Avatar is an Elephantine Heap of Excrement
Christopher Carr
Rowan Atkinson's Na'vi
SPOILER ALERT: If you didn't guess from the title, this review trashes Avatar. If you still want to enjoy the film, don't bother reading it. Let's skip over Pocahontas, Dances with Wolves, Ferngully, and all that really funny, funny stuff, because that's played out like a Jheri Curl. Instead, lets explore the less-covered ground of why the movie really sucks: its crude, ham-fisted politics, invidious racism, crappy animation, unfortunate impact on film-making, and hackneyed unoriginality.
James Cameron's self-righteous injection of partisan politics and one-dimensional morality that is the story of Avatar is ponderous, underhanded, and due to the whopping success of the film, destined to make us all dumber. The RDA mining corporation, run by a character named Parker Selfridge, is represented as profit-motivated and evil, willing to do whatever it takes - including genocide - for uncertain returns. The clash between the Na'vi (Honestly, what's with the breath mark? An umlaut seemed too pretentious?) and RDA reminds me of the simplistic good versus evil narrative of most comic books, where the superhero is endowed by some sort of natural or spiritual deus ex machina and battles the evil forces of - inevitably - a wealthy businessman or scientist. As Avatar has all the thematic complexity of a bad comic book, it's hard to see it as the masterpiece twelve-years-in-the-making it's been hailed as, and not as the product of the decadent final stages of a pervasive Hollywood meme. I wonder if director Cameron was so lost in focus groups, financial projections, and delusions of grandeur (He is the King of the World after all.) that he failed to realize his film treats adults like morally incompetent losers in a Spurlockian fashion. In the words of Turtle from Entourage, "“James Cameron, baby! This could be the worst piece-of-shit movie ever and it’ll still make a billion dollars.”
Avatar, like all superhero narratives, relies on a dichotomy between archetypical good and evil characters, in this case juiced-up with ham-fisted parallels to real-world events, that reveal emptily antagonistic politics. The evil Earth-raping corporatists are after "unobtanium" - a complete MacGuffin; they need to "fight terror with terror" and "shock and awe", when really what the humans should be doing is painting with all the colors of the wind.
No doubt, in the future - as in the past and present - political issues will be controversial, nuanced, and layered. Consider Cameron's metaphor of evil resource extraction: without fossil fuels humans would be living in the dark ages and harvesting turnips - not discovering the secrets of genomic medicine and communicating via the internet. Resources are AWESOME. Even now fossil fuels are the most cost-efficient way for the poorest people in the world to rise above subsistence. Of course, there are dire consequences of burning fossil fuels that must be considered when formulating wise policy, but the point is that resource extraction is anything but simple. Although I sympathize with the premise of minimal resource use and investments in renewable energy, Avatar is decidedly one-sided: there is not even a cursory glance at the economic or social causes of RDA's rapacious resource extraction, and the humble miners are presented as monolithic bad guys. No one thinks they are evil; Hitler, Stalin and Mao all thought they were serving the greater good. In real life, there are often clear instances of good versus evil, but I find it hard to believe that the bad guys embrace destruction and violence to the degree shown in Avatar; I prefer to think they are tragically captivated by the righteousness of their own ideas, much like James Cameron.
The parallels with Star Wars cannot be ignored either. It's unfortunate that talented and respected film directors repeatedly sacrifice story to grand sensationalism, special effects, and marketability ("There will be an Avatar II!"). George Lucas's first film after graduating from USC film school was THX 1138 - in my opinion one of the greatest films ever made. Like Lucas, Cameron has used the success of the provocative and intelligent, low-budget Terminator to essentially make money via the lowest common denominator in storytelling: the oversimplified good versus evil narrative. I wonder however, whether directors like Lucas and Cameron are to blame, or whether the blame is properly placed on a society that rewards empty flash with ticket sales. In the words of Woody Allen, and it pains me to say this, "Thank God the French exist." Although even the French love Avatar.
