By now a lot of people have seen James Cameron’s Avatar, and a much larger number have formed an opinion about it. Anticipation had been building for months, as people were excited by the prospect that ultra-realistic computer animation would combine with dazzling 3D technology to produce a different kind of movie than anyone had ever seen.
It’s generally not a good sign when the buzz is about the technology behind a movie rather than the story within it, and in the case of Avatar the worries are justified. There’s no question that the moviemaking is truly impressive; not only is it a great technological achievement, but Cameron is an accomplished storyteller. The film is long but never ponderous, the set pieces are thrilling, and one’s heartstrings are tugged at all the right places. As a bonus, the acting is fantastic — Sigourney Weaver’s gruff scientist in particular is a great character.
Alas, in a world that one would like to see fleshed out in shades of gray, Cameron’s contrast knob is stuck resolutely at eleven. (Spoilers henceforth.) Humans have destroyed their own planet, and are now descending on Pandora to set about destroying that. The bad guys are represented by a craven businessman and a scarred ex-Marine. War and capitalism are bad! We get it.
But cartoonish villains don’t necessarily spell doom for a movie, especially one meant to be an elaborate thrill ride. I didn’t leave Raiders of the Lost Ark wishing that the Nazis had been more fleshed-out, and nobody gives thanks that the Star Wars prequels let us in on Darth Vader’s backstory. The problem arises when such banal evil is trotted out in service of A MESSAGE. And if there’s one thing Avatar has, it’s a message — a particularly trite one, which is deeply misguided, but a message nonetheless.
The Na’vi, Pandora’s native race, are presented very bluntly as traditional noble savages. They may be nine feet tall and blue, and find themselves trapped in a series of Yes album covers, but that just provides a convenient excuse to mix and match features of Native Americans and African tribes as the director sees fit. The Na’vi are portrayed as saintly tree-huggers who feel bad when jungle beasts are killed unnecessarily; at any moment you expected to hear “This animal is called the bufa’lo. We use every part of it.”
To drive things home, most of the humans are portrayed by white actors, while most of the actors behind the motion-captured Na’vi are people of color. And to drive things home even more (things worth driving home can never be driven too much, right?), the Na’vi have a literal connection with the natural world around them. Which might be a cool idea worth exploring, if it weren’t deployed as a gimmick to emphasize the pastoral purity of the pre-technological natives. (I can’t wait for Oscar night: “We would like to express our gratitude for all these Academy Awards for technical achievement given to our movie about how true virtue is to be found in wearing loincloths and chanting around trees.”)
And even that wouldn’t be so bad, if the noble savages weren’t portrayed as good-hearted but ineffectual. Eventually they manage to fight off the invading Earthlings, who despite mastering interstellar travel and consciousness-transferal are still stuck using machine guns and tiny rockets when hostilities break out. But they’re only able to do so because the kind-hearted white warrior rides to their rescue. Sam Worthington’s character, the protagonist with whom we are supposed to identify, spends three months as a Na’vi and turns out to be better at it than any of the primitive sods who were actually born that way. Only he is able to tame the legendary beast, bring far-flung tribes together to work for a common cause, and have the wit to appeal to the ecosystem-network for a bit of help.
It’s an old trope, fueled by liberal guilt. “Sure,” the elaborate narrative rationalization goes, “people like me have screwed over people like you for generations. But I’m pretty sure that, had I been around at the time, I would have been one of the shining exceptions who bravely turned against my compatriots to side with the honorable native folk. Who, frankly, could have used my help.” It’s the victors who tell the stories and make the movies.
How one reacts to Avatar depends strongly on how bothered one is by this kind of stereotypically condescending storyline. As a thrilling popcorn movie, it absolutely works; the detailed world Cameron created is breathtaking; and the technological feat is singularly impressive. But when these achievements are in the service of a message that is so ham-handed and ultimately off-putting, I find it hard to enjoy. If the storytelling had been handled with a little more self-awareness and toleration for ambiguity — by the folks at Pixar, for example — it might really have been an historically good movie.
#25, Phillip Helbig:
Often the apostrophe is intended to mark a glottal stop.
I liked all aspects of the film. I don’t get all the negativity towards the pro-environment message. It is about doing what’s best for the greater good. How is that a bad thing?
