Well I Wouldn't Want to Live There

Avatar

Directed by James Cameron

Three and One Half Stars

Much like Peter Jackson’s “Lord of the Rings” Trilogy earlier this decade, James Cameron has created with “Avatar” a world that I would like to experience first hand.  I want to stand on the road-like branches of these mountainous trees.  I want to see the moist glossy fauna of the forest floor illuminate under my bare feet and swim in the stainless crystal springs.  I want to emerge from the cover of the canopy and the heavy fog and see the Hallelujah Mountains floating in the sky above me.  More than anything else in “Avatar”, the lush and ethereally beautiful planet of Pandora is Cameron’s crowning achievement.




 Plenty of people will argue that the Na’vi, Pandora’s indigenous race of shamanic blue giants, are the real technical accomplishment, but I would contend that they are one of the many components of Pandora, and a vital one as you’ll eventually understand.  The Na’vi, with their slender, blue patterned bodies and feline characteristics, are somewhat of a miracle of motion-capture technology.  They are wonderfully expressive and fully realized, and occupy the screen comfortably alongside their human counterparts, who are no more or less real, but rather share Cameron’s universe as beings of equal authenticity.

The Na’vi occupy the Hometree, a mammoth culmination of symbiosis resting over the planet’s largest known deposits of Unobtanium (clever), a metal that has attracted a hoard of humans (American, of course) in the year 2154 to the far away planet to mine it dry.  The metal, and who knows how its function or location was initially discovered, is apparently vital to preserving life on Earth.  The Na’vi, as one might have guessed, are less than thrilled with our presence.

The humans bring with them an arsenal of military technology and rock-em sock-em soldiers to secure the operation.  The quaint, poison-tipped wooden arrows of the Na’vi are no match for our alloys and armors, but they have no intention of backing down.  This is their land, thank you very much, and they’ll be damned if they’ll be chased off.

They do have a distinct advantage, however.  Apart from the knowledge of the land, they can breathe the air, which is toxic to us.  We wear masks for rudimentary activities, but for extensive outdoor work, we have designed the Avatars, organic replicas of the Na’vi infused with the DNA of selected scientists and soldiers.  Their pilots, for lack of a better word, operate the Avatars with their thoughts inside sensor-ridden pods.  The transition from human to Avatar is not permanent, which is an important element to the story.  Their minds can be returned to their human vessels with the push of a button.

One of those minds is Jake Sully (Sam Worthington), a paraplegic ex-marine who was brought into the project after his twin brother, whom an Avatar was fashioned for, was killed in a mugging.  Jake finds the freedom of his new body liberating, and his lack of preparation quickly finds him recklessly involved in the Na’vi tribe, under the watchful guidance of Neytiri (Zoe Saldana).  Meanwhile, at the base, Sully is torn between conflicting objectives from the environmentally conscious Dr. Grace Augustine (Sigourney Weaver) and shoot-first-shoot-again-later military Col. Miles Quaritch (Stephen Lang).

Lost yet?  This is all just a broad outline of the establishing sequences of the film.  Pandora harbors an interesting secret revealed later that reminded me of the oceanic consciousness of “Solaris” (1972).  An inevitable relationship forms between Jake and Neytiri that doesn’t carry a lot of weight, but is adequate to move the story forward.  Hitchcock once said that if you introduce a gun in the first hour of your film, that gun must go off.  Well Cameron introduces a lot of guns, and they all go off in a final battle that pits among many other creatures and weapons, Jake’s mentally piloted Avatar against a humanoid robot piloted from within by Col. Quaritch in one of the film’s more subtle metaphors.

But rising above all else is the film’s immaculate spectacle, realized with an extraordinary eye for detail and a livid imagination.  Cameron is much better at shooting these big budget action movies than his evil counterpart Michael Bay.  He leaves the money on screen long enough for us to savor it, and places it in service of something more than just effects.  The project is more palatable than other recent action flicks, particularly films like the monochromatic club to the face "Death Race" from last year.  It is also well edited and choreographed, setting apart from this year's other mammoth budget spectacle "Transformers 2", which overdid the former to disguise the absence of the latter.  Cameron has a superb eye for place and scale.  Not for a second in “Avatar” does this universe not make perfect sense.

I suspect that much of the triumph that “Avatar” has become isn’t necessarily explicitly visible on screen.  Cameron utilized many state of the art FX technologies, many of them he invented himself.  What we see is more of an exhibition of product, a fun but clunky story seeing itself through in a utopian vision.  Cameron was aiming for the heavens with this project.  If he had to burn a few clichés to get there, well, I can forgive that.

Rollan Schott
December 18, 2009
Jon's review of "Avatar" is available at GoS' brother site, The Film Brief.