The stupidity of the story isn't the worst part. The film is extremely, uncomfortably racist. While, thankfully there aren't any real-life Na'vi who had to sit through it, the fact remains that Avatar plays to the cheap seats. I felt more respect and pathos for the barbarian holding a severed head at the beginning of Gladiator than I did for a bunch of naked, self-righteous hippies dancing: after the death of Magua, of course the Na'vi make the human their leader! Of course only the human can tame the Toruk! And while that sounds like a masturbation euphemism, we're simply a superior race, even when we use our superiority to promote equality. This is the underlying tenet of the soft, liberal racism of the left - more invidious than its clumsy counterpart on the right.
The well-meaning racism of Dances with Wolves, Pocahontas, and Avatar sees race and ethnicity as a determinant of everything: if it weren't for the one conscious-having human/European, the poor, stupid minorities would be overwhelmed by innate technological and cultural superiority without even realizing anything was going on at all. Avatar's liberal heroine's solution to the threat posed to the natives by her peoples' "natural superiority" is to enlist the Na'vi in American schools and give them English names so they can learn about civilization, when perhaps the Na'vi would prefer to be left alone. Above all, this form of Noble Savage racism is unable to sacrifice its worldview centered on snug superiority, even if that superiority is manifest in apparent extensions of equality.
Well, so what? I didn't go to see Avatar for the story, you might say. I went for the cutting-edge film-making and special effects. After all, in the same way as Lord of the Rings was a story to show off the elvish culture and language that J.R.R. Tolkien created, Avatar is an empty vessel for Cameron to utilize in showcasing the 3-D CGI technology that will change film-making. Unfortunately, the animation was disappointing too. Once again, I felt as though I was watching the film version of a comic book, and once the shock of the 3-D wears off, I'm confident that we'll all look back at Avatar like we now do at Hammer pants and wonder what the hell we were thinking. Animators still haven't found a way to make their craft work in three dimensions. The exaggerated facial expressions and body language present in Vaudeville-era Disney animation are still the norm for two dimensions, and, if we are to continue with three dimensions, we must stylistically find a new way, no matter how much trust we may place in our sophisticated technology. The arrogant tendency of 3-D animators to see their craft as a continuation of 2-D animation is responsible for the exaggerated, saccharine essence behind the fake appearance of CGI in general.
The difference between the two crafts of 2-D animation and 3-D special effects animation for live-action films should be like the difference between acting for stage and acting for screen: stage actors must speak loudly and in melodramatic fashion, but a film actor's performance relies on the visual language created by the cinematographer: a slight change of angle or a particularly profound cut can be the difference between representing joy and representing sorrow. If 3-D animators designed subtle characters whose ears didn't wiggle and whose tails didn't twitch instead of the visual equivalent of a Peter Frampton track, current technologies might be able to produce realistic-looking supplemental effects for live-action films. Otherwise, it's about showcasing all-too-impermanent technology.
Like Clash of the Titans or The Ten Commandments, Avatar carries on the tradition of films about special effects at the expense of stories. The truth is that less is more; Jurassic Park - from 1994 - still boasts some of the most realistic special effects to date, complemented by darkness, rain, and fundamental story structure. The move away from a hybrid of special effects techniques to fit a situation to showcasing CGI rests on both economic and stylistic causes: the cost, workload, and knowledge capital required for animatronics, models, and CGI used in conjunction with film are prohibitive when compared to solely CGI and costumes used in conjunction with digital cinematography.
Speilberg and Lucas represent the two poles of thought on this subject. I have to side with Speilberg: no matter how many pixels, no matter how high the resolution, or even if one uses stereoscopic cameras, as in Avatar, no director will ever be capable of perfectly matching the lighting and textures of scenery with that of deus ex machina CGI; high-resolution digital will never be able to duplicate the photochemical process. Furthermore, Directors who take the Lucas approach to CGI tend to neglect whether or not a particular effect is relevant at all: George Lucas may have been able to digitally create Jabba the Hutt for his triumphant remake of Star Wars: A New Hope, but he never asked himself whether or not that scene fit the rest of the film. The truth is it looks ridiculous even when compared to the absurdities of the Star Wars universe.