I think the negativity is due to a variety of factors: 1) the message isn’t subtle, 2) the bad guys are white and the good guys are coloured (hence the title of this thread), 3) nevertheless, the hero is a converted bad guy instead of one of the good guys.
Did you notice that the little notification area in the “diary cam” that Jake occasionally speaks into is permantly set to “Security Level Orange” ?
I’ve read that some people think it has a blatant “anti-human” message. I disagree because a film that captivates our imaginations and encourages us to think, makes us better humans in the end. Thus, it could just as easily be interpreted as being pro-human.
@Haelfix #19, “…Cameron always does this too. Whether its the evil military/corporations in the terminator series, or the silly rich vs poor theme in Titanic…”
I always thought Titanic wasn’t just about rich vs. poor but also a plea to leave the wreck alone. After all, “Titanic” (the movie) was made shortly after “Titanic” (the wrecked ship on the bottom of the ocean) was found and shortly before various corporations sent expeditions there to recover artifacts…
Have you people seen Battle for Terra?
Here’s the plot synopsis on IMDB, with obligatory SPOILER ALERT! :
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0858486/synopsis
Oh, don’t worry. Its almost the EXACT same story as AVATAR rehashed again and again. This one is animation from back in 2007 (around the time AVATAR was being made) and quite well done.
Synopsis of the Synopsis:
1. Humans exhaust Earth’s resources
2. Humans discover that Terra, if terraformed would be perfect for them.
3. Terra’s inhabitants worried that this might destroy them.
4. Smart alien girl perfects alien flying craft.
5. Stranded human astronaut who thinks aliens are savage beings helped by alien girl.
6. They get each others jokes and syntax and sarcasm in both languages are the same.
7. They combine forces to save the world from humans.
8. Thankfully, the alien is far from humanoid, so no mating scenes.
Done quite well though.
Wonder why nobody told Cameron about this movie.
@31 – So in order to plea to leave the wreck alone he personally went down there with his entire production machine.
Cameron simply has big ego – I’m on the top of the world and will make the greatest movie ever. And his big ego is justified – he’s already made a billion dollar movie. Avatar was an attempt to make the next “greatest movie ever” and for Cameron it meant the most technologically advanced. Quality of the story? – the story had to allow for full display of technical wizardry and be commercially safe.
I dunno. In terms of percent profits, District 9 did extremely well, and since it was practically a grad-school film project compared to Avatar in terms of budgets, probably much easier to pitch. You pretty much have to be James Cameron to even contemplate projects on this scale.
And while D9 wasn’t didn’t exactly employ subtle allegory either, it didn’t approach the stunning conceit of Avatar’s great white hope. In D9, the human protagonist (such as he was) started out a pathetic, shallow, callous little nepotistic d-bag, and ended up a miserable, mutated, mutilated outcast. Yeah, Blomkamp copped-out on one heroism moment, but overall Wikus is a much more plausible “hero” than Jake’s Dances-With-Ehwah (or whatever Pandora’s Gaia was called).
I didn’t have a problem with the discongruously primitive military tech. After all, this is a not a government with an army, but a mining corporation with mercenary security. And I wouldn’t be surprised if the company skimped on the security budget. If you think your adversary has just horses and bows and arrows, why invest in anything more than machine guns and helicopters (probably purchased second or third hand)? These guys are the equivalent of today’s Blackwater on a shoestring budget, not the US military.
The discongruously primitive mining tech was harder to swallow. It seemed that the only difference between the equipment portrayed in the movie and what is available now is just bigger size. This is supposed to be a major mining corporation, for whom the mining of unobtanium is their primary business. You’d have expected them to have something closer to state of the art here.
I would have liked it if they had been a little bolder with the design for the Navi themselves, rather just stretched out humanoids (although I liked the consistency of the mention of Pandora’s low-g). All the other terrestrial vertebrate equivalents in the Pandoran ecosystem were hexapods, including the primate-like critters which were presumably in the same clade from which the Navi themselves descended. It would have been nice if the film-makers had decided to have the Navi keep a vestigial third limb pair, like a wing remnant, or parachuting organ (they climb trees a lot, after all), or something.
Part of movie going is the ability to suspend disbelief for a time so that you can just enjoy the experience.
