James Cameron, I have a small suggestion next time you’d like to make a film. Nothing huge, mind you. It really just boils down to one minor quibble:
Next time hire a writer.
No one’s criticizing the strength of Avatar’s visuals, except maybe some stodgy old luddites angrier about CG than I am. Instead they (not the luddites, that is, but the hypothetical critics implied with “no one”) are criticizing how goddamn cartoonish the plot is.
I have to be really careful in discussions about Avatar because sometimes I’ll hear people defend the name “unobtanium” as a legitimate name for the movie’s MacGuffin mineral. I have to be careful about this because when I hear someone defending something indefensible it makes me question if I’m even alive and living in reality. Such facile and lazy writing couldn’t possibly have survived the production process of a multi-million dollar blockbuster release. “But it’s a legitimate term that has been used in the aerospace engineering field for decades!” the defender might say. “Get out of my bathroom, I’m trying to shower,” I might reply were the defender arguing this point in my bathroom. Otherwise I might say “Legitimate? Pfah! Only so far as an in-joke can be legitimate.”
It’s one thing to call an essentially unobtainable material “unobtanium” as a joke, but it’s quite another thing to call it “unobtanium” when they have enough of it to justify a floating display chunk and an extensive mining operation harvesting more every day. They have clearly obtained unobtanium. And why? Because otherwise the movie wouldn’t have a one-dimensional conflict. Oh, sorry, I mean, “because this little gray rock sells for twenty million a kilo.”
This brings me to the crux of this article, for without our cartoonishly villainous antagonists, we couldn’t have our insultingly virtuous protagonists. The Na’vi are the result of post-colonial atonement-seeking filtered through the lens of lazy storytelling equipped with an enormous budget. But the movie would like you to accept that - despite existing on a planet that already had some form of planetary consciousness and an entirely alien physiology - they evolved into a sentient and miraculously humanoid race of giant blue cat-elves.
Fair enough, I suppose. Except then they just so happened to develop a perfectly idealized subsistence-based culture that reveres nature and abhors senseless killing. And I do mean a singular culture, because apparently the Na’vi are so homogenous that the only differences between Pandora’s various tribes are their geographic locations. Far be it from me to criticize the ideals of environmentalism, but in this case the Na’vi are literally too good. They are romanticized right out of their own biology. Are we supposed to believe that there are no diseases whatsoever on this lush jungle world teeming with fungal life?
I’m not asking for a complete ethnography on a fictional alien race, simply a modicum of depth. Perhaps if we had seen some of the downsides to living as the Na’vi live then we wouldn’t see the schadenfreude-laced laments of broken internet denizens stricken by Avatar-induced depression. As morbidly hilarious as this situation is, Mr. Cameron, let’s try to avoid it next time. And there’s only one way to do that: Hire a writer.
For my own part, I agree that the writing was lacking. But as someone who wants to get into the CG industry, I fell I must point out why this movie is so awesome even with the lack of depth. Final Fantasy, The Spirits Within was one of the early movies made from entirely CG visuals. It took something like 2 years worth of rendering with a collection of super computers to make the movie look as good as it did. Now Avatar by comparison allowed the director to see the scene he was working on as the motion capture actors were acting it out. This is a good deal better than the 1 Hour Film : ~1 Year Rendering ratio of FF:SW. There is also the difference in quality of the visuals. The actors movements are far more realistic in Avatar and the lighting effects alone made it a much more beautiful production. The final part that made this movie so awesome is the 3D. Me and many of my friends have held to a belief that 3D movies would never go anywhere because directors would be too obsessed with the 'horror movie'-'throwing things at the audience' look and feel to actually use the 3D to make the move look realistic. This happens to be the first 3D movie I have ever seen where the 3D actually added to the move, rather than completely ruining it. All of this adds up to a movie, that raises the bar for all future CG, motion capture, and 3D movies. I for one would like to see more movies made the way this one was, though maybe with a little more depth to the story.
ReplyDeleteYeah I thought this movie was actually pretty good although it was a more expensive version of Pocahontas and the Last Samurai. However, the one thing I think they really did well on was the creation of an entirely different world with unique plant life and the like. I think that was mostly why I liked it was because of the creativity in the design rather than the story. Did you see that article on MSN.com talking about how people were calling it Racist? It was interesting you should check it out. Oh and the part where he gets the flying mount thing was basically a rape scene; that was just weird.
ReplyDeleteI share your gripes about Avatar, and wanted to add one of my own. The previous response mentions the "entirely different world". I disagree here. Science fiction (especially populist fare like Avatar) fails to address the fact that, in the astronomically unlikely event that we meet another intelligent race, we probably couldn't even fathom their culture or biology. The similarities between the N'avi and Native American tribes are no accident; merely, Cameron wants to make the the aliens as friendly and likable as possible. He made them anthropomorphic to eliminate the estrangement a mass audience would inevitably have. Do superior works of sci-fi such as 2001 or Solaris have such easy to understand cultures? Definitely not. To do so guarantees you won't break your previous box-office record, as much as it compromises the art-form. The movie isn't so much racist as xenophobic.
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