A Not Very Funny Review of Avatar

Hey, I’m running out of ideas, so I’m going to do a review of Avatar.  For all three of you that used to read my old LiveJournal, you’ll be familiar with the format.  For all you newbies, here how it works: what follows is a rambling incoherent mess rife with tangents and “jokes.” 
 
But, and here’s the rub, lots of spoilers.  Lots.
 
Just a heads up that if you were looking for something well-informed and spoiler-free, look elsewhere.  Everyone else, right this way for jokes about blue alien genitalia.

Also, the last time I tried to upload and link to photos from my computer at work, I basically crashed it.  So no pics.  Try to get on with your lives as best you can.
 
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Avatar is a movie that if you have any interest at all in it, you need to see it in theaters in 3D.  This isn’t like Iron Man or Dark Knight where seeing it on the biggest screen possible is really nice, but unnecessary.  The Imax camera, the effects, all of it is incredible, and they are incredible movies, but not that much is lost in the translation to home markets, especially if you have a nice ass TV.  Well, maybe sound design, but I digress.
 
This movie does some subtle and amazing things with 3D and hopefully signals the death of the filmmaking school of “Hey, audience!  Shit’s coming at you! Whooooooooooaaaaaaaa!”
 
I will definitely see this movie again.
 
Having said that, I’m not entirely sure I liked it.
 
Let me back up.  James Cameron is my favorite director.  I could watch Terminator 2, Aliens, and the Abyss everyday and never get tired of them.  I think I actually did watch Aliens once a day when I was a sophomore in college.  Mine was a rich life, filled with adventure and danger.
 
Oh, and sidenote, to whoever has my copy of the Abyss and hasn’t returned it; you’re already dead.
 
Anyway, I can’t really talk about his directing style in the technical sense, but he makes movies that are damned watchable.  They’re exciting; they’re built around interesting concepts; they always show us something we’ve never seen before; they’re filled with iconic moments, characters, quotes, sequences, etc; and I know a lot of critics like to bag on him for lacking human moments, but I think he does a great job writing regular people in irregular circumstances.
 
The moral of the story is, I placed colossal expectations on this movie, and I freely admit that that is coloring my perception of it.
 
One of the things that threw me for a loop, and I couldn’t articulate it until after leaving the theater is that Pandora never felt that dangerous to me.  Yes, they have really tall trees and floating mountains, but I can just as easily fall to my death on Earth.  Shit, I’m at work as I write this, we’ve got ladders.  I can make that happen.*  Yeah, they have some big ass dangerous animals, but I can get trampled by a terrestrial herbivore at my grandfather’s ranch or mauled by a fucking jungle cat at the zoo.  Or, you know, the jungle.

*not a cry for help
 
Where’s the hook?  Aliens and the Abyss did a spectacular job of creating a hostile, alien environment.  The “you’re not in Kansas anymore” speech painted the picture of Hell come to our plane of existence, but I never really felt it.  In the Abyss and Aliens there was a pervading sense of “if you go outside, you will die.  Outside will kill you.”  I just didn’t get that feeling watching Avatar.
 
It’s one of the oldest tricks in the book, because it always works; show someone die.  Look at the opening of Jurassic Park.  You see practically nothing, but it gets across the point that what’s in that box, what’s on that island, is not to be fucked with.  Just show us a platoon of Marines dying ugly, or hinting at it off screen.  Show the first survey team to go out without hybrid bodies or escort getting their asses handed to them by Pandora.
 
As it is, we get a pretty fucking cool speech, and then…Jake goes for a jog.  I expected the “this place will kill you” portion to come when Jake wanders away from Maggie and the guy from Dodgeball to the orange flowers, and we were about to see some crazy adaptation found only on Pandora, but nope, just peek-a-boo.  At that point, the natural predators could have been Wall-E.
 
I wanted sequences like when the Banshees attacked the military, but earlier in the movie.  Even gunships fall prey on Pandora.  Show, don’t tell.  Yes, it was dangerous in the conventional sense, but I wanted the out of nowhere kills.  The sense that this planet is dangerous in ways you’d never dream.
 
Skull Island from King Kong had more of a sense of dread and danger than Pandora.  And there weren’t glowstick helicopter lizards.
 
