Avatar

Today, I am disappointed in the movie nerd community. This is a group that I have been proud to be a part of for many years. Whenever a good movie slips past the general public and is danger of falling into obscurity, the movie nerds give it the respect it deserves. Without movie nerds, I never would have seen Brick, Oldboy, or the Pusher trilogy. They're also responsible for turning me onto such television shows as Veronica Mars and Battlestar Gallactica, both of which now rank amoung my all time favorites. But as I said, today I am disappointed, because they have allowed themselves to fall victim to Fox and the James Cameron hype machine, to forfeit the need for plot and characters and drama all in the name of some pretty pictures. Avatar may be pretty, but it is dramatically inert and as emotionally hollow as the Na'vi home tree (for those who haven't seen the movie, it's a hollowed out tree.)

I don't want to come across as a James Cameron hater. There are many of them out there, but I am not one of them. Up until recently, he was my favorite director and had he chose to keep making real movies rather than take a 10 year hiatus to make documentaries, he probably still would be (the title now goes to Christopher Nolan.) Cameron is responsible for my two favorite movies of all time (Terminator 2 and Aliens), but that is not enough to make me see past the failure that is Avatar. Yes, I said failure. Any movie that takes a decade and close to $300 million to bring to fruition should be something spectacular. What we are given is far from that.

I'll get to the tech Cameron used in a minute, but as it should have been in the movie, I'll start with the foundation elements, plot and character. I made the assertion to someone earlier that the movie had no plot, only to have this person give me the Webster's definition of plot, so, yes, it has a plot in the technical sense, but not in the sense that matters. This is basically a reshashing of Dances With Wolves, The Last Samurai, or any other white guilt movie ever made. The focus of Avatar is a paraplegic marine named Jake, who through a crazy random happenstance becomes part of the avatar program on the distant planet Pandora. This program is designed to mix human and alien DNA to create synthetic aliens which are remotely driven by humans. If it sounds complicated, it's not, and is all explained in one line of dialogue. Through his avatar, Jake is given the ability to walk again and he slowly begins to infiltrate the Na'vi (10 foot tall blue cat people who make up Pandora's native race) to find out all of their secrets. Surpisingly (read: not suprisingly at all), Jake begins to connect with the aliens and realizes they are not savages at all, but really nice people. For $300 million, we deserve a lot better than this as a story.

Aside from being the most unimagined story ever, it is just filled with things that don't make sense. For example, the first thing that we are told about the Na'vi is that they are very hard to kill. If by hard to kill, they mean just shoot them with a gun, than yeah, it's true. Also, the year is 2154, we have the tech to create artificial aliens and drive them iwth our minds, and yet wheelchairs are still the exact same thing. Oops, didn't think that one through, did ya Jim? These are just more examples that show the script came second to the visuals, which should never happen.

Maybe, just maybe, this simple and cliche story might have worked if every character in the film hadn't been flat and one note. Sam Worthington is good as Jake, but there is no reason behind anything his character does. It's as though he's supposed to do certain things to move the "plot" along, though neither he nor audience really understands why. Neytiri, the alien warrior princess, is the most interesting character in the movie and probably gets the closest thing to a character arc in the film (yes, more happens to Jake's character, but it's all bullshitl.) Zoe Saldana gives an excellent performance and thanks to Cameron motion capture tech, we are able to see the few instances of emotion in the film (but sadly, we don't feel anything.) The best performance is the live action one of Stephen Lang, the film's bad guy, Colonel Quarrich. Quarrich is a buffed out, scarred, Ryan Seacrest looking soldier who is hell bent on solving every problems with guns and thinks humans are awesome and alien sucks. Never has anyone done so much with such garbage lines ("You're not in Kansas anymore. You're on Pandora.") Rounding out the cast is Sigourney Weaver, who's horrible, and Michelle Rodriguez, who's good.

The reason that this film took so long to make is the tech that Cameron used. It is an evolution of the motion capture tech we've seen in Lord of the Rings and King Kong. Never has it been done on this scale and never has it been done as well as Cameron has used it here. We see every twitch of the Na'vi faces, and it is really something to behold. The problem is, at no point do we ever forget we are watching mo-cap and it creates a buffer between the film and the audience. It's just hard to care about something you know isn't real at all. It's also tough to care about the Na'vi when they are nothing more than blatant stereotypes of native americans. Again, you spend $300 million creating a world and the creatures, and then you give them no traits of their own. That's just bad writing.

Not only did Cameron create the race with mo-cap, he also used digital 3D when creating the entire planet of Pandora and all of its other creatures. The various alien animals are impressive and look good, but the designs are nothing more spectacular than Pan's Labyrinth. Also, creating a world, while never seen on this scale in movies, has been done in video games for years. And that's really what Avatar is. It's a video game you can't play, and that's no fun.

At the end of the day, when you advertise your movie as a "game changer" and your tagline is "Movies will never be the same" people will expect things from your movie, and Avatar doesn't just not deliver on it, it's just a average movie by any standards. Don't get me wrong, it's very nice to look at, but if you're someone who likes a little more than some pretty pictures moving on screen, then you should probably look elsewhere.

UPDATE: Upon rereading this, it feels as though I'm saying I am the only person in the movie nerd community who sees this movie for what it is. That's not the case. There are some very good bloggers out there who have written articles on Avatar's problems, mostly notably CHUD's Devin Faraci and Cinematical's Elisabeth Rappe. There are others, and I did not mean to paint the community as a whole, though I am still disappointed in the vast majority.