Avatar
Reviewed by Edward Larsen Terkelsen

USA/UK, PG-13, 162 m, 2009
Directed by James Cameron. Stars Sam Worthington, Zoe Saldana, Sigourney Weaver, et al.

Believe it or not, James Cameron’s sci-fi fantasy, Avatar (which has become the highest grossing picture in the history of the universe—besting Cameron’s own Titanic), is leaving some viewers so depressed that they’re driving their cars off cliffs, sticking their heads in ovens, and ingesting entire bottles of sleeping pills. Not because Avatar is such a stinker (though I’ve smelled sweeter, that’s for sure), but because these unfortunate souls can’t deal with being cut off from the movie’s idyllic world of Pandora after the curtain falls and the lights come up. It would appear that the Avatar “experience,” which involves a new stereoscopic technology, is so immersive that it can be hazardous to your psychological health. On the movie’s official website, Naviblue.com, one visitor wrote, “When I woke up this morning after watching Avatar for the first time yesterday, the world seemed...gray. It was like my whole life, everything I’ve done and worked for, lost its meaning. It just seems so...meaningless. I still don’t really see any reason to keep doing things at all. I live in a dying world.” Sheesh, I’d like to think that the poor schnook who made those remarks is grappling with something a little more existentially complex than Avatar withdrawal, but given the impractical expectations of today’s young Americans (who, at least when you compare their lives to those of Christians in Eastern India or women in any number of the Islamic countries, are more spoiled than a potato salad that’s been left in the sun all day), I fear that’s not the case. In fact, I came across so many other similarly despondent posts on the site that I thought my head was going to explode like Louis Del Grande’s in Scanners. Look, I understand how a body might get down about living in a degenerate culture overseen by a Dumbo-eared Marxist who turns a blind eye to infanticide, but I doubt any one of the whippersnappers who long to live in Cameron’s backasswards fantasyland would last one minute there if they didn’t have access to a laptop or a cell phone or an Xbox or an iPod or a multiplex that shows brainless fare like Avatar. Why the flick is inspiring its viewers to commit hara-kiri isn’t as big of a mystery as why it’s such a colossal hit. Rest assured, for a guy with a slow leak in his head, I still know a thing or two about a thing or two, but I’ll be dadblasted if I can figure out what audiences are finding so elevating and ennobling about this overblown Smurf cartoon. (After two and a half hours, the only thing I felt was played, hornswoggled.) And it’s not just Yanks who are lapping up this new age Kool-Aid; moviegoers abroad think it’s the bee’s knees, too. Is the whole world off its cockadoodie rocker? Don’t answer that; it’s a rhetorical question.

With the exception of The Abyss, I haven’t had much use for what Cameron has given us over the years: loud, clunky, and utterly impersonal special effect machines. Granted, The Abyss was derivative (one part Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, two parts Das Boot, three parts Close Encounters), but it had heart. (At least the theatrical version did; the director’s cut—which I also liked, but for different reasons—was more of an odyssey than a love story.) However, Cameron’s next project, Terminator 2: Judgment Day, was one of the most heartless things I’ve ever sat through. It drummed up a lot of biz, though, and even motivated normally discerning reviewers like David Denby to sing its praises. (I may be the only one who felt like doing the Chinese Typewriter when Cameron relinquished the director’s chair to Jonathan Mostow in Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines.) Cameron’s success with T2 (as well as everything else he’s ever touched) gave him the weight to run through as much of 20th Century Fox’s money as he wanted (some estimates put it at $200 million) when he thought it’d be fun to recreate the sinking of the Titanic. Miraculously, the gamble paid off for everyone involved: Titanic became an international blockbuster (raking in literally billions of dollars) and won a plethora of awards—including an Oscar for Best Picture. Woohoo!!!

