Monday, January 4, 2010

Avatar




The movie event of the decade. James Cameron created it a decade ago with Titanic, and he's seemed to have done it again with Avatar, which has already made $1 billion at the global box office in 17 days and seems almost certain to surpass the record for the highest grossing film of all time...held by Titanic.

Then again, Titanic's not exactly known for being a great piece of cinematic wonder. Grandeur, sure, and that seems to be all that Avatar is. A budget thought to be anywhere between $300 million and inflated as high as $800 million, Cameron had boasted self-invented technology just for the sake of going about this vast undertaking in cinematic storytelling.

Avatar takes place in a future where our planet colonizes others, destroying the untouched nature of such lands as Pandora, in which Cameron immerses us and the people of Nav'i who live there. Jake Sully (played by Sam Worthington), a crippled marine who is limited to the mobility of a wheelchair while on earth (you would think science would have advanced a bit past the wheelchair by this time), is called to some generically high-tech center that allows humans to go into "avatars" that put you in the body of a Nav'i person through the control of your own mind and able to explore the lands of Pandora. Jake is called to replace his fallen twin brother, despite a gross lack of training and simple-mindedness on his part that would not make him an ideal candidate for an avatar.

Jake is so unsure of himself and easily manipulated that his ultra-macho colonel Miles Quartich (Stephen Lang) — with such tough guy lines as "you're not in Kansas anymore...you're on Pandora!" — to tell him secrets of the Nav'i people and the geography of their landscape during his adventures as an avatar so that the military could more smartly arrange a strategy for going into these "savage" peoples lands and obtaining unobatanium (or something) in exchange for Jake Sully to get new legs as a human.

But as he's doing this, uh oh! Another conflict. He falls for the Nav'i babe who was chosen to teach him the ways of their land. Neytiri (played in motion capture by Zoe Saldana) is a Pocahontas/Sacajawea/any other strong female Native American caricature in the canon of Americana who allows Jake Sully as an avatar to realize that they are a very special people, not savage at all, and it is the militaristic humans who are, indeed, the savage ones. But, being as dimwitted as he is, he only realized this at the point where he already blabbed to higher gung-ho authorities on where the most sacred and vital spots to the Nav'i people were where they could find the most...whatever element they need, possible. So, their whole world is practically destroyed and Jake's only hope at Neytiri not being pissed at him anymore is if he goes back as an avatar and tries to stop these Earthly forces from attacking any longer.

...clearly. This bloated excuse for a storyline that any liberally-raised third grader fresh off of watching either Pocahontas or Ferngully and Star Wars could have imagined seems to be excused by most people for the immersive experience Cameron allows his audience in a good old fashioned popcorn movie. But even then, the first two-thirds of the movie prove unbearably long, pointless, boring, and absurd. Seeing the full brunt of his newly invented CGI at work in Pandora is pretty damn neat, even if it isn't flawless. There were things that did seem blurry, digitized, and moved unrealistically. But the pros of the technology far outweigh the cons, even if there is room for eventual improvement.

But that's not enough for me to excuse this profoundly stupid storyline, which Cameron seemingly slapped on to his vision for revolutionary technology instead of the other way around. Bitter anti-Republican storyline at a point where there's no ramification or risk of doing so? Check. Romanticist message of nature over technology? Check. Does that second storyline really make sense given that this film's central selling point is it's groundbreaking technology? Probably not. Does the humanist message makes sense when the Nav'i people Cameron proposes as more ideal can just latch onto pterodactyl-like things and fly and talk to each other through little voice things in their throat, which, had humans been so biologically lucky, could have prevented us from destroying our own "mother" to begin with? Yeah, probably.

I can't say that the 3D ticket wasn't worth the price of admission, though. By the time it got to its climax is where it really shone through. Yes, this is a truly entertaining piece of cinema. And I do wish to go back again through IMax to rewitness this "event," but the more I think about it the more I feel like I don't want to be subjected to that torturous first act. Or that lame second act, for that matter. Whenever they got out of Pandora I wanted to kill myself from how lame the movie was. And the climax itself got to a point where I was really anxious for it to finally get to the end. But if there were any reason to go see this movie, aside from saying that you were one of the many who experienced such a cinematic milestone, it would be for the badass fight sequences and the awesomely created creatures of Pandora. Not for the atrocious acting. Not for the weird Jamaican accents the Nav'i people had when speaking English. Not for the papyrus font that James Cameron seemed only able to afford for subtitles in his $300+ million budget.

I was genuinely excited for this. I was genuinely hoping that the clichés of the storyline would not have outweighed the thrill of the viewing experience. It was funny to see people who had criticized the look of it from the trailer to say that they were wrong. But, I didn't realize it would be to this level of absurdity. And, I'm sorry, but the initial criticisms of the trailer do remain for me. The characters of the Nav'i people themselves still looked really stupid. And the dialogue was, unimaginably, even worse than that of Titanic. Trying to make "I see you" the next "I'll never let go Jack" ended up being an absurd failure and left a rather creepy aftertaste.

This will probably end up winning the top prize at the Academy Awards this year, making it perhaps the most retarded film of all time to do so. But damn, if it isn't kickass...

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