While Avatar's animation can boast a high frame-rate and high-resolution graphics, it can't deny the fact that it looks like the Treehouse of Horror episode of the Simpsons where Homer winds up in the real world - or like a blue version of Shrek. It's better for directors and animators alike to have more humility when incorporating CGI effects into their films. Technology is not great in and of itself because we can make it; technology is great because of of what it allows us to do. People who like Avatar fundamentally misunderstand the nature of technology.
I'm dismayed that Avatar will inevitably change movies forever. The last time special effects movies were this big, in the 1950s, the beat poets were deeply exploring the meaning of llfe and American society, and the counterculture was practicing in the on-deck circle, but in the present, even a cursory glance at The Soup reveals we are getting dumber and dumber by the minute. Box Office revenues hit record lows in the last few years, and Avatar - a vulgar, special effects bonanza - comes along and shatters records previously set by Titanic, - Cameron's last overrated and empty-headed box office smash. It's clear that the immediate future of film will be all about stereoscoping and polarized sunglasses: its only been ten years, but we've come a long way from the blend of solid action, supplemental CGI, intelligent film-making, and commercial success that was Gladiator.
Ultimately Avatar is shockingly derivative and stupid in all regards, the filmic equivalent of a Dan Brown thriller. In creating Pandora, James Cameron ripped off Ferngully, Chris Dane Owens, magic mushroom posters, Monster Hunter, and Yes album covers; the prayer scenes were lifted directly from Baraka and cheapened. The human's war-robots, one of which "died", Cameron actually stole from his own film, Aliens. All in all, Avatar represents a talented director motivated by certain profit and the subconscious desire to mine human brains in the same way as the bad guys in the movie ravage the Earth, err umm the Pandora: Avatar is a soulless mammon-machine bent on destruction. Cameron admirably succeeded with the film in making me hate humanity, but in a totally different fashion than intended.
Reader Comments (8)
Ironically, it was George Lucas who said something along the lines of "Special effects are simply there to help the story".
A big name director that follows this particular school of thought is Christopher Nolan. Just check out Batman Begins.
I'm in 95% agreement with you here Chris, but the CGI truly was impressive. Not enough to save the film from mediocrity, but a spectacle in itself. I think your problem with the face acting comes from the horrendously overacting actors themselves.
But wait... you liked Gladiator? Am I reading that right?
Also on your next trip to the sad barren that is the Avatar forums, could you ask them what colour poop the Na'vi have? It wasn't addressed to my satisfaction in the film.
lol, another internet blog hero trying to make a name for himself.
Don't stub your toe jumping on the bandwagon. Yes, avatar is probably a commercial, if not critical success.
Deal with it. Because in the end, cameron wins either way.
*slow sarcastic clap*
nuanced enough?
The New Yorker provides a good portrait of James Cameron and the making of Avatar that still resonates six months later: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/10/26/091026fa_fact_goodyear
Avatar is crap. The worst thing is it will not change anyone's attitude and behaviour towards the environment or indigenous people which are so desparately in need of attention.
jeez.. somebody got sand on his vagina
Sand IN his vagina, not on it!
The one thing I can't stand about this.. Rant. Is that you mentioned the poor quality of CGI I can't pull my head around that one! The CGI graphics of this movie were pretty outstanding! hell you could mistake the na'vi for actors in makeup.
But if I were to read this say.. A month ago I would agree with a lot more of the things you had to say until I watched Avatar again mind you I did watch the extended version which may I add was much better, but after watching it I don't know.. The movie just like HIT me! Now I freakin' love the movie :D