Avatar Reviews

Written By: mike on August 25, 2010 No Comment

The film Avatar is a spectacular movie about a disabled military officer who joins a bunch of scientist on an alien moon of pandora. The planet is inhabited by blue aliens and live in the trees of the forest. The planet is covered in gas so the military marines have to use gas masks when they are outside. The story starts off when the general wants to have a peaceful contact to make the aliens leave peacefully. The humans are after a mineral that is worth more than twenty million dollars per ounce. The large deposit is in a main tree where the aliens live. The peaceful negotiations end and the aliens want to fight. Jake, tries to get the friendly race not wage war but it is to late. The humans attack the tree and destroy it and wipe out the aliens home. In this 3D marvel, the aliens are life like and have a dialect. The special effects are what carry this movie. The characters are a bit weak in the film and you don’t care for them that much. You care more for the main character when Jake is the avatar. He is placed in an aliens body and can magically walk again. He runs and jumps and would much rather be in this form than his human form. Jake turns on the general in charge of destroying the aliens home. It is hear where the story and theme of the movie get interesting. Jake becomes the enemy against the humans but rallies with aliens and falls in love with one of the blue alien females. It is hear where the story turns. The final climatic scene is when Jake gets other alien tribes interested in fighting the humans and even the animals come to the help but the alien army is against machine guns and bombs. Over all the movie was spectacular and a must see and is worthy of a box office success
by James Cameron the director.

Avatar is one of the best movies to debut in theatres within the last six months. While the visual aesthetics, content and colors make it enjoyable for viewers the movie also addresses social issues such as the unbreakable trend of American imperialism. The movie takes place in the future and follows the American militia as they invade another planet, Pandora, in an attempt to seize natural resources that are worth millions of dollars back on Earth. However the native people of the land are hesitant to comply with the militia’s orders and the diplomatic efforts of the Americans.

While it seems that society today continues to move toward a hybrid culture, Avatar addresses the importance of preserving all types of life and culture over possible fiscal gain. Avatar is an epic story, packed with action. It serves as a compelling story of love, compassion and humanity.

As the main character surfaces within the story you learn that although he is a paraplegic member of the militia he is still considered one of the best. The American troops have tried various different ways to communicate to the natives that they must relocate from their homes in order for the militia to extract the raw material. The natives have refused this request and the relationship between the Americans and natives have become hostile. We see this similar situation in society today. The possibility of war becomes more prevalent.

Once again money becomes the driving force of all cruelty and inhumanity. However there are a few good men and scientist within the militia who are dedicated to finding a peaceful way to communicate with the natives and learn their culture and way of life. Thanks to incredible actors such as Tom Worthington, Sigourney Weaver and Zoe Saldana viewers are able to see the kind of heart and thought that was put in to building a strong relationship and friendship between the natives and the American militia.

The movie cuts back and forth in between real life images and computer animation, however the viewer is unable to see where real life images begin and the world of Avatar ends, everything is extremely well done. So well done that it seems the characters within the story also loose focus of human life verses the native life. Initially the natives were seen as barbaric and dumb but towards the end of the movie the same natives are capable of not only winning the battle against the American militia. While they’re way of life seemed primitive and disposable, the natives proved to be just as important, wise and strong as the American militia.

I find it interesting that this movie parallels many similarities and situations that are taking place in society today. Avatar creatively addresses these issues and at some points even provides answers for dealing with the future of science and hybrid cultures between Americans and other natives, alien or not. It’s a beautiful story that teaches all who watches it to value life in all the forms that it may take.

It’s easy to get lost within the fantastical imagery painted across the screen in writer-director James Cameron’s magnum opus “Avatar.” It’s little wonder that he is the filmmaker to usher in the New Era of Cinema in which a director dons the magician’s hat and wields a wand when creating a complex alternate universe; a world-builder in the tradition of J. R. R. Tolkien and H. G. Welles. It was Arthur C. Clarke who explained that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic,” and Cameron has been determined to advance the film medium far beyond the limits of imagination for over twenty-five years now.

Beginning with “The Terminator” [1984], the script which he wrote while living in his car, and progressing through the watery non-extraterrestrial intelligences in “The Abyss” [1989], Cameron has been an undisputed trailblazer in regard to at least two areas in modern commercial filmmaking: budget and special effects. “Terminator 2: Judgment Day” [1991] was the first film to cost one hundred million dollars, while “Titanic” [1997] was the first to exceed two hundred million. Such price tags are astonishing even by 2010 standards, but Cameron is able to gain such unprecedented financial trust because his movies tend to dominate the box office, quintupling their original budgets in global earnings. To consider the phenomenon even further, one is obligated to agree that his films are so successful because they — some would say shamelessly — capitalize on that which has universal appeal. What, if anything, is more appealing than filmic wizardry? At the apex of the Digital Revolution, its own Grand Master presents “Avatar,” a film that comprises, according to its own designer, “the most complicated stuff anyone’s ever done.”

