Avatar

Yes, I saw it in 3D.  Or, rather, I saw it in Real-D 3D.  All the better for it.  This film is visually stunning, and having spent half a billion dollars, I would certainly hope it would at least be that.  Unfortunately, that’s about all this one has going for it: lots of money and spectacular graphics.

One would hope that half a billion bucks could pay for some good acting.  Do they really expect us to believe that the absolute best they could buy with that kind of money was Sam Worthington and Stephen Lang?  I refuse to believe that.  Nonetheless, that’s what we get.  Sam Worthington and Stephen Lang.  They aren’t the worst, but they certainly aren’t good.  Worthington’s character, an ex-Marine who is bound to his wheelchair (one of the only good ideas the writers had), is shoved into his brother’s shoes (should I say body?) early on, and his first encounter with Lang’s character, Colonel Miles Quaritch, sets the tone for the rest of the film: overused and ineffectual.  The acting could probably only have been worse if they had been replaced by Paul Walker and Vin Diesel.  Zoe Saldana tries to play the love-interest, another character with mostly amusing dialogue (not in a good way), but doesn’t really get a chance, due in large part to the preposterous script.  Additionally, this film supports my theory that Michelle Rodriguez is actually requesting to be cast as the characters with the most poorly written dialogue in the film.  Giovanni Ribisi and Sigourney Weaver were fine, but even they couldn’t rise above one of the laziest scripts of the year.

Had the script been given the kind of attention that WETA gave the graphics or that the producers gave the advertising campaign, it probably would have been vastly improved from the jejune one which made it onto the screen.  Instead, clichés follow on one another’s heels throughout the film, tripping themselves up in a laughable pile of bruised simplistic banalities.  I actually had to stifle laughter through some of the dialogue, much like I did in The Blind Side, save for one difference: I expected it in The Blind Side.  In Avatar, I expected a script that had been worked over until the writers bled, then worked over some more.  Half a billion dollars?

This movie aims to be epic, a film of sweeping proportions, soaring above all others in a meteoric rise to ineffably great heights.  It does no such thing.  Instead, it induces laughter.  If nothing else, I expected Cameron to have made sure that it was well-paced, especially given nearly three hours of screen-time.  Nope.  Characters have relationships that seem to be a creatio ex nihilo, a “creation out of nothing.”  Jack Sulley and Neytiri’s romantic relationship is a series of trite montages, expecting us to accept that their love develops naturally, which, of course, it does not.

If this wasn’t already bad enough, we are confused to find ourselves thrust into a story which can’t decide if it’s a love story, an epic, or an action film.  We might assume, for the benefit of the doubt, that it tries to be all three.  Fine.  Unfortunately, it can’t be all things to all people.  The love story is incoherent, the epic is poorly drawn and badly paced, and the action film lacks Bruce Willis.  (Although the score is about as epic as it gets.)  All jokes aside, the “epic” battle, the action-packed part of the movie, is no less believable than many others of this variety, but there are some aspects which are simply beyond comprehension.  For the sake of those who haven’t seen this film yet (which you should, by the way, despite its ability to ruin what could have been a fairly enjoyable story), I won’t divulge any spoilers.

The thematic elements are obvious enough.  The natives are being attacked by the new settlers.  We’ve seen this many times.  It has truth to it.  But we’re hit over the head with it so many times that it actually might give you a headache.  These humanoid natives are actually reminiscent of the Native Americans of Disney’s Pocahontas. I guess all “natives” on all planets are identical.  How imaginative.

Another prominent theme is that of the scientist v. layman conflict.  Weaver’s character, Dr. Grace Augustine, is the ideal Scientist, capital S, reminiscent of the story of Antoine Lavoisier, the French chemist who supposedly requested that his friends count how many seconds he remained alive after his beheading, in a final scientific experiment (15 seconds apparently, if you’re curious).  Dr. Augustine battles the corporate powers that be in what I found to be the more affecting thematic reference point, drawing on the struggle between scientists’ desire to unravel the mysteries of the natural world and corporate giants’ desire to exploit the resources of the same.  As Ribisi’s character says: “This is why we’re here, because this little gray rock sells for twenty million a kilo.”  Along this same scientific vein, they make a fascinating discovery on the planet, Pandora, regarding the Na’vi’s great Mother Spirit, Eywa (one of the brighter moments of the film is when they let the audience in on this secret, in my opinion).  Again, though, no spoilers from me.

So, where are we now?  We seem to have witnessed what money can buy.  And what it cannot.  At least in this particular case.  It can buy marketing and a marvelous visual display of digital graphics (even though the people still don’t move like actual human beings – there’s a calculated quality which actual people typically don’t have).  It was unable, however, to buy honest writing or mostly decent acting.  In the end, then, this film needs to be considered along two very distinct lines of aesthetic thought: that of the magician, and that of the raconteur.

Perhaps most importantly, however, this movie is a telling example of one thing that money apparently can’t buy: a sense of truth – that knowledge that is both intellectual and emotional that the story being told is honest and, above all, human.  This film is rarely honest, and the moments of humanity are few and far between.  Films might ultimately be divided along this line, those with a sense of truth and those that lack it.  This is not to say that all films will be either entirely honest or entirely dishonest, only that the balance must fall one way or the other.  In my opinion, for this film, the balance falls the wrong way.  No amount of theatricality, however unprecedented or spectacular, can genuinely make up for the lack of a sense of truth.

Rating: 2/4 Stars