Avatar, Big Review

Has big Jim done it again?  Has he certainly taken a great, gigantic leap forward in visual terms?  And for Cameron, an amateur scientist and techno geek wiz, the narrative is always somewhat secondary, it can’t help but be.  This time, it really doesn’t matter as he has created a future, alien, fantasy world that is like no other.
No bleak modernist sci-fi landscapes that define the genres so much of our thanks to 1950s films and canonized by Star Trek.  Nor do we have that post-apocalyptic broken world of grays and blacks seen in TV’s Battle star Galactic and any of the multiple “disaster awaits us” films.  Forget all that, in Avatar, the future is stunningly, gorgeous, and of course we, as in humans from that rotting planet Earth, have come to are wrecking it.
Cameron is somehow also a romantic or maybe just a humanist, so there has to be a romantic hero in the midst of all of this 3D wizardry.  Jake Scully (Sam Wainwright) is a paraplegic marine who has been commandeered to replace his twin brother in project on the remote planet Pandora. Dr. Grace Augustine (Sigourney Weaver) has been studying the indigenous “Navies” and has come up with a way to mix human DNA with theirs and build/clone “avatars” which are then inhabited by that individual’s consciousness.  Jake jumps right into his twin’s avatar and are gleefully up and running again, unfortunately the planet is also housing an evil energy corporation that has hired Backwater type mercenaries to help it recover some valuable natural resource that the Navis are sitting on top of.
So there are two separate things to discuss here, first the visuals.  As you probably know unless you haven’t been paying attention, Cameron has spent the last ten years since the great surprise hit, predicted to be debacle, Titanic, developing a state of the art 3D technology.

This includes the PACE/CAMERON camera system which I won’t go into here other than to say the results are eye popping.  But Cameron uses his 3D for good, judiciously as it were, so there aren’t unnecessary and distracting visual asides.  One just seamlessly falls into the world, truly becomes a part of it and this does indeed create another level of connection to the visual text.  Perhaps it’s another step across that boundary between conscious and unconscious.  If all cinema is tapping into our unconscious, as psychoanalytic film theorists argue, then Cameron and his 3D seems to be burrowing even further in.  The result is that one does indeed emerge from the theater feeling like a 15 foot, blue-skinned creature with that can command the natural world with a ponytail.
The obvious Native American metaphors abound and here is where the narrative is creaky, conventional and sweet.  Cameron seems to be crying out for a revolution: one that will be led by the spiritual seekers who believe in the interconnectedness of all being and energy.  In that sense there is a glimmer of something fascinating that is, unfortunately, not fully developed.

The beautiful, long limbed and scantily clad navis with their blue skin, black hair are the “primitives” who of course hold the ultimate truth and therefore power in their hands.   But it takes Jake ultimately to show them the way, help them harness their power and that’s where the narrative falls a bit flat.  In the end humans are still smarter, even if they do go native, and women need men to save them.  I still loved sitting there, though; it was like being swept into something truly and unbelievably new and exciting.
Avatar is now playing.
Written, directed, produced and edited by James Cameron; Director of Photography, Mauro Fiore; music by James Horner.  Released by 20th Century Fox.
With:  Sam Worthington (Jake Sully); Zoe Saldana (Neytiri); Sigourney Weaver (Dr. Grace Augustine); Michelle Rodriguez (Trudy Chacon); Stephen Lang (Colonel Miles Quaritch); Giovanni Ribisi (Parker Selfridge); Joel David Moore (Morm Spellman) and CCH Pounder (Moat.)

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