Visual Achievement: 10/10
Narrative Originality: 1/10
Biological Originality: 3/10
Racism: 8/10
Ratio of hours it was to hours it should have been: 2.75/1.5
The bottom line: Avatar is a marvel of technology, but if you value storytelling the price of your 3D glasses is a ripoff.
Avatar is a sci-fi epic that you'll be hearing about for a long time because it made impossibly large amounts of money and because (let's get this on the table right away) it is a staggering technological achievement that will have a huge impact on the way movies are made in the future. All the poor bastards who had to sit at computers for God-only-knows how many hours to make this movie possible deserve every award that exists for that sort of thing and probably a few that should be invented just for them. For that reason, it's pretty disappointing how mundane the writing is.
Apparently, at some point in the future, a giant Earth corporation travels to Pandora (a moon of a distant gas giant) to mine a very rare and valuable element called, wait for it, 'unobtanium." The locals, called Na'vi, are about as pleased with their planet being strip-mined as you'd imagine they would be, so security is a serious concern for the giant Earth corporation. Jake Sully is a paraplegic ex-marine who gets recruited for the Avatar program, in which his mind controls a Na'vi body...somehow. This is one of those movies where they just kind of wave their hands and say "science!"
(xkcd written by Randall Munroe)
Whatever. Plenty of films I like have done that too. Anyway, the stated purpose of the Avatar program is to nourish positive relations with the Na'vi. Of course, the big bad evil general who's in charge of security has a sinister secret plan. That character has a real name, but if James Cameron can't be bothered to write a villain with any depth, then I can't be bothered to visit IMDb to look it up. I'll just call him 'Bad Guy,' because other than his scars and stupid haircut, 'bad' seems to be his only character trait.
So, Bad Guy wants Jake Sully to infiltrate the Na'vi, so that he'll have a double-agent at his disposal. Instead, Jake comes to respect the Na'vi for their simple nobility and joins them in their fight against Bad Guy. This is not particularly surprising if you've seen, Dances With Wolves, Pocahontas, The Last Samurai, Fern Gully, or any of the other movies that have told pretty much the same story.
And honestly, this is 2010. We need to stop with these "noble savages" stories. They're offensive. On the one hand, there's the Na'vi, whose facial features and accents are vaguely African, and whose culture is a caricature of the American Indian. Because, you know, all the peoples that Europeans have screwed over are basically the same right? And then on the other hand, you have Bad Guys and his army of mindless goons. Because that's always where capitalism gets you, right? So basically, we're left with a story where "ethnic" = nature/good and capitalism = greed/bad.
Now, I'm not saying that there aren't any good movies to be made about colonialism, the environment, etc. But these are complicated issues. Turning them into caricatures is insensitive to all involved. Oversimplifying the crimes of the past is almost as dangerous as trying to revise them away.
At bottom, though, this movie fails because its story fails. And its story fails because its characters lack depth. At this point I should point out that, if the characters had depth, the above political criticism would be null and void. So, my parting shot to Mr. Cameron is this:
Three-dimensional images will never make up for one-dimensional characters. For the record, though, True Lies is one of my all-time favorites.
And honestly, this is 2010. We need to stop with these "noble savages" stories. They're offensive. On the one hand, there's the Na'vi, whose facial features and accents are vaguely African, and whose culture is a caricature of the American Indian. Because, you know, all the peoples that Europeans have screwed over are basically the same right? And then on the other hand, you have Bad Guys and his army of mindless goons. Because that's always where capitalism gets you, right? So basically, we're left with a story where "ethnic" = nature/good and capitalism = greed/bad.
Now, I'm not saying that there aren't any good movies to be made about colonialism, the environment, etc. But these are complicated issues. Turning them into caricatures is insensitive to all involved. Oversimplifying the crimes of the past is almost as dangerous as trying to revise them away.
At bottom, though, this movie fails because its story fails. And its story fails because its characters lack depth. At this point I should point out that, if the characters had depth, the above political criticism would be null and void. So, my parting shot to Mr. Cameron is this:
Three-dimensional images will never make up for one-dimensional characters. For the record, though, True Lies is one of my all-time favorites.
No comments:
Post a Comment