AVATAR review: when does the real movie start?

Don’t you hate it when a bad plot gets in the way of a good movie? That’s what it’s like to watch Avatar. If you’ve seen Pocahontas, add an hour of repetitious scenes of ‘awe’ and ‘discovery,’ and you’ve seen this movie. The predictable plot straitjackets the movie, inhibiting it from reaching its true potential. We snatch glimpses of humanity, inklings of ideas, tantalising snippets of the rich landscape and universe of Pandora … and then we’re railroaded into the same old humdrum routine plot that’s been recycled since the dawn of storytelling.

First of all, a lot of the things I complained about in my hype-busting retrospective still hold true. The animation may be leaps and bounds ahead of its competition, but no matter hi-res your textures are, and how many particle effects you squeeze into a single frame, the human nervous system still obstinately refuses to accept pixels as real life. The animation deftly skims the uncanny valley by realistically animating totally non-human characters, and again, this tech is head and shoulders above the competition, but when you combine the almost-good-enough animation with the almost-good-enough CGI, the disparities of each are multiplied together to create something that is even further away from being good enough. I was also worried that once human hero Sully went down the rabbit-hole, it would become a kaleidoscope of unconvincing CGI and mo-cap performances, and that turned out to be a disappointingly accurate guess.

And second of all, a lot of what I feared turned out to be even worse in the final product. Yes, I’m talking about the ecosystem again. It appears that when writing the script for Avatar James Cameron threw realism and science out the window in favour of pure fantasy, which would be fine, if he hadn’t promised realistic organisms and ecologies. The vast majority of the creatures in the film look even more fake than the mo-cap characters, and the fact that there are a lot of creatures in the film means that your immersion will be constantly and gently prickled by the stream of stupid, ugly, poorly-rendered creatures that floats past your mind. I mean, seriously, most of the creatures in the film are lightning blue (not exactly camouflage in a green jungle) and have six limbs, four eyes and breathe through sphincters on their chests (don’t even get me started on how stupid that is–what if they need to swim? How do they vocalise through their mouths if the passage of air is through external holes on the chest? Stupid, stupid, stupid). This is distracting.

Also the na’vi bleed red blood. The reason humans come in varying shades of brown is because our blood is red, and the reason our blood is red is because the cells involved with oxygen transportation are that colour. So why the hell are the na’vi bright blue? Their skin must be like a whole extra layer over their muscles and circulatory system. That makes no sense. If their blood is red, how come they don’t breathe oxygen like us? Pandoran plants are green, so it looks like we’ve got chlorophyll, carbon dioxide, oxygen and hemoglobin involved–why aren’t our respiratory systems compatible? One more thing–the na’vi look nothing like any other organism on the planet (with six limbs, four eyes, chest-sphincters, etc.) so it’s almost like the na’vi fell out of the sky fully formed, instead of evolving alongside their fellow Pandorans. Which is super distracting.

Then there’s the na’vi themselves. They all come in the exact same shade of the colour electric blue, and  they all come in various shades of the colour ugly. Except Neytiri, Sully’s love interest, because it would be gross to fall in love with some ugly, realistic alien, right? Sigh. The na’vi look pretty good in close-up, but when you throw a whole bunch of them into a wide shot they look terrible. All thin and spindly and identical, they look like video game models slavishly duplicated by generous application of the control, c, and v keys. I found Sully’s romantic interest in Neytiri entirely implausible and unnecessary, too, and a little contrived to boot. She should hate and want to kill him, but because this is a man’s movie, she stupidly falls head over heels for him. Not only are they not even the same species, they aren’t even on the same cladogram, rendering any romance awkward and pointless.

The eponymous avatars themselves are purportedly a mixture of human and na’vi DNA. That’s like saying you mixed the DNA of an apricot and a badger and got a functioning, useful organism. No, no, no (I’m only going into this depth because James Cameron invited me to; if you invite probing like this, I’m gonna probe you, damn it). I think the point of all the organisms, characters and creatures of Pandora was that we would be immersed in this beautiful, alien world, and fall in love with it as our character does. But no matter how interesting it seems, it’s a hell of a lot more dangerous and silly; I kept wondering why the humans stayed on Pandora at all.

And that brings me to my next point. Constantly hanging above Pandora, visible especially at night, is the blue Jupiter-esqe planet around which we are orbiting. And visible in several shots are a few other moons, all orbiting the gas giant as well. The singular motivation afforded humanity’s presence on Pandora is the elusive (and fictional) element unobtanium. It won’t cure diseases, it won’t help feed starving children in third-world countries, no; it sells for twenty million (future currency units) per kilogram. That’s why we’re shooting and burning everything. Haw, haw, Jim, subtle. Anyway, those other moons would have formed around the same time as Pandora, and presumably from the same or similar accretion discs–so why the hell aren’t we mining unobtanium from them? There are no nasty blue aliens over there. You see what I was forced to think about while I waited for the pedestrain plot to kick into gear? Expositional fallacies and gaping plot holes. I hate doing this.