To go along with Pandora being the most inhospitable environment, ever, I’m just not buying the Na’vi as a culture.  There seems to be no common thread to their culture except as an antithesis to ours.  Every example of what they do is just to show us how different their’s is from ours, or how ours is wrong.  For a society that lived in that big ass tree for thousands of years, it just didn’t feel lived in, and as meticulous as Cameron’s been in the past, and the background work he did to make this planet plausible and organic, this is a major fault with the movie considering that we’re supposed to be won over by these people and their way of life.

Sam Worthington cannot do an American accent. He couldn’t do it in Terminator: Salvation, and he can’t do it here.  Just slip in a line about a new world government or how Australia became the 51st state after some war, and he’s still a Marine, but from Australia, not a guy from the US who for some reason can’t say his long ‘a’s like a real ‘Merican.
 
Okay, now on to the stuff I liked.
 
At first, I was a little thrown by the black and white starkness of the movie.  There was good; there was evil; pick a side.  As the movie continued, I had less of a problem with it.  This is a fairy tale, like Star Wars or Lord of the Rings, and once I got into that mindset, I did enjoy the movie a lot more.
 
The acting is really solid.  There’s a lot of ridiculous shit in this movie: scientific facts, back story, exposition, and having to explain things outloud sometimes comes off as really clumsy and clunky, but everyone from star Sam Worthington, to Joel Moore, to Giovanni Ribisi did an excellent job.
 
Worthington had a Keanu Reeves in the Matrix thing going on where he’s a blank slate waiting for something to imprint on him.  He’s accepting of everything, because well, he’s just along for the ride.  He doesn’t know what to expect, so he’s never really surprised or cocksure; he just is, which is exactly what this role needed.
 
I love Sigourney Weaver.  Alien, Aliens, Ghostbusters, Galaxy Quest, Dave, she’s an actress who can play any role, and that is increasingly rare nowadays.  She did an excellent job of hating Jake, hating Jake but realizing he was useful, hating Jake but needing him to keep working, to actually liking and respecting the guy.  She had the thankless job of handling a lot of the background, and doing that well is a gift.  She really is the first lady of sci-fi.  Also, my dreams.
 
Dear Zoe Saldana, baby, stop trying to make me fall in love with you. Between this and Star Trek, you’re working overtime, and I appreciate the effort, but, baby, stop.

Of all the performances, hers was the most nuanced, the most layered, and the second most watchable.  What could have easily been the most rote performance was made into something else.  Really, all this role required is that she be the savage version of Natalie Portman in Garden State, the perfect girl who shows you new stuff, oh, but wait, she’s damaged in ways that you are uniquely perfect to fix.  I loved that she came off as high-minded to ignorant Jake, but as soon as things became personal or emotional, she lost control, and was almost child-like in her anger and grief.  It told you a lot about this character and gave her layers.
 
Finally, holy shit, Stephen Lang.  Straight up, I was cheering for this guy the entire movie.  What a fucking badass.  When the airlock’s are blown open and every other pussy at the base is scrambling around for their precious mask, he’s switching to full auto and putting rounds on target.  The most dangerous part of Pandora, as near as I can tell, the air itself, ain’t got shit on the colonel.  Here’s a guy who isn’t racist or greedy or anything like that.  He’s just man doing a job, that job just so happen to be killing the enemy.  He has a detatched sort of menace, he doesn’t care who the target is, just that it’s dead, and that makes him scarier.  I’d watch a whole movie of this guy leading space marines into hell, and I think Avatar would be a thousand percent better if he had more screen time.  Incidentally he was also my favorite part of Public Enemies. 
 
And now, the reason we’re all here, the reason we all saw the movie, it’s very reason for being, the special effects.
 
In film, the term “uncanny valley” is used to describe the disconnect between CG and practical effects.  It was decided early on that no matter what, filmmakers would never be able to cross that line where CG and live would just blend in, and studios would have to hope that everyone would suspend their disbelief and just get sucked into the story.  Well, Cameron filled in that valley, paved over it, and that space is now a parking lot for a Super Wal-Mart.
 
