On Avatar
James Cameron’s Kitschy New Age Epic
By John David Ebert
I keep waiting for those “Wow!” experiences in film that I used to encounter routinely as a child growing up in the middle American suburbs of the 1980s. It seemed that every summer, I would go to the movies and walk away feeling that I had been temporarily transplanted into another world: there was Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, for example, or David Cronenberg’s version of the The Dead Zone (both major improvements upon Stephen King’s novels); I remember the summer when Spielberg hit me over the head with not just one, but two films: E.T. and Poltergeist, and in the same summer, John Carpenter’s The Thing and David Cronenberg’s Videodrome. These were all films of the early 1980s, but as I went into high school, I remember seeing James Cameron’s sequel to Ridley Scott’s masterpiece Alien, itself a sort of sci-fi masterpiece made with an exhilaration and a love of the genre that is rare nowadays. In the 1990s, Cameron wowed me a couple of more times with Terminator 2 and Titanic. After that, he quit making movies. I’m not sure why: maybe those three or four films were enough to prove that he could rival Spielberg and Lucas, and maybe after winning the Oscar for Best Picture for Titanic, he’d decided that his yearnings as an artist, a major director of Hollywood cinema, had been recognized and that was that. Why make any more movies?
Time went by, many years, twelve or thirteen, while Cameron made a couple of documentaries that were moderately interesting, and now, in 2009, he has given us his much anticipated science fiction film Avatar.
I can tell you without reservation that it is the biggest disappointment in my own personal history of cinematic moviegoing. It is without question not only Cameron’s worst film, but an embarrassingly bad film that is excruciatingly painful to sit through. As the years have unspooled, those “Wow!” experiences in film have appeared with less and less frequency, until now we are at the point when they seldom occur at all. Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings may have been the last one. And, by the looks of recent trailers, there may not be any more to come.The days of great visionary cinema appear to be reaching its curtain call.
It could be that at forty I’m just getting older and fussier. But it could just as well be that film really is going into the toilet. Every medium, after all, goes through a natural cycle of birth, flourishing and decadence.
So what’s wrong with Avatar? Well, for starters, it’s not really a science fiction film. It’s a disguised allegory of the white man’s conquest and ethnic cleansing of the Native Americans, and its plot is so similar to Kevin Costner’s Dances With Wolves (a much better film, though I hate to say it) that if you’ve seen that film, then there’s no point in leaving your house to watch Avatar. There are also echoes from Frank Herbert’s Dune. And not only that but he has stolen the dragonriding motif from the novels of Anne McCaffrey.
The plot of Avatar, if you really need to know what it is, concerns a former Marine named Jake Sully who is trapped in a wheelchair and receives his chance at redemption when his brother, who had been taking part in a science experiment involving Avatars, dies. Since Jake is a twin of his dead brother, the military brings him in and sets him up with a sarcophagus-like pod that enables him to incarnate into the genetically engineered physical body of a race of alien beinsg known as a Na’vi. The Na’vi (notice the similarity to “Native Americans”) are the aboriginal inhabitants of a planet called Pandora, which the American military is colonizing for the purpose of obtaining riches in the form of a rare mineral. These Na’vi are giants, roughly twice the size of human beings and are obviously inspired by the four-armed giants from Edgar Rice Burroughs’ John Carter novels, as is the premise of the film generally.
However, the problem with the film is that it is so self-consciously aware of its own moral allegorizing that it leaves no room for the viewer to create his own textile of interpretation. The film is mainly a flat, one level allegory of what happened to the Native Americans on the one hand, and of what American-inspired globalization is presently doing to the indigenous societies of the world right now. And that’s it. There’s nothing else going on. There are no moral ambiguities, no sense of irony, and most of all, no sense of humor. (There aren’t even any fun villains: the bad guys are just the same military dickheads from Cameron’s earlier film The Abyss). The movie takes itself very, very seriously. So seriously that we are hit over the head by Cameron’s self-appointed moral pontificating.Yes, Jim, we are decimating the planet’s ecosystems. Yes, Jim, we did practice ethnic cleansing on the Native Americans. And, yes, there is a connection. But haven’t we already agreed on all that? Now what? How about a fresh idea?
In short, Cameron is more concerned with delivering a message here than he is with telling a story, and that is too bad. He used to be a good storyteller who could care less what his “messages” were. (Such naive directiors–like Spielberg, for instance, make the best storytellers, because they leave it up to the audience to figure out what they’re up to). But Cameron hits the page running here with a morally self-appointed agenda that never lets up with its New Age weightiness.
And that’s the film’s other main problem. It is sickeningly New Agey. Indeed, in terms of its visual look, it is a cross between Heavy Metal magazine and the paintings routinely produced out of Sedona, Arizona. His Na’vi, with their Gaian religion, are nauseating California New Age kitsch, the kind of kitsch that is routinely produced by artists with names like “Silver Bear” or “Sun Wheel.” By the end of the film, I was so disgusted with this New Age tripe that I was ready to throw up.
And while we’re at it, there’s one more problem: visually, the film is made up of a palette of Day-Glo colors that are interesting for about twenty-five minutes. After that, the viewer is so sickened by them that he is ready to go home and dig out some Rembrandt paintings in order to counteract the effect.
This film, in short, is a mess. The 3D effects are neat, for about twenty minutes. Then those get old, too.
You’re better off just waiting for the DVD.
