The highest-grossing review ever made

I have finally dropped my eleven dollars (eleven dollars?! for a matinee?!) into the big, big bucket that is Avatar, and I have to admit, I liked it a lot better than I thought I would. It is by no means a great movie, but it’s not the train wreck that I expected.

Let’s start with the faults, which are legion.

This is a deeply, almost offensively derivative movie. It owes all of its plot and characters to other, better films.  If it hadn’t been touted for so long as a masterwork years in the offing, I would have taken this plagiarism in stride, but we were told time and again how greatly epic this film was going to be, how it was unlike anything we’d ever seen. And yes, it was, but in ways I’ll get to in a minute. Certainly not in its writing. If you haven’t seen it yet, to offer you no spoilers, I will only say that if you took the characters from The Abyss and put them into the story line of Dances With Wolves, set it on Endor (with the same savages-versus-highly-trained-soldiers-with-exponentially-superior-equipment climactic battle), throw in some controlling-another-body-from-inside-a-pod action like you’d find in The Matrix,  and flavored it with the “humans bad! nature good!” guilt-trip of Nausicaa of the Valley of the Winds (no, that’s not quite saccharine enough – more like the moral of every douchebag pop-eco message movie, like Ferngully) then you’ve basically got Avatar. It really does almost nothing original from a writing standpoint, and I found that deeply disappointing from someone whose ideas I have come to love over the decades.

James Cameron has made some of my favorite movies. And what he does best, historically, is putting real people with real problems into almost laughably unreal situations. The thing is, there isn’t a single real person to be found here. With a running time of almost three hours, you’d think there would be plenty of time to develop some deep, rich characters, but that is simply not the case. First, the character roster is precisely the same as The Abyss. Gruff but lovable hard-nosed leader who turns out to be a big softy: check. Female scientist who is described as a bitch before you even see her, but is really just super passionate about her work: check. Psychotic military career man who just wants to blow shit up: check. Company douche who is only interested in the profit reports: check (and even played by an actor who looks eerily similar to Paul Riser…and before I get comments about it, yes, I know that was Aliens. Shut up.) Renegade female pilot of a minority race: check. Science geek who turns out to be badass when pushed: check. Marine who sees the light and ends up fighting for the good guys: check. Misunderstood alien race that at first seems violent and aggressive, but which ends up pitching in to save the day: there are about twelve of them in Avatar. The only newish character we see here is Neytiri, the love interest, who is basically a less-helpless, even more naked version of Princess Leia. For a movie of this length to truly involve an audience, there has to be a character you love in the mix somewhere. And the problem is that while these archetypes worked brilliantly in The Abyss, that was a wholly different kind of movie. At its heart, The Abyss was a character piece inside a tin can at the bottom of the ocean. It took the time to explore the motivations and interactions between its characters, made them live, and gave you a reason to care about them, so that when the conflicts really begin you have a real stake in them. Avatar just throws these characters at you, as though Cameron expected you to just remember how you felt about them all in his other movies and let that feeling carry over. Well, it didn’t work. These are flat, dead characters.

The next big failing of the movie was exposition. The first half-hour or so of the film feels like an information dump to set you up for what’s coming. There is literally a scene about ten minutes in when Company Douche, during an argument with Science Bitch says (and I’m paraphrasing here): “This is why we’re here! Unobtanium! This very rare ore sells for millions of dollars a kilo! And those aliens out there are trying to stop us from mining it and making a lot of money! AVATAR!” (Sidebar: Mining for a rare ore called “unobtanium” on a wild, unpredictable planet called “Pandora”? Fuck you, James Cameron. Just…just fuck you.) There are big chunks of exposition this clumsy throughout the movie, largely provided by the ham-fisted voiceover by main character Sully (thinly disguised as a “video log”….well, you got the “log” part right, anyway.) I am willing to accept this sort of goldbricking expository style when a movie is trying to get the talking out of the way so that they can start blowing shit up or decapitating people. It’s de riguer for that sort of movie. But for what purports to be a story-driven science fiction epic, that is simply inexcusable. If the script had a tenth of the grace of the computer animation, this might have been the greatest movie ever made.

