January 4th, 2010

Here's a rarity: I'm actually going to review a movie. In this case, Avatar.

There's no denying the success and popularity of this movie. Holy cow, we saw it more than a week after its opening day and arrived ninety minutes before the un-cool early show only to discover we were nearly too late! With sales in the first two weeks topping a billion dollars and no signs of slowing down, it would be hard to dispute what industry insiders are now calling the most successful movie ever. Most people—especially Hollywood people—will agree, the almighty dollar equates to success, and more is always better.

As is the case with any success, there are staunch critics and staunch supporters, often at great odds with each other. Here's a clever little post I saw about Avatar on IMDB from someone claiming to be 26 years old: "if someone goes to the theatre to see Avatar on 3D and still think it was bad then he/she is an idiot". Charming. And quite revealing. Someone from the left side of the political spectrum posited that left wingers love the movie and right-wingers hate it. Someone else from the right side agreed. And there have been recommendations from all quarters to go see this movie, despite harsh criticism expressed in the same article—often within the same paragraph!

So my wife and I saw it last weekend. And I have some thoughts about it.

Let's start with the characters since, for me, that is what nearly all my favourite stories and movies are rich in portraying. Unfortunately, in Avatar there's little in the way of real characters. Grizzled tough-as-nails colonel who is hell-bent on destroying the natives, young jaded marine after a life-changing injury who learns to live and love again from an unexpected quarter, the full-of-wonder environmentally-conscious scientist activist-in-disguise. And let's not forget those natives who are a mish mash of North American Indians (as interpreted by Hollywood), South American Indians (as interpreted by Hollywood), African tribesman (as interpreted by ... well, you get it), and a few other of humanity's Lost Peoples Destroyed by White Man's Tyrannical Imperialism and Expansion. Really, if they weren't blue and nine feet tall you'd have a hard time believing they were from another planet. (And if it's a metaphor, then why bother making them blue and nine feet tall?)

But, I told myself, this isn't the kind of movie to show character development—it's a science fiction fantasy story, after all. It's all about the story and sense of wonder! Well, about that story: It's a retread of Pocahontas. Or Dances With Wolves. Or even Lawrence of Arabia (which, by the way, was a real story about real people). Even the minor twist at the ending, which I'm going to spoil here since it was so obvious even before the movie was 1/4 old, was a rehash: Gaea herself—oops, I mean Ey'ra herself—rises up and helps the naked natives defeat the titanium-plated ordnance-spewing gunships. Yay. Or, really, yawn. Hollywood has been there and done that so many times already that even the twists are commonplace.

I think it's time to say something nice things about this movie. Because story alone isn't what makes good science fiction fantasy. There has to be that wonderment ... the breathtaking heart-stopping amazement that a creative imaginative mind can conjure in an audience. And boy, does this movie have that sense of wonder in spades. Really. There were amazing moments marching past in droves, and I really did bug out my eyes in amazement dozens of times in this movie. The world of this movie and its nature were tangible and real, and so full of surprise and excitement that I had several giddy chuckles of delight. The story may have been conceived in crayon, but the interpretation and telling of it came from a grandmaster of the canvas. Also, despite its length (more than 2-1/2 hours) there were no lulls, no restless wiggles from anyone in the sold-out audience that I could see. Yet I never felt as though the story were being trimmed and crammed down my throat. Many film-makers would donate limbs for that fine sense of pacing.

