Avatar Review

God I hate being right...

A friend of mine asked me a few weeks ago what I thought Avatar would be and I suggested that it would be two hours of nothing characters moping around a planet followed by forty minutes of a battle I didn't care about. And guess what?! Make yourselves comfortable folks, this one's gonna be a long one!

Before I continue, let me make a few things clear. Firstly, I have nothing against Avatar, no wish to see it fail, no wish to see James Cameron fail, I'm watching it as a film like any other. Secondly, I'm a big fan of much of James Cameron's work, though really his best work has come early in his career and a gradual though absolute decline is further evidenced by what I watched today. Thirdly, the story is the least of Cameron's concerns and so it's going to take up the least amount of space in this review. Quick synopsis: Jake Sully is a marine paralysed from the waist down, he goes to Pandora, becomes a Na'vi through the Avatar programme (tying his consciousness into a Na'vi avatar body and therefore free to roam the planet and become one of them) he falls in love with Na'vi girl Neytiri and abandons his human roots to "go native"and join the Na'vi in fighting back against the technologically superior human invaders. If that story sounds familiar, it's only because you've seen it a million times already. Before Avatar, Titanic was my least favourite James Cameron film by a very long way. Now, I'm not so sure.

Here's the problem. This is a film that has created and is in the process of perfecting new film making technology. It's a film that's meant to end the "3-D debate" and lest there be any confusion regarding the outcome of that debate, the verdict is "it rules!" This film is the herald of a new era in film making. It's a new dawn, a new age. Years from now, when mind bending 3-D spectaculars are par for the course, we'll all look back at Avatar and say, this is the film that started it all and I was there. Sure it's quaint now (Remember when you had to wear 3-D glasses?!) but without it we wouldn't be where we are today. This is what the film and its much talked about production process is screaming and you can be damned sure it's what Cameron is thinking. This is his legacy to film making. He's a pioneer, cutting his way through a new frontier, fitting given that Avatar is basically a frontier movie. Avatar's disclosed budget is around $270 million. Industry insiders have specualted that it's considerably north of $300 million and, if certain rumours are to believed, taking into account the many years of R&D, this film has cost close to $500 million. Has 20th Century Fox spent this much on the story? The characters? Absolutely not. Cameron's last film grossed $1.8 billion for the same studio so he is in a position to make some demands. I believe Cameron genuinely wants to further the technology of film making and so, having seen the more modest developments made by the more modest budgets of, for example, the Lord of the Rings trilogy (I mean that completely relatively; neither the final $200 million budget of Return of the King nor the technological advancements of the trilogy as a whole can be regarded as modest) he has secured a massive investment in new technology, to bring cinema to a place where it can weather the illegal downloading storm and provide photo-real CGI environments, characters and creatures in 3 dimensions. This is what he has promised Fox and this is what they have spent the money on. This is the film that started it all and now everyone else is only going to reap the benefits. I started this paragraph by saying here's the problem, and after a lot of set up, finally, here's the problem. Assuming for a moment I'm not interested in what it took to get it to the screen, in how much it cost, in what it's offering film makers for the future, what is Avatar, a stand alone film, offering me? What am I getting from it? The answer is very, very little.

Dances With Wolves, Dune, Last Of The Mohicans, The Mission, Ferngully, The Last Samurai... all of these films (and more) share two things in common with Avatar. 1 They're all considerably better. Yes, even The Last Samurai. 2. Those films were borrowing stories and story elements in their day. What does that say for an "original" story coming 20 years later? Avatar is cliched beyond belief, trite and incredibly sanctimonious. A technologically cutting edge $3/4/500 million film is telling me how nature will prevail in the face of technology. A tough lesson to swallow. The references to real world events are horrendously heavy handed, to the point where the final attack by evil military man Stephen Lang is described as a "shock and awe" campaign. Worst of all though is the Na'vi's connection with nature, their laughably mystic "oneness" with the flora and fauna exemplified in those moments when they all hold hands and sit chanting around the tree of life. Seriously, this happens. Twice. This is not "classic" story-telling as Cameron has argued, it's a juvenile appropriation of the native American culture with a view to generating cheap emotion.