So, the middling stuff. Avatar packs every standard sci-fi trope into its first hour. Cryo-sleep. Drop ship. Space marines. Walker robots (which, at the end, and utterly inexplicably, have knives to fight with. Really? You have a two-ton robot exoskeleton and you’re FUCKING FIGHTING WITH A KNIFE?! Who designed these things, Brock Sampson?) Hostile planet with hostile flora, hostile fauna, even hostile fucking air. Beautiful naked humaniods. A big monster that attacks and is chased off by a bigger monster, who then chases the protagonist (I rolled my eyes at this scene a year ago in Star Trek, why on earth did I have to see it again?) Earthlings taking over other planets for their resources. Blah blah blah. The thing is, I love science fiction, and I love these tropes. They work. They’re a familiar language for nerds to draw on. But like so much else in this movie, it feels like James Cameron (or, just as likely, some studio shill) felt the need to pack every single one of them into the movie, and it turns into overkill. If that was the worst part of the movie I’d have let it slide, but piled on top of so much else gone wrong it actually drags things down.

My only other middling complaint was the 3D, which I really didn’t think was especially well executed. After seeing a movie like Coraline, where the 3D was seamlessly, beautifully integrated into the film itself without ever being obtrusive, but also without ever fading away, anything less just feels tacked on. The 3D in Avatar pops in and out, is missing in some bewildering places (um, hello, giant spaceship floating past the camera like the beginning of Star Wars…this would be an optimum time for some 3D magic! No? Oh…ok), and simply wasn’t that convincing. Except – and this is a big except – in the walking around the jungle scenes. In a lot of those scenes the 3D really shone, and helped make the planet itself a living being. But more on that later.

And the good. It has been said a million times over, and I’m going to say it again: this is hands-down the best special effects ever put on film. And I don’t mean inching past the previous benchmark. I mean creating a whole new fucking standard that it will take years to recreate, much less surpass. Yes, that has been the main selling point of the movie since we all first heard about it over a year ago, and yes that’s all James Cameron will ever say when he opens his mouth. I sometimes wonder if he talks about CGI in his sleep. I wonder if, when he has sex with his wife Kathryn Bigelow, he screams out “WETA!” when he orgasms. The man can not stop talking about the fucking special effects. But hey, he has a reason. If I had a nineteen-inch-long dick, I would talk about it all the time too. And this movie is, without question, the nineteen-inch cock of special effects. It’s literally beautiful. The design of everything is stunning. Even the Na’vi, which I absolutely hated in every preview for the movie that I ever saw, are gorgeous. The choice to make them blue actually makes a lot of sense when fit into the greater design of the movie, particularly the bio luminescent things that the previews never show.

The planet (sigh) Pandora (shake head) is visually spectacular, in a very literal sense. Glowing, neon plants, moss that lights up whenever anyone takes a step, floating mountains with waterfalls gushing off of their sides, insects that light up and spin when disturbed, it is absolutely stunning. I want to visit (sigh) Pandora (shake head). I want to climb its enormous trees and ride its pterodactyl-things. It is, in all seriousness, the only well-developed character in the entire film. Obviously, this was Cameron’s baby (which leads me to wonder what fucked-up sort of thing he named his actual children: “Boychild Middlename Cameron, time to eat lunch!”), and he spent a lot of time bringing it to life. It’s a marvelous feat, but it comes with an enormous flaw: there are all sorts of fascinating ideas that pop up and disappear, just like that. If you know me, you know that a good idea wasted is, to me, one of the most unpardonable sins. Without giving anything away, there are a lot of mysteries about (sigh) Pandora (shake head) that are brought up, used as a plot device, and never really heard from again. I am willing to stand against common logic and say that I would have watched half an hour more of this movie if they had spent the time developing the good ideas more. With the caveat that none of that time be spent listening to the worst caricature of a Marine Sergent ever put on film.

I also feel the need to reiterate that the CGI is absolutely astonishing. I have never seen computer-generated characters that looked so natural, expressed themselves so physically, and looked so much a part of the world. Of course, much of this is due to the fact that, by and large, the CGI characters live in a fully CGI world and rarely mix with the real human actors or appear in actual physical sets. But hey, when the CGI sets look this good, why mix and match? It was a far cry from George Lucas’ absurd green-screen shitfests.

And the acting? It was fine. I don’t think anyone deserves any awards for this. It’s all pretty much standard acting for the situation. By and large I thought the big blue cartoons were better actors than the actual faces you see, but that could be because they just had better actors on that side (even Sigourney Weaver was stale when she wasn’t blue, which I find a little shocking.)

So, is this the best movie ever? Definitely not. Is it a technical and design marvel that will be the standard for many years to come? Definitely so. At the end, though, the movie is the sum of its parts and no more. Some of it is stellar. Some of it is terrible. And when you put them together you come out right in the middle. As a spectacle it’s unsurpassed. As a tech demo it’s mind-blowing. As a movie, it’s decent. I might even go so far as to say pretty good if you caught me in a good mood.