Review: Avatar

Happy New Year everyone!

I finally got around to seeing James Cameron's 500 million dollar condemnation of Western Culture. It was predictable, cliched, insufferable, unoriginal (even the title is ripped off), and beautiful. That is, from an animatic point of view, it is very engaging, perhaps even overly so. I left the theater feeling as if I had watched a cartoon, rather than a movie.

But special effects can only go so far in propping up what is an otherwise pathetic bit of storytelling.

I won't go into the semantics of the plot, because you already know what happens. It would be no use writing spoilers because there is nothing to spoil. The end is apparent in the films opening 30 seconds – the only suspense coming from exactly how many anti-Western stereotypes will be hammered home with an iron bludgeon. Indeed, one feels as if they are being harangued and chastised throughout the entirety of the film. And for what? Well, for one, being white. (The film even features "token" blacks...) But mostly for not being a nature loving, overtly sensitive, ambiguously spiritual noble savage.

And that is where more stereo-types are handed down to the (presumably moronic) audience with ham handed, obvious deliberateness that only someone in the back corner fast asleep would fail to miss: that is, despite being spiritually superior, environmentally more unified, and culturally more sophisticated, the Na'vi (laughable rip-offs of World of Warcraft Trolls, incidentally. No, really...) are naive simpletons, helpless and hapless, ignorantly blissful children who, without the intellectual superiority of the far seeing, strikingly athletic (despite being paralyzed) white, American, former marine, would have never realized the full depth and scope of that vague and distant god of nature.

It really is that ridiculous.

From the militant military commander (private army, hired by an evil corp. of course) that sips his coffee while gunning down children, to the bloodthirsty hired guns who somehow lost any ethical compass or love for liberty and life when they left Earth, to the Jane Goodall-esque scientists who try to integrate and educate the native population, only to find out (of course!) that it is only they who can educate "us", every character is a one-dimensional cliche void of any inner conflict about their course of action. There are no character twists, no surprises, certainly no subtle inner arguments, and nobody in the film more interesting than the visual effects used to create them. I am somewhat surprised that the villainous Earthlings, who are strangely all Americans, did not have curled mustaches and black hats.

The Na'vi are a culture free of any conflict (unless of course it's those bastard "Sky People" causing such). The various tribes do not war one with another. And within the tribe itself there is no contention or disagreement or struggle for power. They hunt apologetically, and exist in a Utopian vacuum where hatred, jealousy, bitterness, and any other "human" emotion and reality are painfully absent. I found it curious that the other tribes were content to let our particular characters live happily in the heart and soul of Na'vi culture (such as it is). One would assume that such a place would be one of conflict, and sacredness, either becoming neutral territory, or ground fiercely fought over, a sort of Pandoran Jerusalem. Instead, it's Disneyland.

Avatar is melodrama at its very worst.

Am I being overly critical? Perhaps. But at nearly the cost of the American Reinvestment and Redistribution Act, one would think a film of this scope would try a little harder to contain some actual drama, substance, subtlety, and conflict beyond the popular checklists of current Hollywood activism and stereotype.

Activism that for Cameron appears to be, unlike the one dimensional film he created, fraught with moral complexity, given the massive marketing partnership with McDonald's (one of the world's most "non-green" companies, if you believe such metrics) he is using to push his pro-Utopia, anti-capitalist cartoon. I'm just certain he must be terribly conflicted...

Bottom Line: Worth seeing for some interesting, if hyped, special effects and some quality rolling of the eyes. Just don't groan too loudly, there may be more sensitive and enlightened sophists sharing Plato's Cave with you.