting the trees). In Avatar, the people using technology are stupid and amoral ones and naturally are depicted as faithless. Catholics, Jews, Muslims all get short shrift in films because without some "scientific proof" for their religious beliefs, apparently faith alone is not enough. According to Cameron, you have to be able to literally talk to the trees and cute animals, or else religion just doesn't cut it.
But I also don't understand the movies in which we're supposed to root for cultures who reject modernization; the message was so heavy handed it just made me angry more than anything. Connect the dots - technology is bad, since evidently it ruined the Earth, and therefore we need to root for blue people who prefer to live in trees and sleep in hammocks without any of our creature comforts. Personally, I like living in a house and having a computer, and watching TV, and a spring mattress, and a gas-fired furnace, and a car with internal combustion engine to take me interesting places, and going to the movies and watching far-fetched stuff that people like Cameron dream up.
There might have been a good story in here somewhere if Cameron hadn't decided to beat us over the head with an environmental guilt-trip, with bad guys with razor thin motivations and no ambiguity whatsoever. Far more interesting themes would have been the notion that humans were there to sincerely help, or perhaps the notion that religion and faith are real and legitimate and meaningful without being able to 'prove' the existence of God through scientific means. Sometimes sworn enemies even believe in the same gods - talk about moral ambiguity. I can't buy into a notion that people who make multi-million dollar technology are always of necessity amoral idiots while people sleeping on rocks and eating raw hand-killed food are somehow geniuses with absolutely perfect moral centres. I guess that's why they call it fantasy. By the end, I was cheering for the guys in the helicopters, not because I approved of what they were doing, but because I wanted it to be over with that much more quickly. I simply wasn't buying it; I enjoyed the visual spectacle but the characterizations and motivations of the "villains" were about as compelling as Wile E. Coyote.