“Avatar” Review/Discussion

It’s impossible to discuss “Avatar” without talking about how Paramount has released it. When they asked the waiter for the check and saw “$300 Million” at the bottom—beneath “Develop New 3D Camera Technololgy” and “Render CGI in Real Time Performance Capture”—they must have sat around the table and stared at one another blankly. No one asked “how do we go about this,” because a number like that dictates the response to anyone with common sense…

You make an event.

To this end, they were enormously successful. They more or less treated the film like a Dylan record coming out in the 60s, it was a cultural even you simply could not miss. By the time the release rolled out, swarms of people who have no interest in science fiction were trudging into the theater just so they wouldn’t fall behind at the water cooler. At some point, mass media culture becomes a bludgeoning weapon, making life literally miserable for anyone who dares not to care about the movie that’s happening here. I can’t imagine how awful these past few months have been for people who just don’t like science fiction. But then, I have little pity for them, because they don’t like science fiction.

Anyway, with that out of the way, how was the movie?

Excellent. From a technological standpoint, it’s a serious step forward. The sheer scope and breadth of it is awe-inspiring, it transforms CGI from a tool used to buff up one part of an image to a full-blown creator of worlds. This is the next step towards our weapons becoming limitless. The motion capture performances are almost scary to behold, their accuracy and sensitivity blew my mind. The Na’vi ranged from good to perfect; sometimes I knew I was seeing CG but I bought it anyway, sometimes it was so real it made me uncomfortable. The world of Pandora is gorgeous, not just in the rendering but in its conception and design.

As far as the 3-D, this was the first one I’ve ever seen where I would not have explicitly preferred the normal, 2-D image (and that includes more recent ones like “Up”). Cameron’s meticulous obsession with technology has allowed him to push it right to its breaking point, to a level where it accentuates the grand visual plain without obnoxiously violating the 4th wall. Seeing this movie has made me realize that 3-D will never be the kind of game-changer that color or sound was, because for all that effort it does nothing more than heighten what is already present. It does not create depth—or should we say the illusion of depth—because that is already done with foreground/background manipulation. For all the blood, sweat and tears that it takes to do it, it merely sweetens an effect already working seamlessly. In most cases, this results in calling too much attention to the trick, and thus the suspension of disbelief pops like a bubble.

“Avatar” never allowed the 3-D to ruin the experience, but it also added only marginally to the sense of wonderment. The real imagination work horses were the IMAX technology and stunning, WETA Workshop special effects. These were the ingredients that were taking me beyond the stars, the funky glasses I had on were just a slight boost. The highest compliment I can pay “Avatar” is that I did not mind the 3-D in it, and that’s quite a thing. But it was not and is not necessary.

Right.

So how about the story? We all know that James Cameron is a guy with too much on his mind for pesky things like dialogue, so of course you have some over-cooked tough guy speeches and several conversations which exist for the purposes of exposition only (why is Giovanni Ribisi explaining to Sigourney Weaver that they’re here to mine that special rock? She of all people would know that). That I can accept as a part of the style. I had a much bigger problem with Sam Worthington’s voice over, which wouldn’t shut-up for the first twenty minutes and then kept re-emerging sporadically through the climax. If you’ve ever heard that atrocious Harrison Ford VO from the theatrical release of “Blade Runner,” you know what you’re in for. Its content fell into two categories:

1. Yes, Thank You, I Got That: observations so bleeding obvious you can’t fathom why you’re hearing them.

2. Quick Fix: plot points and expositional details that are flagrantly not earned by the movie proper, and often completely irrelevant to what’s happening.

The second tends to result from reading too many whiny blogs (like this one), the first is just a crutch and there’s no excuse for it. The beginning of the movie has severe pacing issues because of this clumsy, lumbering thing. Lead character Jake Sully keeps informing us, “I’m a hardcore dude. You don’t want to mess with me. But I’m in a wheel chair. Watch me brood. Mmm, yeah, that’s nice.”