There are portions of this movie that are entirely CG, no practical sets at all, and I had to remind myself a couple of times that I was watching special effects.  Do they stumble in a few places?  Absolutely, but when they connect, which is most of the time, they knock it out of the park.
 
More than that, the special effects serve to enhance the story.  It’s rarely a shot of “holy shit, look at this” but more of a world building to create a unique background for the type of story we all know very well.  The muscles in the face, or the way the skin stretches, it’s all a million little things that you’d never think of, but are so massively important to making things real.
 
Most importantly, it’s the eyes.  It’s how we connect to every other living thing, and CG is notorious for having dead eyes.  Look at Final Fantasy: the Spirits Within, or the Robert Zemeckis mo-cap movies.  Brilliant animation with dead eyes. 

WETA was able to cheat a little on Lord of the Rings and use Serkis’ eyes for the basis of Gollum, but the Na’vi eyes are unique and exotic, maybe that helped to make them look alive and believable, but no matter what, there’s something going on there, a light, if you will, and it’s importance to making this film work cannot be overlooked.
 
Finally the artistic direction and set design in terms of the human stuff was some of that silly trivial stuff that I love to geek over.  Everything in the movie, even the robot suits seemed possible.  Maybe not in my life time, but perhaps my children’s.  It was existing technology, just cranked up to twelve.  It was worn, and functional, and lacked all the bells and whistles lesser directors would have added to make everything seem cooler.

A perfect example is the rear-view mirror in the AMP suits.  Other movies would have a camera system or hologram or something, but this movie understands that “if it hurts, it works.”  Besides, all equipment in the military is made be the lowest bidder anyway.

I would also like to thank Mr. Cameron from cutting away from the blue cat people fucking.  Words cannot express how awkward and hilarious that could have gotten.
 
Was anyone else amazed at the lack of action?  Yeah, the last twenty or so minutes were intense as all hell, but that was really it.  Everything else was exciting, but more adventurous than action-packed.  Not complaining, but something I noticed.
 
Speaking of action, Cameron has rightfully reclaimed his crown as the greatest living action director. It’s just so well done.  There’s a sense of geography at work, every hit, every fall, every crash is related to the greater whole and those things affect everything around them.  More than that, no jump cuts.  Smooth transitions and clean camera work let you actually see what’s happening.  Every action movie director is officially back on notice.  You can’t just have explosions for no reason, or MTV editing and expect to get by.  The bar’s been raised, and that’s including good* action movies like Star Trek.
 
Fuck, I could have totally not wrote all this and just did a Michael Bay column, couldn’t have I?  Crap.

*see, also: acceptable by film snobs
 
You know, I wrote this review to A.) have content on my day and B.) to work through my feelings on the movie, but I don’t think I’m any closer to figuring out if If liked it or not.
 
I’ll say this, I don’t regret seeing it.  I’ll be seeing it again, and in terms of special effects and whether or not we’re going to see a continuing trend of more 3D, it’s hugely important, but is it really any good?
 
It’s heavy-handed, and as I pointed out, the other side that we’re supposed to feel for seems to exist only to counter our entire way of life.  They’re good, we’re evil, the end.  I wish the line about the humans returning to their “poisoned world” had come earlier, and humanity’s future being bleak was brought up more.  An “it’s us or them” sort of attitude would have been a lot more interesting and given us more to debate.  This movie was a lot more them vs the bank account.

There’s no gray, and like I said, this is a fairy tale, but even in fairy tale’s there’s temptation.  You have Gollum’s lust for the ring, Frodo teetering on the edge of corruption.  In Star Wars you had Han Solo ready to run at any point, and Luke also teetering on the edge of corruption.  This story had none of that.  Once Jake made up his mind, there was no going back and with no temptation whatsoever, just the fear of being caught.
 
Yet, the visuals alone will make you want to ask the camera to stop and the story to pause so you soak it all in, and the sheer ambition on display forces us to acknowledge it.  A whole new ecosystem, language, were dreamed up for this movie, and new technology was created to bring it to life, and that is impressive.
 
It feels like I’m making excuses for my favorite director, yet there are so many moments that I keep reliving in my head or talking about with people and I’m genuinely excited to see it again.

So, here’s a recommendation to see a movie from a guy who’s not sure if he liked it.  Take it as you will.

Matt