"Avatar" Review

If the question about "Avatar" is "is it a game changer?" I think the answer might be yes. The special effects and 3-D technology fully live up to their billing. In the middle of the movie, my eyes started to ache a little; having been trained on movies for my entire life, they had no idea how to react to this. This is something new. After a while, thankfully, I think they got the hang of it. I was also surprised by how well the story worked for me, considering there is not a single moment of it that is not completely predictable. If Cameron were just a little bit better writer, "Avatar" could be an all-time great movie. As it is, it is a very good movie, and when you put the spectacle on top of that, it's a seismic event.

The 3-D is never used just for its own sake. Nobody paddles a ball in our face. At some points in tight-shot indoor scenes, there is a little of that sense of objects occupying a series of flat planes that is what you usually get in modern 3-D. However, when the camera is allowed free range out in the forests of Pandora, we get a complete sense of depth, a sense very similar to what we'd get from watching something in person. I don't see how one could improve this short of putting me in a VR suit. I think the reason my eyes had trouble adjusting was that in most films, the movie does the work of focusing for your eyes... some parts of the screen are in focus and some are not, so there's no question for your eyes what they should be focusing on. In this immersive 3-D, everything is usually in focus; it's once again our own eyes responsibility to figure out what to focus on. There were several times where action was taking place in many different places on screen and I found my eyes straining to flit from one focal point to another. They were reacting not like they would to a movie, but as if I actually was fighting a battle while riding on a dragon. I think it might just take getting used to.

Cameron's greatest technical achievement may be the Na'Vi, the film's blue aliens (with whom we probably spend the majority of the film). It's not 100% perfect, but the moments where we lose the sense that they're completely physically real are very rare. Cameron has completely solved the biggest bugaboos of motion-capture/animated people, and somehow never once falls into the so-called "uncanny valley". Normally, our brains are very good at realizing when a facsimile of a person is not real, that there's nothing behind those eyes, no soul. This is why "The Polar Express" is so gosh-darn creepy. It is also extremely hard to make them move like real people... when Grendel swings Beowulf around in Zemeckis' film, he seems to lose substance and moves like a rag doll. The Na'Vi play completely as real sentient beings, both in how the move and in that feeling that there are real people behind their eyes. If this can be done for non-astronomical sums of money and in shorter time frames, the applications are mind-boggling.

The story is pretty simple. Future human colonists are mining the beautiful moon of Pandora, where the atmosphere is toxic, the wild-life is proliferate and deadly, and the natives are fierce. In order to move freely and gain the native's trust, the colonists have their "avatar" program... bodies grown with both human and Na'Vi DNA. "Drivers" get into a CAT-scan type machine and can essentially download their consciousness into an Avatar body.

One of these drivers is Jake Sully (Sam Worthington), who is in a wheel-chair in normal life but not when he's an Avatar. To make a long story short, he begins the gain the trust of the tribe (who realize he is not like them but do not seem to fully understand what this means. They call him a "dreamwalker"), and is given the task of getting them to move from their home in the giant "Home Tree", which sits on a huge mineral deposit. However, he begins to realize he may be at more at home among the Na'Vi, and falls in love with Neytiri (Zoe Saldana, who plays the female lead in the year's two biggest and best SF films). In the end, Jake must lead the Na'Vi in a final battle with the human invaders.

The rest of the review is going to contain SPOILERS, so don't go further if you care.




This story has been compared to "Dances With Wolves", but I think it transcends its influences because its fantastic setting lends itself to a sense of greater universality. It is not about the Europeans genocide of the Native Americans. It's about all native peoples and their relationship to more advanced invaders, in a larger sense. When the over-the-top military colonel villain played by Stephen Lang orders the Home Tree felled, there is a sense as it crashes to the forest below that somehow all of man's inhumanity towards the Earth and its environment is concentrated into this one pointless act. It almost made me sick to my stomach, but in a good way. In a way that means I'm really caring about the story, and that it's having an effect on me.

The film has more than one weakness, however, and the biggest is that its story is very straight-forward. It goes exactly how you think it's going to. Pretty much every element that's introduced is eventually paid off. Though some of the characters have genuine arcs, nobody ever reacts to anything in a way that surprises you. Sigourney Weaver plays a character who seems interesting on the surface, a chain-smoking scientist who wears a Stanford T-shirt even when she's an Avatar. But the way Weaver plays her (and I'm not sure it's her fault), she completely lacks layers. She's a blue, smoking Jane Goodall. The Colonel, meanwhile, is such a mustache-twirling villain that he might completely sink the movie if he had a touch more screen-time. As things are, he mostly disappears for the film's middle third, and really seems to only exist to be a physical antagonist. Giovanni Ribisi does a wonderful job as the slick company exec in charge of the mining operation, a role I would not have pegged him for. We get a tangible sense as the film continues that he knows he's gone too far, that something inside him knows he is not the hero of this piece, but he continues because he does not see any other options open to him. That had to be hard to portray.

One might rail against the way the film, like so many these days, descends into a long action sequence for the home stretch. The climax is a violent struggle starring people who constantly insist that they're fighting for peace. However, Cameron is so good at this that it's almost refreshing. Michael Bay is an easy target, but he's not the sole offender. So many modern action sequences lose their impact because they fail to make sense visually. There is no sense of what is where. Cameron knows how to show us the action so that we can tell what it is gong on: it is awe-inspiring enough without desperate cutting to increase "energy". This film must have a much longer average shot length than your average modern action blockbuster.

There has been some talk that the film wears its political aspirations on its sleeve, and I suppose this is not untrue. For me this helped to add reality to this world, that it had similar problems to those I experience. We learn in the first ten minutes that Jake's spinal condition is treatable in this future, but that he is not rich enough to afford the operation. (he even says "not in this economy") And the Colonel is fond of Bushisms, like "we'll fight terror with terror" and "shock and awe", and the soldiers in a hostile environment dealing badly with natives who don't want them there raises obvious parallels to Iraq and Afghanistan. Beyond all this, of course, is the environmentalism. Here Cameron cheats a little: the metaphors "tree-huggers" use, about everything being connected and about Gaia having a soul, are all made literal on Pandora. Everything on the planet is connected by a sort of living fiberoptic network, making for a kind of world mind. Cutting down trees on Pandora really is murder. So the film's Pandora environmentalism, in the end, is sort of a writ-large metaphor for our Earth environmentalism rather than a straight parallel, and I think it may be difficult for some to make that distinction.

This is already longer than I meant to make it and I think I'll stop here. I do want to answer a question someone asked Roger Ebert in his last mailbag, asking whether the film was appropriate for children. He said there was "nothing objectionable", but that it might be too scary for younger kids. I think it is probably worth mentioning that Na'Vi ladies do not usually wear shirts, though perhaps blue boobs don't count. (Neytiri spends much of the movie wearing some rather strategically-placed necklaces) There's also a (rather tasteful) 3-D alien sex scene. And "Avatar" may have the highest S-word count of any PG-13 movie I've ever seen. (I could swear when I was a kid you couldn't swear at all in PG-13 movies) All that said, I sat directly in front of a rambunctious group of younger kids. They drove me nuts all through the previews, commenting and laughing about every tiny thing. But once the movie started, they were dead silent throughout. I'm pretty sure it worked for them. It definitely worked for me.