Word of advice to any screenwriter: never, never, never have a character inform the audience that they are a bada**. We audience members reserve the right to be impressed by something cool, and then confer that status on you. You don’t just get it for a gravelly voice.

Okay, okay, I’m just being hard on Cameron. Lord knows it’s easy for me to sit here on my computer, smugly assessing 14 years of backbreaking work. Let’s get back to the positives: solid story, delicate execution, sincere emotional investment. Nothing in this plot is new, but if you’re that guy who points that out on the way to the car, everyone hates you. The story is involving, it relishes the intricacies of Na’vi culture, and the awesome scope of the human weapons, and the mind-bending-ly cool flying mountains and rushing waterfalls. You may hear snide comments about “Dances with Wolves meets Pocahontas,” but there’s no reason to keep the story from what it wants to be for the sake of Walt Disney and Kevin Costner. The characters are well fleshed out and believable, they make intelligent decisions and command our respect or fear. I give Jim tremendous credit for how thoroughly he invested me in the plight of the Na’vi, for how much I came to admire and look up to the way they lived. The love story between Jake and Neytiri is also great, deftly avoiding any “Planet of the Apes” (the Tim Burton) bizarreness. It should say something about the quality of the technology here that Zoey Saldana and Sam Worthington had powerful chemistry, and I never saw both of them together in the same shot. As a person who tought “Titanic’s” love story sucked, I’m relieved to find Cameron back on his A-game.

“Avatar” at its heart is a rousing parable about our treatment of Native Americans. It’s a tasteful and appropriate critique of ourselves, an acknowledgment of the baser parts of our collective nature. Seeing a film like this makes me proud to be an American; these jerks in the Middle East who want to kill us would never have the balls to write/attend movies with themselves as the bad guys. Their world view is too narrow, their hearts too shut out to any perspective but their own.

As for the acting, it ranges from good to great. Sam Worthington gives his best performance yet, which is to say I did not mind him. This guy drives me crazy, because his agent seems to think he can just leap-frog the crucible of building a career and become a star immediately, without our approval. Only an insanely gifted performer gets to do that, and so far I’m not seeing it. He came off like a knuckle-head in “Terminator: Salvation.” Here he’s fine, I thought he handled the role adequately, but his tough guy shtick is a little wooden. We already have a Mark Wahlberg, Sam. If “Avatar” has a weakness, it’s that its lead actor is simply good enough, while almost every other element around him is stunning.

On the other hand, Stephen Lang, Sigourney Weaver, Giovanni Ribisi, and especially Zoey Saldana are all wonderful. Lang chews scenery with great relish, taking some pretty poorly written dialogue and finding the fun in it. Weaver is great as a hard-nails environmentalist, Ribisi has fun as a “Boiler Room” variety corporate fiend, but Saldana takes the cake here. Her performance is absolutely electric, she makes the audience fall in love with Neytiri immediately. I admit I’m stunned at this; she was good in “Star Trek,” but nothing that blew my mind. Who knew she was capable of such a rich performance? Credit must also go to James Cameron, who can add Neytiri to his long line of beautifully written empowered female characters. This man writes tough women expertly.

The action contained in the movie is great. I liked the spectacle, but more than that I just admired how well choreographed it all was. I had a clear sense of space all the time, even when the fighting was high in the air and surrounded by floating mountains. The interplay between human actors and motion capture was better than anyone else has ever done it, period. It sets a new bar.

All told, I found “Avatar” to be a deeply satisfying science fiction romp, a movie that justifies the “event” status it has been given. James Cameron is a man known for vision, and here we see exactly why that is. “Transformers 2″ and “GI Joe” had almost soured me on the big-budget spectacle genre, but along comes the King of the World to show us that when the characters are given their due, and the story is told with skill and depth of feeling, the blockbuster is still relevant as ever.