It’s been 12 years since Titanic was launched and established Cameron as “the king of the world,” and judging by all the loot that his latest epic is raking in, it appears that he’s in no danger of being dethroned any time soon. There’s already talk of an Avatar sequel (maybe a trilogy), but if it’s even half as dopey as this movie, I’ll hit the Annie Sprinkle retrospective instead. Seriously, if you’re able to dispense with all the hype, you’ll find Avatar a rather minor happening, too. Only on the odd occasion have I seen so much lettuce ($300 million, they say) frittered away on such a dinky idea: A crippled ex-Marine, Jake Sully (a nod to Jack Scully on TV’s “M*A*S*H”?), is charged with cozying up to an alien tribe known as the Na’vi (read: the naïve) and convincing them to pack up their shit and move to a different part of their planet so his employer, Parker Selfridge (played by that marvelous sleazeball, Giovanni Ribisi), can loot their woodlands for some precious mineral or another. (He gets a new pair of legs if he pulls it off.) Of course, a jarhead in a wheelchair would stand out like a sore thumb on Pandora, what with its race of blue-skinned, cat-eyed goliaths (their faces recall Mr. Tumnus from Andrew Adamson’s 2005 version of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, while their bodies appear to have been modeled on the Harlem Globetrotters), so he’s provided a Na’vi clone—the titular avatar—that he can control mentally, allowing him to mix it up with the natives (all of whom have been rendered in the computer) while his body remains snug in a pod back on the spaceship. Now, if you’ve seen Dances with Wolves, you know exactly where all this is headed: Jake comes to admire the Na’vi and their sense of ecological connectedness. He also develops a thing for one of its females, Neytiri, which doesn’t make much sense considering that he’s only taken on the outward show of a Na’vi—not its untold years of psychological conditioning. (He could just as well be crushing on a chimpanzee.) Nevertheless, going green compels him to turn on his boss (that evil capitalist), which leads to a battle royale between the private military contractors Selfridge has retained and the Na’vi, who, if nothing else, are pretty good warriors. (You just about have to be on this planet; there’s always some hungry beastie lying in wait.) But all the rock ‘em sock ‘em stuff is boring, boring, boring. Cameron doesn’t shape the action with the kind of balletic precision that a genuinely talented director like Steven Spielberg does; he just throws a lot of random images at us and calls it good. (The smash and grab manner in which he cuts evokes George Lucas.) The 3-D effects might call your attention away from the film’s overall slackness (for a while, anyway), but I’ve never been a fan of this gimmick, whether its used to pump new life into a dying franchise (Friday the 13th Part III, Jaws 3-D) or add a more realistic dimension to the computer-generated trickery of a popular entertainment like Avatar. A good movie doesn’t need the assistance of 3-D imaging to draw us in, but, alas, Avatar isn’t a good movie.

And it’s so goddamned PC that you just know Cameron’s going to be top dog on awards night. Mind, I’m hardly against conservationism, but I don’t need a guy who spends the equivalent of Venezuela’s GDP on a fricking flicker show to tell me that we all need to return to a simpler, more environmentally friendly way of doing things. (He expects us to bow shamefacedly before the noble Na’vi, but I found them to be such a self-righteous, downright humorless lot that I couldn’t wait to get away from them and back to my earth-plundering peeps.) And I think it’s the height of hypocrisy for this stinking rich so-and-so to keep bagging on big business (the military is another one of his preferred objects of ridicule), but that’s an age-old Hollywood convention that most lazy moviemakers are happy to rely on. However, Avatar’s distaste for technology (that is, “the application of practical sciences to industry or commerce”) just doesn’t compute. After all, Cameron pushes the envelope of FX technology with each new project, so much so that the human element is often lost amid the CG spectacle. In Return of the Jedi, Lucas expressed similar misgivings about technology when he had the machine-dependent Empire meet its Waterloo at the paws of spear-chucking Teddy Bears. Like Lucas, Cameron has built a wildly successful career out of developing and tirelessly promoting new technologies, so when he gets on his soapbox and tells us to be wary of technology, I can’t help but want to tell him to fuck off. 

January 31, 2010

© Copyright 2010 by Edward Larsen Terkelsen. All rights reserved.