Weirdly, the biggest plus point is the 3-D. I'm a complete sceptic when it comes to 3-D but there is no denying that Cameron uses it to tremendous effect in Avatar. Gone are the hokey "things poking you from the screen" days of 3-D. Cameron uses it to surround you in Pandora's lush vegetation and wildlife. You believe in the place, you believe this environment. In that respect the 3-D is as immersive and transportive as everyone is saying it is. But the film as a whole is not immersive, no film this dull can be. And when you take the 3-D out of the equation, so when I have the opportunity to watch it on DVD or Blu Ray for example, what is going to entice me back? The big screen, 3-D experience just about makes Avatar worth a watch once, but it is only story and characters that make a film worth repeat viewings and I can safely say I will never watch Avatar again. I think that the worse a film is, the more 3-D helps. So watching Up, I completely forgot about the 3-D. Watching Avatar, I was incredibly grateful for it. The motion capture technology is also very impressive, the movements of the Na'vi feel completely real and their faces are tremendously expressive. More generally, the CGI works to mixed effect. In terms of the environment, it is undeniably stunning. You really do forget that Pandora is almost entirely digital. Everything from the trees to the water is rendered on a computer and, in close up and in 3-D, it needs to be photo-real and for the most part it is. The various animals never look like anything other than digital creations and the Na'vi are never photo-real, despite Cameron's promises. Bright blue and feline, the design of them felt naff from the first time we saw them and watching the finished film, they still feel that way. You do accept them after a while, but in the way you accept an animated film for example. You don't believe it's "real", you accept it in context. Personally I never felt transported to another world in the way that, for example, the Lord of the Rings films made me feel. I believed the world certainly, but I was never particularly awed by it. Flying dragons, blue monkeys, variations on a rhinoceros or a wolf, there isn't anything particularly fresh or interesting in these ideas, most are variations on things we have on our own planet. Added to this the fact that the Na'vi are thinly veiled Native Americans and, for all its pretensions to "other-worldliness", the world of Pandora suddenly feels incredibly familiar.

By the time the big battle comes, it's too little too late. There are some spectacular shots to be sure, the frame is filled with marines and dragons and Na'vi and warships and, in 3-D, it looks amazing. But there is no resonance to any of it and, given how long we've spent wandering around that bloody planet, it feels very short by comparison. Not just that but I'm fairly sure I've seen another film, made over twenty years ago, that cut between different battles occuring simultaneously on a jungle planet... Oh right, it's called Return of the Jedi. Also, the way in which the battle resolves is the biggest cop out, "get out of jail free" piece of writing I've seen in a film in a very long time. It's all coming back to the writing. Cameron has never been a particularly strong writer but his best films have great set up to them in the script that his directorial abilities can then pay off in the finished film. Aliens is still the best example of this and remains his best film as far as I'm concerned. Terminator also does this very well, as does Terminator 2 to a slightly lesser extent. Those early films were not built on giant budgets and forced Cameron's creativity, which he has in undeniable abundance. He knows that a film with no characters or story is just a soulless enterprise, which is why he and the cast are constantly paying lip service to that as they promote Avatar, reassuring us that the James Cameron who made us care about Ripley's relationship with Newt in Aliens has made us care for Jake Sully's dilemma about whether to follow orders or join the Na'vi in Avatar. That is the James Cameron I'm interested in but it is not the James Cameron who showed up to make Avatar. Cameron keeps telling us how he has spent 10 years getting Avatar to the screen. Surely in those 10 years he could have found some time to work on the script? A week maybe? Even a weekend?

I feel like a broken record, but there is simply no substitute for a good story and good characters and there never will be. It's a lesson I feel the cinema will never learn. There are no technological advancements to be made with books. All they have ever had to sell them, and all they will ever have, is a story and it's on that story that they stand or fall. Theatre is (or at least can be) more technologically based, but theatre too ultimately comes down to its story. Why can it not be the same for cinema? Why, with all the possibilities now available to it, is a medium as potentially powerful as cinema squandered so repeatedly, used as nothing other than a fancy light show? That Avatar has been announced as a film that is changing the face of cinema just throws its many flaws into an even brighter light because if we have taken several steps forward technologically then we have taken an equal number backwards with regards to the stories we're telling. I really wanted to be wowed by Avatar, really wanted to be taken on a great adventure, but in the presence of unremitting cliche and trite storytelling, this is simply impossible. The visual effects and 3-D give it an extra couple of points but make no mistake, this is a bad film. See Avatar once for the 3-D and get everything there is to get from it because ultimately, a turd with diamonds on it is still just a turd.

5/10