Avatar
Sam Worthington and Zoe Saldana star in James Cameron's "Avatar."
If director Kathryn Bigelow made the definitive film on the Iraq war this year with “The Hurt Locker,” then James Cameron has just attempted the penultimate film on the war in Afghanistan with “Avatar,” his first film since 1997’s “Titanic.”
Where Bigelow’s “The Hurt Locker” takes to the battlefields of Iraq to explore what makes a person enter into particularly dangerous situations in battle—i.e. the disarming of crude improvised explosive devices in Iraq— “Avatar” takes to the skies and faraway planets, its characters throwing around words like ‘terror’ and phrases such as ‘shock and awe” with near reckless abandon.
But the task of “Avatar” is not merely to wax political; sure, the film preaches philosophical about the merits of preemptive war, the mining of other’s land for its precious natural resources, the perils of waging a military campaign against an indigenous people with home field advantage.
No, “Avatar” aims higher than simple political allegory.
If Cameron’s sympathies are with the indigenous people of Pandora, a distant planet with all manner of hostile creatures and curious inhabitants, then his mission with “Avatar” appears to be figuring out precisely how to immerse audiences in the vast world he and his special effects team have labored on for the better part of the last decade, to make you see this world just as the characters on screen do.
Here, Cameron uses the latest innovations in 3-D technology and special effects to create a world so expansive and detailed that many of the film’s images seem to stay with you long after you’ve left the theater.
And, with “Avatar,” Cameron does little to reinvent the storytelling wheel. Anyone who has ever seen a film before will recognize painstakingly familiar elements: a greedy corporation desperately wants to mine another planet for its valuable natural resources, a low-ranking military dude learns valuable life lessons about how faceless corporations do not always have the best intentions, indigenous people teach white people how to appreciate difference and respect things.
A bit into the film, Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) begins to narrate his experiences on the distant planet Pandora.
Jake, a young Marine, speaks over the images on screen, explaining precisely the details of his mission—to walk amongst Pandora natives, the Na’vi, gain their trust, and convince them to give over their land to the “Sky People” who recently set up shop there.
Set in 2154, Jake arrives on Pandora after a recent tour of duty leaves him a paraplegic. Once on Pandora, Jake meets Dr. Grace Augustine (Sigourney Weaver, a welcome sight and veteran of Cameron’s fantastic sequel, “Aliens”) who has created a way to blend Na’vi DNA with the blood of Jake’s dead brother to produce a Na’vi body—an avatar, if you will— for Jake to assume in order to gain the trust of the Na’vi.
He does this by crawling into a fancy science pod where his human body will remain while he disappears into the body of a tall, blue Na’vi.
Should Jake fail in his mission, the military, led by Col. Miles Quaritch (Stephen Lang) plans a blitzkrieg of the Na’vi’s land, particularly the area where their most sacred tree resides, as that so happens to be the location of Pandora’s precious minerals.
Once on Pandora in full Avatar mode, Jake meets a young Na’vi princess, Neytiri (Zoe Saldana) who teaches him the way of her people and the mysteries of her planet, causing Jake to doubt whether his mission is the right one after all.
Storytelling wheel left intact, what Cameron does with “Avatar” is find a way to use the fanciest of special effects to create a wondrous world, a world with its specifics detailed yet awaiting further exploration on repeated viewings. A visual wonder, “Avatar” never lets its “Look what I can do” get in the way of engaging storytelling.
But, that “Look what I can do” is precisely what “Avatar” is all about. Just as “Star Wars” borrowed heavily from Joseph Campbell and the hero’s myth and “The Wizard of Oz” took a familiar tale of a protagonist learning the importance of family and friends and made it new and wondrous again, so too does “Avatar” find new, amazingly inventive ways to tell an old tale.
And, for the most part it works, save for the film’s inability to approach anything resembling subtlety— “fight terror with terror,” proclaims Col. Quaritch as he leads his soldiers into battle against the Na’vi.
Moments such as those stick out here, particularly because the rest of the film is actually quite graceful and much smarter.
You leave “Avatar,” a technological marvel and oddly engaging film, and find you hate yourself for giving into what appears superficially to be a rather silly film—the smurfs on steroids in space? — but perhaps no more so than audiences in 1933 who kicked themselves for letting the image of King Kong standing atop the Empire State Building wow them into a giddy blend of awe and amazement.
Time will tell how convincing audiences find Cameron’s “Avatar” hat trick.
Curious, though, that both Cameron and Ms. Bigelow, Cameron’s ex-wife, find themselves grappling with similar themes: masculinity and its excesses (all about that giant robot suit Col. Quaritch dons late in the film to battle the Na’vi, a’la Ripley at the conclusion of “Aliens”), war and its stakes, and the way viewers experience such themes when they sit down at the theater.
Interesting then that while Ms. Bigelow went for nitty gritty realism in “The Hurt Locker,” the King of the World ventured off to another world to tell his.
Grade: A-
