Avatar sucked, and here’s why.
Posted by Benjamin J. Thompson | Filed under Literature, Thoughts
I just got back from watching James Cameron’s Avatar and I’d like to brace you for some bad news and a truckload of spoilers: The reason they advertise the bajeezus out of it based on its special effects is that there’s not much else going for it. The characters are flat, the story predictable, and the message is shallow.
I would dislike it for being an overt environmentalist movie, but apart from this it lacked certain things that make for good cinema. Even a movie with a political slant can be good if you get me to care about what’s going on in the characters’ lives. This one didn’t, and here’s why:
The Story
The movie starts off well enough, with Jake Sully, a disabled Marine hired to fill the role of his dead twin brother. His serendipitous genetics make him a money-saving choice for the corporation trying to quell the locals enough to mine their planet’s landscape for the unobtainium buried beneath it.
We’ve actually got the start of a really neat story here. Here’s a guy whose regular life really sucks. His family is dead and his legs are useless, but through an avatar —- a proxy body identical to an indigenous alien —- he can run, jump, and even fly, in a beautiful paradise so long as he lives a lie. This could be a great premise, a story about living with loss, about addiction, or betrayal, maybe climaxing when he has to choose: fakery and excitement versus drudgery and truth, but that’s not the story Cameron wanted to tell.
The story also pits two rival groups against one another: an aboriginal population deeply in love with their home, and a technologically superior group with the might to invade and take over almost totally unchallenged. This could also have been a story about the tragedies that happen when a big, strong civilization crashes up against a small and weak one. But the movie wasn’t about that either.
Instead, Jake Sully is a blank slate. He and the other characters even say so before he ever sets foot in the alien world. There’s nothing he really wants, so there’s no real tension. This blank slate enters an alien body, and is abandoned in the alien world within hours. The moment he meets an one of the aliens, a Na’vi, she chastises him for not honoring nature. He thrusts himself wholeheartedly into their world and doesn’t come out except for the obligatory video log and food. Obviously, he sides with the pure, innocent natives rather than the irredeemably evil humans, and leads a resistance against the mining enterprise and succeeds, with the help of a ragtag gang of the only four non-evil humans on the planet.
The Characters
I’ve covered the protagonist above, but the rest of the characters are similarly empty. None of them are anything you haven’t already seen in a dozen other movies. The leader of the “security force” is an entertaining but stereotypical military sadist caricature that reminds me of Sergeant Slab Rankle from Invader Zim. The corporate boss of the project is one-dimensional in his pursuit of the company’s goal: more unobtainium. In general, the humans behave like the worst of the American colonists in Pocahontas.
The Na’vi hail from every fictionalized pre-technological tribe you’ve ever heard of. We have the matriarch, the patriarch, the warrior and the princess. Their political system appears almost identical to the Acquarans, from a poorly-executed episode of the great show Farscape.
If you’ve watched the movie, try an experiment. Try to describe any of the characters without resorting to their appearance, their surroundings, or their role in the film. In other words, describe them in terms of personality, desires and fears. This can be done with well-written, three-dimensional characters. Han Solo, Tyler Durden, pretty much anyone from Lost. The only real person I can pick out of Avatar is perhaps Sigourney Weaver’s character.
The Message Through the Visuals
I could have been willing to let all of the above go and simply enjoy the spectacle. If I didn’t have friends who were artists, I’d be tempted to conclude that any heavy-handed message I read into this movie during the first half or so was just in my imagination. But alas, they’ve taught me better than that. There are visual messages embedded throughout the film. Consider the following:
- The heroic Na’vi, the ones who are symbiotically and irrevocably linked with every organism around them, also happen to be beautiful, bio-luminescent, 11-foot-tall supermen with carbon-fiber skeletons. Next to them, humans look like dirty, squat little toads.
- Humanity’s banner vehicle is an ugly bulldozer the size of an aircraft carrier. It performed exactly the same function as the villainous, smoke-spewing, sludge-spouting machine in Ferngully, and that is to say it indiscriminately mowed down trees carving a path through the jungle.
- The human settlements were strip mines, airfields and quarries devoid of the slightest hint of life.
- The entire alien world glows.
- You never see a Na’vi do anything except joyous jungle gymnastics in between hunting and sleeping. The implication is that they live a life of nearly perfect ease.
- Near the beginning, Jake Sully in his Na’vi form is attacked by a series of nightmare creatures. After he is rescued, Na’vi life seems completely undisturbed by wild animals even though they live outdoors 24/7.
Cameron chose to show us (and not show us) these things on purpose. The Na’vi could have been homely and short, or they could have been cycloptic tentacled beings. Humanity’s emissary might have been something else, like a surveying party or a machine that cleared a narrow path to possible dig sites for less obtrusive shaft mines.
The Message Through the Plot
I think it was obvious from the get-go that Mr. Sully was going to abandon his human life for a life with the Na’vi. That’s an acceptable outcome, and it could have been done without being an environmental sermon. Maybe he chooses that life for the adventure, maybe for love. The sad fact is that the plot contained no lure whatsoever for Jake Sully to remain human. The judgment the movie is making for us here is that the life of the Na’vi is preferable to the life we live.
The humans perform outrageous, unnecessarily cruel acts, but have no motivation. Sure, an important Na’vi landmark is between them and more unobtainium, but we have no idea what the function of this rare element is. It’s never mentioned. All we’re told about is its monetary value. I feel its purpose is important information, because people in the movie appear willing to commit genocide to get more of it. Would it feed a starving Earth? Cure cancer? Generate energy? If this question had an answer, it would give us a little insight into the humans and provide a little moral conflict. Instead, Cameron seems to dub this completely unimportant information. The judgment the movie makes for you is that whatever high-value use the unobtainium is for, it is immaterial compared to the destruction of one community’s heritage, on a planet brimming with life. We’re all entitled to our value judgments, and the above is a decent one, but the movie should lead us to draw these conclusions ourselves.
The climactic battle includes all of the animals in the ecosystem, predator and prey alike, uniting against the human invaders. Certainly, there was a sci-fi biological explanation for it, but this is Gaia-ism to the core. This is a movie about nature fighting back. It is a story of the biosphere actively struggling against those cruel enough to extract anything from it.
I’m sorry, but extracting things from nature is how we got rich enough to make movies like this in the first place.
I could have forgiven the bleh characters and the stereotypical plot, because this movie follows the Hero’s Journey trajectory quite nicely and I’m a fan of simple hero stories. But has invited us through this film to engage in Doublethink. He has told us two opposing thoughts simultaneously in his movie: that nature will kill you in an instant, and that it is your nurturing All-Mother.