Is “Avatar” Oscar-worthy?

Written By: mike on September 6, 2010 No Comment

There are visionary filmmakers – and then there’s James Cameron, who pushes the envelope of what is possible on the screen every time he makes a film. He doesn’t do it nearly often enough.

But now here comes “Avatar,” the most dazzling film experience you’ll have this year. Written, directed, produced and, for that matter, pulled whole from Cameron’s brain, “Avatar” is 160 minutes of thrilling entertainment. It’s as heartfelt as it is exciting, as emotionally powerful as it is suspenseful and as brain-bending a fantasy as you’ve seen since “The Lord of the Rings” trilogy.

It would be easy to dismiss “Avatar” as “Dances with Wolves” in outer space, except for two things: First of all, that denigrates “Dances,” still an outstanding film (based on a recent viewing). Second, it implies a lack of originality on Cameron’s part that is baseless on the face of it.

Set 150 years in the future, “Avatar” is about a mission by an Earth corporation to secure the distant planet Pandora, which is rich in valuable minerals. The humans, in essence, want to strip-mine Pandora – a mission that doesn’t sit particularly well with the Na’vi, the planet’s native inhabitants.

One of the new arrivals to Pandora, Jake Sully (Sam Worthington), is there by accident. His twin brother – recently murdered – was a scientist who had been training for the mission to Pandora. Jake, a Marine who is wheelchair-bound after being wounded in combat, has been recruited because he shares his late brother’s genome.

His brother has been learning the ropes for the Avatar project: In essence, a Na’vi body has been test-tube grown, combining Na’vi and human DNA. Jake will go into an isolation capsule, where he will electronically mind-meld with the avatar. His consciousness will enter the avatar, allowing him to roam Pandora without the otherwise necessary breathing apparatus.

More important, he hopefully will be able to infiltrate the Na’vi clan. The plan calls for him to convince the Na’vi to move away from Hometree, the 1,000-foot-tall tree that is their base. There’s a particularly rich vein of the valuable mineral Unobtainium beneath the tree – and the Earth corporation in charge of the operation is willing to do things the rough way, if diplomacy fails.

For Sully, the experience of being in the avatar body is total liberation, after being confined to his paralyzed form for too long. He can run, jump, climb – he’s ambulatory again. But he’s also a Marine – so even as he makes contact with the Na’vi and works with chief scientist Grace Augustine (Sigourney Weaver), he’s also reporting to the hard-shell security chief, Col. Quaritch (Stephen Lang), who is only interested in pinpointing the Na’vi weaknesses for the inevitable attack.

Sully, however, goes native, seduced and enlightened by the Na’vi’s attunement to the planet itself. As Grace explains, the connection between the Na’vi and the planet is more sophisticated than the connections between the synapses in the human brain. Humans can’t begin to understand the depth of that intertwinement – and the company’s only interest is eliminating the aboriginals so they can get at the riches below the planet surface.

That’s a familiar message – that humans are short-sightedly lining their pockets at the expense of the planet. And the dynamic that Cameron sets up here – the heedless, ignorant humans invading a native populace whose customs and values they neither know nor understand – has resonance with the American invasion of Iraq, or Vietnam, or colonialism in general.

But spending too much time on politics will distract you from what Cameron has achieved onscreen. Sit back, adjust your 3D glasses and let yourself get lost in the fascinating world that Cameron has created.

Make no mistake: He has created it all, from the smallest blade of grass to the largest rampaging beast – and everything in between. Cameron has erased the line between reality and fantasy in “Avatar”: While the bulk of it has been created by computers, all of it looks absolutely real.

That’s most notably true of the inhabitants of Pandora. The Na’vi, the flora, the fauna – it all exists only as 0s and 1s in a computer somewhere, having been transplanted there from Cameron’s imagination. But you simply can’t tell: Even the Na’vi look and feel real, with a tactile quality to their physical beings that’s eerily real.

And the action? Hey, you’re talking about James Cameron, who redefined the modern action film with “The Terminator,” “Terminator 2,” “True Lies” and “Aliens.” And you’re talking about the director who created perhaps the most epic love story of all time in “Titanic,” his last film, 10 years ago.

The key to Cameron’s work is the heart he puts into it. He understands that action is just action until the audience has an emotional investment in the characters. He manages the nifty trick here of imbuing computer-generated characters with flesh-and-blood feelings, whether it’s Jake in his avatar body or Neytiri (Zoe Saldana), the Na’vi who finds and falls for him.

One of the indicators I use in judging a film while I’m watching it is the point at which I sneak a peek at my watch. In some films, it’s a “how much longer do I have to endure this” peek. With “Avatar,” that first look came after two hours – and it was because I didn’t want the movie to end.

I’ll offer one more highly personal indicator. The night I saw “Avatar,” I entered the theater in an exceptionally bad mood because of a run-in with theater security (and studio publicists) over the ridiculous order to surrender my (camera-free) cell phone before I would be admitted. Within a very few minutes of the film’s start, I had forgotten my snit and lost myself in the Cameron-created world of Pandora. I didn’t think about it again until the film was over.

I will say that the 3D imagery is spectacular. Cameron himself has said that it’s the only way to see this film, though I’ll try to see it in 2D to judge the difference. The 3D is exceptionally immersive and unobtrusive at the same time.

Is “Avatar” Oscar-worthy? At a minimum, Cameron deserves recognition for inventing the technology that allowed him to make the film. The film itself is certainly one of the year’s most exciting and entertaining, a visionary piece of filmmaking you can enjoy on any number of levels.
Kevin