Around the middle of the twenty-second century, a paraplegic Marine named Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) serves as our John-Smith-meets-James-Dean all-American hero. Through an elaborate but altogether derivative two-and-a-half-hour buggy ride of special effects, Cameron draws our brave, battle-wounded John Smith closer to his otherworldly Pocahontas, or Neytiri (Zoë Saldana). Jake’s twin brother, recently deceased, had a contract with a military-corporate entity currently stationed on a moon called Pandora, approximately 4.3 light years from earth, and Jake has been called to take over his brother’s place in the Avatar Program. In the program, participants are matched with an “avatar” version of themselves that is modeled on the physical characteristics of the Na’vi people who inhabit Pandora. This enables humans to interact with the native race through an “avatar.”

As we all know, anything that is corporate and in possession of military capabilities is irredeemably evil. This is especially true when the broadly painted villains of the film are represented with such hilarious incompetence. We are given both recognizable caricatures: the Greedy Executive, Parker Selfridge (Giovanni Ribisi), who’s stuffing his face with food when he’s not putting golfs balls into coffee cups, and the Bad Ass Army Man, Colonel Miles Quaritch (Stephen Lang), barking lines like, “Shut your pie-hole” and “Alright, let’s turn up the heat.” In an early scene, Colonel Quaritch describes the Na’vi people as an “indigenous population of humanoids” who are almost impossible to kill. To Selfridge (selfish, is it?), they’re merely “fly-bitten savages who live in the tree.” Clearly, these fellows aren’t interested in the same kind of harmonious interaction that Dr. Grace Augustine (Sigourney Weaver), the head of the Avatar Program, has in mind.

So why exactly are these folks on this planet? It just so happens that a certain area of Pandora possesses a massive deposit of Unobtainium, a highly expensive mineral and energy source that could revive a rapidly waning Earth. The problem is that this Unobtainium exists beneath the most sacred site to the Na’vi, the Tree of Voices, the ground upon which humans are forbidden to tread. Jake’s mission is explained very clearly by the colonel: he has three months to live among the Na’vi, learn their ways, synthesize within their culture, and somehow manage to convince them to evacuate the area so the Army can uproot the tree and take the Unobtainium. In return, Jake will be sent back to Earth to immediately undergo surgery that will restore his ability to walk.

The first scene that introduces the exotic jungles of Pandora involves Jake’s avatar — tall, slender, and various shades of blue — running against protestation from technicians in the science lab, bounding through an otherworldly amazon awash with a palate of undersea colors. Once he undertakes initiation into the local tribe, the Omaticaya, he is renewed physically and introduced to a spiritualistic amalgamation of Hinduism and Native American pantheism. In an elated state of renewed oneness with Nature, Jake, or rather, his avatar, naturally finds himself in conflict with the interest of the Powerful Greedy Godless Corporation and must find a way to prevent Them from exterminating anything in their way as Colonel Quaritch leads an army to the Tree of Voices. This tree is also the Na’vi place of Prayer, wherein the voices of ancestors can be experienced by linking to the tree’s long purplish pink tendrils. As the day of attack draws nearer, Jake falls in love with Neytiri and is forced to choose a side before the epic battle for Pandora’s future ensues.

An attempt to provide a fair evaluation of the performances is beside the point. Any acting achievement is trumped by the ground-breaking imagery. Weaver, working on an impersonation of Cameron, delivers lines about electrochemical communications between the roots of the trees with about as much conviction as could be reasonably expected. But like Worthington and Saldana, Weaver is also confined to acting in avatar make-up for a good portion of the movie. Incidentally, the two performers who seem to have the most fun are never forced to undergo the blue make-up of an avatar. Ribisi is always well-cast as an antagonist; he has an uncanny ability to switch from frat-boy goofball to calculating sociopath in an instant. His line readings continually survive the overinflated dialogue. In Cameron’s movies, Manly Men like Stephen Lang, who has played Lieutenant General Stonewall Jackson in “Gods and Monsters” [2003], curiously occupy a considerable amount of the director’s attention. So Lang is confined to the most clichéd bits of business while onscreen, such as snarling in front of a large screen or lifting weights while speaking to Jake in a vaguely threatening tone.