I think we’re likely to find a lot of rare minerals in the asteroid belt and/or the moons of Jupiter. We’ll send robots to mine them and bring the stuff back without the need for invading alien worlds and being unwelcome guests. There are probably lots of uninhabited worlds out there to be discovered.
Should we find a world like Pandora we should study it, learn about the culture, not seek to exploit it or harm the natives in anyway.
I don’t understand why everything has to have some secret message. It’s a movie…get over it.
The movie has grossed over a billion dollars and has been seen by millions of people. There’s nothing remotely secret about it.
The message isn’t secret: the audience is hit over the head with it for three hours. Your point is that it’s not worthy of discussion because it’s a movie?
“It’s a movie”
Well, yeah. But it’s telling a story. What? People aren’t allowed to complain that it’s a story they’ve heard before and don’t much like? They have to just accept it, because “it’s a movie”? I don’t think so.
And I too was bothered by the Na’vi having two less limbs and eyes than everything else. Like the ants in that movie where the grasshoppers have six limbs… it’s like we can’t be expected to empathize with anything that isn’t a tetrapod humanoid.
And as for the ‘ – well, it’s a voiceless stop, by the way. But it’s silly to complain that the Na’vi wouldn’t have used a human alphabet. Of course they wouldn’t, but they didn’t. That was a human attempt to write their language, so of course a human alphabet was used.
Well, as far as lib guilt goes, I still feel bad about the Dodo.
“The medium is the message”, wrote Marshall McLuhan. In the long run “the story” is irrelevant.
‘Course, “In the long run, we are all dead,” as a noted economist once said. Frame it how you will, the story sucks.
OK, it’s a glottal stop. [Dons hybrid Aussie/Cockney accent] Righ’ ma’!
I rephrase my question: Why do writers of English-language science fiction often have the glottal stop in proper names in their work? Is it the science-fiction equivalent of the
heavy-metal umlaut?
Readers here might be interested in the take on Avatar (with spoilers) at Brad’s blog:
http://ideas.4brad.com/avatar-isnt-dances-wolves-its-another-plot
Granted the moral state of mankind as depicted in the film, the obvious implication is that the Company would soon be back with more firepower to blow up the tree of souls and exterminate the natives, thus following the precedent set by the Europeans, first in the Canary islands and then in many places in the Americas, Africa, and Oceania. People complain that Avatar had a banal plot, which is true enough. The unfortunate thing, however, is not that the plot has been used in too many novels and movies but that it recurs too often in history books.
@43. Phillip Helbig,
I laughed at your comparison to the heavy-metal umlaut, but there are parallels. The metal bands liked the heavy-metal umlaut because it made their names and albums seem ‘cooler’ and more dangerous.
My guess is that sci-fi writers like the apostrophe because it’s not used much in English or other common languages (both in word position and as a glottal stop function). Therefore it’s presence in sci-fi is an easy way to achieve an alien-ness that the authors often want. They need audience buy-in and anything which helps that assists the author’s cause.
Back to the umlaut. I remember watching a video by a well-known former blogger about the heavy-metal umlaut’s entry in Wikipedia. The video was meant to illustrate a typical article’s evolution in the open editing environment and the heavy-metal umlaut was just a handy, non-directed context in which to show that. The video even showed a couple of defacement attacks.
I enjoyed the whimsy of the choice of topic!
The most unrealistic thing about Avatar is that the humans didn’t land on Pandora with “we love you” cards and bibles and chocolate bars for the Navi kids, and ofcourse, big mining machines and lots of promises but little respect for the ways of navi culture. And any navi or native that fights back in retaliation is labeled a terrorist or criminal or savage. In reality, we wouldn’t land on Pandora with guns blazing, we’d land with a lot of promises and good intentions to reform the uneducated natives, lots of candy bars and money for those who follow along, but behind the scenes we’d be there to exploit, dominate, and assimilate the native population.
So much for Pandora.
At our core, we’re selfish animals and consume whatever is around us. The only way Pandora can survive is if we’re forced to stop consuming or thrown off the planet altogether. People are right in saying we’re wicked and selfish, but they’re wrong in saying this is because of some kind of original sin or because eve ate some fruit she wasn’t supposed to. This is all just an over elaborate unnecessary way of saying exactly the same thing: humans are sick fukkkks.
People who fixate on little thigns like “With their advanced technology a primitive native population would stand no chance against them” are missing the point entirely.