Director/writer: James Cameron
Photography: Mauro Fiore
Visual effects: hundreds (scroll down)
Editors: James Cameron, John Refoua, Stephen E. Rivkin
Cast: Sam Worthington, Zoe Saldana, Sigourney Weaver, Stephen Lang, Michelle Rodriguez, Giovanni Ribisi, Joel David Moore, CCH Pounder, Wes Studi, Laz Alonso
From the earliest days of its release, before it was clear yet what a monster runaway hit it would turn out to be, before I had even seen it for myself, I have been mystified by the levels of critical revulsion aimed at James Cameron's decade-plus-in-the-making science fiction extravaganza. I know it's a bit of a mug's game to attempt to assign motivations or other psychological overlays to people's reactions to movies, especially those who write about them professionally or as a passionate hobby, but it has been very difficult to read them as anything but churlish backlash of some kind.
Look, I don't know that Avatar is one of those giant generational movies that comes along and (for better or worse) changes everything, the way that movies are looked at and/or made, a Citizen Kane or a Star Wars (make that Jaws) or a 2001 or whatever. But I also don't know that it isn't. And, having seen it a second time now at home, I know I like it a lot more than most of the writers I read and trust on these things—a lot more.
The first point where I knew I was out of step with many was in the almost universal figure they fall back on to mock it—"Dances With Wolves in outer space," it goes. This was problematic for me in that I had actually avoided Dances With Wolves for something like 20 years, figuring it had to be basically awful and appreciating the joke people made out of it (e.g., waiting in a crowded restaurant for a table, "we could have watched Dances With Wolves!"). But when I finally caught up with it I found that I actually thought it was much better than anyone other than the Academy Awards®©™ people of that year had given it credit for.
I'm willing to own up to perhaps liking Avatar for "wrong" reasons, similar to the way I like JFK. Both movies, I know, push very hard on my personal Skinnerian outrage buttons, as they are intended to do. (For that matter, the treatment of Native Americans and animals in Dances With Wolves produced exactly the same effect.) In fact, during my recent 2-D rounded-screen viewing of Avatar I found it hard to avoid seeing what a calculated parable for liberals it is of the Bush/Cheney years. Elements of three of their four titanic disasters are approximately as plain as day—9/11, the Iraq War, and Katrina. Presumably, if the real estate/economic collapse had happened a little sooner it would have found its way in to this movie as well.
At the same time, I don't think there's much use in denying Cameron's facility for telling a story with pictures and words. You might have problems with his pictures—certainly there are always things to complain about, whether it's casting gaffes or Cameron's overweening technology fetishes—but for all that they do tend to hold one's attention, or certainly mine. It's the case here too, plunging directly into its story of other-world colonialism and elaborating its contextual backstories and various high concepts with a good deal of economy, considering the complexity involved.
Things to complain about here: The bad people are so bad. The good people are so good. Where the fuck is Pandora supposed to be and how come it has to have a 24-hour circadian cycle? And, not least, naming the precious mineral so sought after here "unobtanium"? That's so painful there ought to be a law. Maybe they came up with that during the writer's strike?
On the other hand, full disclosure: I don't have any problem at all with the whole mystical nature spirits threads woven all through—in fact, I like that quite a bit, along with the intimations of the biology of the planet, which Sigourney Weaver (and sometimes it seems as if she's always there right in the middle of the best science fiction, parodies and real things alike) tries so hard to articulate. She succeeds only in sketching out the broad lines, leaving us to fill in the gaps. For me, it does a good deal of the work of effectively raising the stakes, keeping me engaged (or perhaps "manipulated") on emotional levels so profound I'm hard put to explain some of my reactions.
In the afternoon matinee of the living room, of course, the visuals definitely suffer, and the picture as a whole tends to become more cartoonish. This is less of a problem than I expected (and I did expect a letdown) perhaps simply because animated pictures are so much more commonplace and familiar nowadays, and not the exotic things—or more often the tepid family fare—they seemed 30 years ago. In the theater, I was as taken with the glorious, immersive experience of it as anyone could have been. The flora and fauna alone of the Pandora planet are so rich and so densely conceived that it really did feel like stepping into another time and place. That doesn't mean it didn't suffer from the usual 3-D clichés, which become so ridiculous when viewing it flat—all those distracting dynamics of foreground and background. To its credit, the 3-D of Avatar was never particularly rooted in such gimmickry, but instead designed to enhance a potent sense of place.
I will also say (as an old man who wants you to get off his lawn), that even in this day and age of cell phones and texting and non-stop gabbing as the norm in movie theaters—and I can assure you, by the way, the latter is no problem confined to the youthful members of the audience, if anything it's even worse among attendees 40 and older, who should know better—but anything that requires a trip to the local big-screen palace to get the most out of it is OK with me, ipso facto.
Sitting in that multiplex room a little more than a year ago, gaping at the Na'vi and their various trials and adventures, with those stupid glasses on, and people all around me working their phones and casually discussing the blueness of the alien's skin and other trivia, and even with my bladder set to burst for much of the last hour, but not wanting to miss a moment—it was the kind of experience at the movies that I just couldn't remember the last time I'd had. The resonations ran deep, reminding me of things like the first movie I ever saw in a theater, Disney's Dumbo as a six-year-old, those transformative experiences that are what keep you coming back for more in the first place. In the face of that, the sniping about Avatar seems to me feeble, and misplaced. And a loss on the part of the complainers.
No comments:
Post a Comment