Avatar

Avatar

By Jonathan Fisher, December 17th, 2009



James Cameron's Avatar is, despite the talk, just a movie. Like any other, you'll sit there for its duration -- you might like it (I expect many will love it, as I did), you might not -- then the credits will roll, you'll leave the cinema, and the world outside won't be much different. This fact, that the world will not be a different place post-Avatar, will come as a surprise to some. There is a quarter of the movie-enthusiast community that seems to think Avatar will have the same effect on cinema that The Jazz Singer had back in 1927 when it introduced sound into the movies. It doesn't reinvent the form. It is, however, something new and exciting. I've never had a movie-going experience quite like the one Avatar gave me, and it may well become a cultural sensation as big as Star Wars or Cameron's own Titanic. We were promised a revolution, but Avatar's revolution is a technical one, not a story-telling one. There's plenty of new technology on show, but it is the tools of film-making that have changed in Avatar, not the story-telling basics. Narratively, Avatar actually leans on quite a few conventions, but it still manages to be riveting. It succeeds because of Cameron's deft directorial hand, solid performances, and a stupefyingly detailed world brought to life by special effects and 3-D that emerge not as a gimmick, but as an integral part of the experience.

The plot of the film will no doubt be seen by many as a pro-environmental parable, or an allegory for the human penchant for invasion, exploitation and destruction, but it also works on its own terms. Set in 2154, the human race has turned its eye to Pandora, a planet near Alpha Centauri. Pandora is of interest to humanity because of its Unobtainium (nice name), a substance integral to Earth's power supply. The local people, the Na'vi (the blue smurf-looking things that you've seen in the trailer) stand in the way of corporate heavyweight Parker Selfridge (Giovanni Ribisi) plundering the planet's minerals. The Na'vi are peaceful, suspicious of humans, and live in harmony with their planet. They believe in a deity that is incorporated into everything around them, the trees, the animals, themselves. The film presents the Na'vi as a richly constructed people, with everything about them suggesting a deeper culture. Comparisons with the Native Americans abound, as their philosophies on nature and living in harmony with it align. But again, the allegory is a side-show. The Na'vi may look a little odd, and there have been plenty of internet jokes about their resemblance to Smurfs, but as characters, they are interesting. They grow on us, and have a kind of ethereal beauty that is conveyed not in spite of, but because of the amazing motion-capture effects employed by Cameron and his crew.

Sam Worthington is Jake Sully, a crippled ex-Marine who has been enlisted to travel to Pandora to inhabit a Na'vi avatar, grown organically and matched with the DNA of its corresponding human. We learn that the military are using these avatars because Pandora's atmosphere is inhospitable to humans, and their use is key in forging a possible diplomatic solution to a tricky problem. The Na'vi live in and under a giant tree that sits above the planet's largest deposit of Unobtainium. If Sully and the crew of scientists led by Dr. Grace Augustine (Sigourney Weaver) can gain the Na'vi's trust and convince them to move away from the tree, it'll save the brutal military (led by Col. Miles Quartich, played by Stephen Lang) from forcing them to.

The inhabitant of Sully's avatar was originally intended to be his brother, but a quick prologue informs us that his brother was killed in a mugging before he was due to travel to Pandora. Because Jake and his brother were identical twins, Jake has the same DNA as his brother's avatar. In his avatar, he is free -- freedom from the constraints of our bodily toil is a big theme of the film -- and he lives with the Na'vi, who originally treat him with suspicion but eventually accept him as he learns their customs. He is tutored by and falls in love with Neytiri (Zoe Saldana) who, despite the blue skin and long tail, manages to be enormously beautiful.

The detail of Pandora and its inhabitants is remarkable. This world feels real and organic. Once again, it is all enhanced by the effects. So often in movies these days, effects detract from a movie. More often than not, there's an element of "look what we can do!" about computer generated effects. Despite Avatar's extraordinary, definitive effects, I wasn't once pulled out of the movie experience.

Now to the story. It is sufficient, although it does rely on some action movie conventions. Of course the final act revolves around the militaristic show-down between the Na'vi and the humans, and the film's villains (Col. Quartich and Parker Selfridge), while entertaining, come straight out of the corporate/military bad-guy cliche-book. Certain scenes (like one in which a major character is shot) play out like countless scenes in countless movies that have preceded Avatar. These things didn't necessarily bother me, but they served as a reminder that Avatar isn't re-defining movies as we know them, but is built on a cinema language that will probably always remain with us.

With a budget of around $300 million (nobody seems to be sure exactly how much was spent on this movie), Avatar will need to be a monster hit to turn a profit. I hope it succeeds. James Cameron has taken his time in bringing this story to the big-screen, but the wait has been worth it. He's clearly had this movie in his head for some time, and wanted to make sure it came out exactly right. Avatar may not be the movie to change all movies, but it has the potential to capture the public's imagination in the same way Star Wars did 32 years ago. This movie had its doubters well before it was even released. So did Titanic. We all know how that turned out.