So what’s wrong with the plot, exactly? There’s about an hour in the middle that could have been condensed into a single, three-minute montage. We know Sully is going to learn how to do all of this stuff, you don’t have to show it in such excruciating detail. What’s worst about this whole act is that it’s so easy, it’s like a goddamn picnic: tame the beast, learn the language, play both sides, fall in love, break the rules, and suffer no ill consequences. Drama comes from conflict, and there is no conflict until nearly two hours into this film. The hook could have easily made up for this, but there isn’t a real hook in this film: more like a tap on the shoulder, a gentle invitation than an inexorable, powerful force. A good, solid action scene would not have gone astray in the first act (running away from native predators doesn’t count; it was effective in Empire Strikes Back thirty years ago, now it’s a little cliche, especially in fantasy films), to promise us some good solid drama by the end. Otherwise it’s like wandering through a desert without even the false promise of a mirage to tantalise you with release. And finally, it’s predictable from go to woe. Every time any creature, weapon or character is introduced you know exactly when, where and how you’ll see it again in the conclusion.

But the most offensive thing of all about Avatar, more offensive than the lame plot and sub-realistic animation and godawful biological ‘realism,’ is the way humans are treated in the story. The na’vi are represented as perfect. They are in sync with nature (literally–another bullshit biological adaptation that makes no sense whatsoever), they don’t fight each other, they all get along, they have a solid social structure going on, it’s like a blue utopia on Pandora. But they’re only that happy and content and downright good because they are literally connected by brain-threads to every other living organism in the history of Pandora. We don’t have the privelege of ancestral memory-sharing, so our only option, as implied by the film, is to fuck shit up. Really? No message about human love? No human nobility, redemption, sacrifice? You mean to say that unless we directly experience the memories of deceased ancestors, we can’t put ourselves in anyone else’s shoes, we can’t see through others’ eyes, we can’t set aside our selfish impulses and try to build a better society–and that we never can? The only option is to become na’vi?

It’s like Cameron became so enamoured of his entirely fictional, bullshit alien society that he forgot that not every human in the history of the universe has been evil, ignorant and stupid. It’s like saying we should quit right now, drop all forms of science, education and humanism, and quietly go extinct before we ruin any other planets besides this one. I find this ideology abhorrent and I deny it with every fibre of my being–but it’s what the film seems to be trying to say to me. Whether or not this is intentional on Cameron’s part is irrelevant, it’s how I reacted to what he wrote, and I don’t like it.

Despite the muddled middle act and poor characterisation, the climactic battle pays off miraculously, and almost undoes the previous two hours’ worth of boredom. It almost single-handedly lifts the film from deathly dull and unnecessary to being a great modern movie. But not quite. It is awesome, it is gorgeous in 3D, it is viscerally thrilling, it’s even emotionally engaging, mostly through the use of close-ups and a manipulative score, but it’s too little, too late. The character pay-offs aren’t as big as they should be: the only humans that stick up for humanism and nobility are mercilessly killed off, punished for trying to do the right thing; but the slimy boss who is inevitably to blame for the whole shitstorm gets off scott-free. This dark, mean, misanthropic streak is characteristic of the film’s ideas in general, and I hate that, too.

I haven’t mentioned the early scenes, before the CGI rollercoaster begins and whisks us away from any sense of reality and immersion, but they deserve a quick rundown. Live-action 3D looks great. I can’t get enough of it. But there is precious little of it in Avatar, and most of what there is has been squished into the truncated opening sequences. If this film were really trying to be a selling- and turning-point for 3D, it should have included a heck of a lot more of the technology. Animated 3D doesn’t count, I don’t want that. I want real humans in front of stereoscopic cameras performing and emoting their hearts out. That’s what the tech’s for, building immersion and connection, not more weightless flimsy CGI 3D, which is what makes up the vast majority of the film.

It would be easy but not entirely accurate to conclude that I hated this film. Despite a few cringe-inducing cliches and gag-worthy one-liners, individual scenes almost always stay on the other side of stupid: there are no patently bad scenes, there just aren’t enough great scenes to elevate the film beyond an average score. The performances are okay if buried beneath pixels, the film moves just fast enough to avoid boring you to death, and the action scene at the end is filled with the kind of skill and bombast you’d expect from a Cameron flick. But the film has a lot of problems weighing it down. The plot is the main offender, followed closely by the world building. Nothing makes sense or happens for any particular reason, and the alien culture fails to impress, convince or immerse, while the world itself is stuffed full of things that make no sense either, and the whole thing is pervaded by a nasty misanthropic bent. If Cameron was trying to kick-start cinema and inspire people to come back to the movies, you’d think he would’ve aimed higher. We needed great, we needed classic, we needed game-changer. What we got was ‘okay.’

Avatar score

48 out of 100