This leads to the effects. Well, they are the best ever, so far. That is not an exaggeration. Remember Star Wars? Its story aggravated parents everywhere (mine included) while its special effects dazzled and hooked an entire young generation of minds (mine included). For me, and many of my age, science fiction fantasy movies are sorted as Before Star Wars and After Star Wars (except for 2001: A Space Odyssey, but let's ignore that genius anomaly). Well, in many ways, the effects—and in particular the way they redefine the storytelling—are as landscape-changing in Avatar as the effects in Star Wars were in its time. With time and money, you can now show anything on screen. Anything. And not in the clunky painted-wire-frame way of previous generations, and not in drawn animation or stop-motion, and not in early CGI with that cartoonish surreal clown-paint style. If you can think of it (and can get the financial backing for it) you can realistically make anything you want come to life on the screen. And that world-sized vision that went into this movie was pure inspiration for the people who used this powerful new generation of CGI to render it. To borrow an analogy: This isn't just some cheesy synthesizer sounds added to pop songs, this is the music of the spheres itself, a planet-sized orchestra. One interesting fact about some of the flora and fauna of this imagined world was that it reminded me of ideas the artistic creators of the Myst series of games came up with a decade ago. If they had had the sheer computing horsepower (and budget) these days, they might have imagined a Pandora very much like the one we saw in Avatar. And a quick note about 3D: I only saw one or two cheap "in your face" tricks done with 3D; the rest was for enhancement and enrichment—the film-makers earn a gold star for not taking cheap shots with the 3D technology.

Ah, but now I have to come back down to Earth. Let's talk about acting for a moment. I miss it. I used to like going to movies and seeing people pretend to be someone else so well that I believed them. But shouting, "go go go!" as something explodes behind you is not acting. Even Sigourney Weaver, whom I felt scared alongside in the Alien movies, laughed with in Ghostbusters 1 and 2, loved to hate in Working Girl (among many other movies) delivered us a watered-down replay of her Dian Fossey from Gorillas in the Mist. Like the character itself, we've seen the performance already. And better before. And she was the only one who attempted to act, even if it was a retread. The others were just stand-ins for the effects that occupied more than two-thirds of the movie. Perhaps it's to be expected. After all, if your face is going to be redrawn elongated and blue (and with a giant flat nose), why bother making the effort to emote? Just shout your lines and hope that some clever CGI technician idiot-savant paints your eyebrows expressively. As I said to my wife on the way home: For good or bad, most movies are not really about the acting anymore. And another reason why I can't blame the actors for their lack of acting: As I said above, the characters were tissue-thin and just about as insubstantial. There's only so much they could do with what they were given.

Just as the actors had to play second fiddle to the effects, that miraculous vision and stunning world had to be corralled into carrying a couple of loud and simplistic messages: 1. Human expansion is greedy, evil, and bad; and 2. We're killing our environment. We've gone from fine painting to crayons again. Whether or not you agree with the messages, you shouldn't forgive the clumsiness and heavy-handed pummelling on and about your head that you receive from this movie. By making archetypical "bad guys" like Stephen Lang's Colonel Miles Quaritch thematically opposite the do-no-wrong beautiful Gaea-loving harmonious Neytiri (played by Zoe Saldana), the movie really compromises any substantive message it might have had. Such polar opposite simplicity, coupled with such obvious images (mother running from fiery explosions with little blue baby in arms, people cowering and sobbing at the destruction of their tree) and even a very clumsy lack of showing us and instead opting for dialog exposition ("We can't wait for the terrorist threat to reach us, we must make a pre-emptive strike") lower the integrity and intelligence that could have made this into a movie that future film-goers won't snigger at. Think about it: When you admire an old movie like, say, Casablanca, do you remember the hard ending and the redemption of the characters, or do you remember the clumsy topical non-isolationist lines thrown in occasionally? Good grief, even The Grinch Who Stole Christmas had a more finely-grained message than Avatar!

And that, really, is the ultimate failure of this movie: It can be forgiven for its thin characterisation and its retread of other stories. We can even look the other way ignoring lack of acting, since CGI mostly covered that up. But its simplistic moralizing could have been handled with a much more mundane soapbox-style movie, instead of allowing all that wonderful storytelling and special effects work to be cheapened into a message drawn by shaky crayon in primary colours. This movie is so very watchable, but leaves one suffering from a lack of genuine emotional sustenance. Ultimately, it fails because of it. It's a crying shame.

* * *

For those who like quantification, here are my "numbers":

Characterisation:2/10
Story:3/10
Acting:5/10
Effects:10/10
Creativity/Innovation: 10/10
Message:2/10
Overall rating:5/10

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