Ribisi’s Selfridge and Lang’s Quaritch would be fine characters to build a broad comedy around, but there’s apparently not room for much comedy on Cameron’s watch. Why decorate the narrative with comedy when explosions are so much more colorful? Whenever something “funny” does occur, it’s the kind of funny that’s so open-faced in its dopiness that it comes across as shrill and desperate, like Bill Paxton’s hammy performance in “Aliens” [1986]. It’s the kind of gratingly unfunny humor you’ll remember from freshman-year algebra class. And we’re meant to be horrified toward laughter by some of Quaritch’s eye-rollingly obvious one-liners. While the Na’vi families scatter under fiery military attack, Quaritch adds, “And that’s how you scatter the roaches.”

Naturally one is skeptical of Colonel Quaritch’s early characterization of the Na’vi as blood-thirsty primitives, but once Jake is captured, the local Shaman pricks him with her knife and promptly runs the blade across her tongue. And it’s apparent that the Na’vi, who refer to Jake as a demon posing as one of them, are somewhat vampiric in appearance with their fangs, pointed ears, and long, slender bodies.

But as Jake discovers, they are only blood-thirsty for those who reject their cultural perspectives. Once he assimilates he’s safely accepted into the brotherhood, and is eventually guided round to the realization that is at the heart of this summation of Cameron’s opinions about the environment, religion, race, and politics: Pandora is the real world; ours is the one that is hopelessly dilapidated. And who can argue with Cameron on this point? As the creator of such an alluring habitat brimming with ingenious coloration, he offers an alternate reality that is not choked by concrete, industrialization, corporate greed, right-wing militarism, and cultural intolerance. This change, he argues, is only available through unity and syncretism, which is why Jake is unsurprisingly determined to complete the final step in becoming an Omaticayan warrior.

The vibrant hues of the Pandoran forest have the intended effect of reminding us that we are separated from an ethereal paradise. The plants and animals of this planet — some of which are ludicrously, even incomprehensibly, designed — are indeed striking, but I wouldn’t necessarily deem them a reflection of paradise. Some inventions are more charming than others. When Neytiri pulls back an arrow and aims at the trespassing Jake, a small jellyfish-butterfly lands on the poisoned point, preventing her from firing. Fifteen years after “The Lion King” [1994], we’re still being taught about the Circle of Life. Later, Neytiri returns to save Jake from being eaten alive from savage wolf-panthers. When he thanks her for killing the beasts, she is quick to reprimand him. He is responsible for the death of his fellow brothers, the animals. The most literal-minded of the film’s (many) metaphors involves the Na’vi’s braided ponytail, at the tip of which are thin tentacles that link into nature and animals, establishing a bond — or Oneness — with them. It’s another bad joke delivered with a fat grin.

“Just relax and let your mind go blank” is Dr. Augustine’s advice to Jake. It’s easy when the colors as so rich and appealing, but an apocalyptic third act featuring endless explosions, death, and destruction seems to render the overall antiwar message a little ridiculous. We’re given the predictable melodrama of a finale, executed with a wailing soundtrack of pulverizing percussion and heroes struggling against repression in slow motion. We get Cameron’s point early on, but it’s a fuzzy one, worthy of only the flimsiest of fantasies. As a sort of New Age William Wallace, Jake speaks to the Na’vi, encouraging them to put a stop the military invasion: “They think they can take whatever they want and no one will stop them.” Cameron wants the fire of the counterculture revolution to be sparked again and he would love nothing more than to be the filmic messiah who ushers in a new era of technology-driven filmmaking. “Avatar” — while undeniably rapturous in its successful attempt at visceral audience interaction — is also an unavoidable, elephant-in-the-room-sized paradox. How can such an expensive, sixty-percent computer-generated juggernaut ever serve as the Hymn to Nature that it is meant to be? Cameron’s too smitten by special effects to ever adopt a serious view about the environment. How can the ego-driven pioneer of such technological advancement ever be able to consider these issues sober-mindedly? Technology has brought us a long way, and “Avatar” implies that such industrialization comes at a high cost to the human spirit.

Pauline Kael reminded us, in her review of Bernardo Bertolucci’s overwhelming epic “1900” [1976], “after an enormous popular success, most great movie directors go mad on the potentialities of movies. They leap over their previous work into a dimension beyond the well-crafted dramatic narrative; they make a huge, visionary epic in which they attempt to alter the perceptions of people around the world. Generally, they shoot this epic in what they believe is a state of super-enlightenment. They believe that with this film they’re literally going to bring mankind the word, and this euphoria conceals even their own artistic exhaustion…Their love of the unexplored possibilities can’t be contained; it spills over into dream epics.” Cameron’s vision can sustain an epic dream, but his message loses some credibility within such a large prism of meticulous special effects. And just how keen is Cameron’s attention to detail? He explained to “Playboy,” when asked how he determined the “movie heroine’s hotness,” that “right from the beginning I said, ‘She’s got to have tits,’ even though that makes no sense because her race, the Na’vi, aren’t placental mammals.”