Vintage

Avatar is a fantastic movie, not legendarily great, but then I didn’t see it in 3D.  I saw it in boring old 2D.  I also didn’t have the privilege of having my avatar watch the film, which would have been cool if I could have laid on the sofa at home and sent my “avatar” to drive to the cinema, maybe pick up a six-pack on the way home.  But, I am getting ahead of myself.

The film takes place in the year 2154 and in the Alpha Centauri star system.  We find the RDA corporation mining Pandora, a beautiful Earth-like nature preserve orbiting the planet Polyphemus.  The humans aim to exploit Pandora’s reserves of a valuable mineral called unobtanium. Gung-ho Jarheads provide security to the mining operation. 

Amid all the astounding proclamations of the next Star Wars for this generation, I  simply didn’t believe it was that darn good.  My daughter liked it, but was not blown away by it, not like I was in 1978 when I saw Star Wars for the first time as a starry-eyed 7-year old.

Don’t get me wrong, it is an astounding visual accomplishment and a well-needed breath of originality in an epoch of boring credulity (did I just twist Dickens?).  However, as far as the story goes, I can sum it up as thus: “Dances With Wolves In Space.”  There are a several aspects of the film I actually found a tad bit annoying.  To tip my hand, an alternative title for Avatar could easily have been: “Fear and Human Loathing In Space.”

So why did such a fantastically pretty movie irk me? First, I found it patronizing toward Native Americans.  Second, I found it trying, striving too hard to outdo all movies of this sort.  It was like a bit of Jurassic Park, Alien, Lord of the Rings, The Matrix – all rolled into one. Lastly, I found it obnoxiously proselytizing about the environment and I am a guy who is all for the environment.  Dare I say I’ll be darned if I didn’t detect an anti-Americanism subtlety to the plot, all of which I’ll explain in unorganized short order below. Then again, I may be reading far too much into a kid’s movie.    Adults tend to do dumb things like that.

Let’s talk about the Native American parallels of the film.  The story basically involves Earthlings as a nightmarish—though perhaps not outlandish—contemporary and logical result of good old unbridled and amoral capitalism run amok.  Avatar extrapolates the frustrations of our waning decade only and projects it over to the next century and half, which is a small-minded projection of very powerful historical and socio-cultural forces for my buttered popcorn.  

Pandora is so named I guess because of all the problems it will unleash.  On it are the happy peaceful, harmonious, eco-friendly, green, Al Gorians.  Okay, they are the Na’vi, a tall blue-skinned and diamond-speckled race of feline-type bipedal power forwards.  They are admittedly the perfect race and would have no trouble dunking over Shaq.

The Na’vi discovered a harmonious balance with nature, which America is bound to screw up.  They are all in good shape too and solved the problem of obesity and found ways to live without I-pods.   Their enemies in the film, are really, not so much generic human beings as they are American-style human beings.  We have become the villains of our own blockbusters! This alludes to the sublet Anti-Americanism, which I thought ran throughout this film.
 
I say this because the enemies in Avatar are exaggeratedly American; versus an amalgam of humanity as I might imagine it to be in surely what should be a more diverse time in the future.  So far as I could tell, there are no Indians, South East Asians, Chinese, Middle Eastern people, Russians.  If this is no accident, then director James Cameron is really manipulative and underhanded if not borderline propagandist. After all, it is clear to me it is not so much as humanity that landed on Pandora but America.  

It is America in the future that is ready to wipe out the natives on Pandora, much like it happened a few centuries ago when the new world was discovered.  The mercenaries are clearly ex-Marines. If that is what Cameron feels, I would respect it more if he had them plunk down a U.S. flag on their planet and called a spade a spade.   

As to why I find this patronizing to Native Americans is that on one level, “Injuns” are once again being served up only to make millions for Hollywood studios only now they are the blue skins and not the red.  These Na’vi are the peaceful Indians of every Western ever filmed.  I would have liked these stereotypes to have at least included a few bands of warlike tribes like the Comanche, Sioux or Iroquois at least as we have seen them in film before.  How would it be if the Na’vi included some who thrived on war or those that once provoked by peaceable settlers did not see the humanity in the beings that were settling the new land?  But, this may be much ado about nothing.   It is a kids popcorn movie after all.

On that account, I firmly believe Avatar is no groundbreaking cinematic milestone like Star Wars was in the 1970s.  Perhaps it is not totally fair to compare Avatar to Star Wars (and I am speaking of the original film released in 1979), but since some have done so already, I can’t help but use Star Wars as the measuring stick for Avatar (We should note that even plausibly inviting such comparisons is high praise indeed).  

The fundamental difference between the films is that Star Wars was an adult-oriented film, which appealed to kids of all ages, namely the kid inside all of us.  Avatar is the opposite in my mind.   It is a kids movie, that I don’t think quite resonates one hundred-percent with adults (much like all the Star Wars films since the original).  Star Wars was humanity comfortably exploring space, interacting with all sorts of creatures, who all faced the same sort of shortcomings across all racial and ethnic grounds.  

Star Wars didn’t dislike the idea of humanity expanding out into space.  In Avatar, humanity is really a nasty breed of people.  Albeit there are a handful of human scientists that really wanted to learn about the Na’vi and help them.  However, there is too much human loathing in this film for me to elevate it as great film unless you loath your own kind.

Another problem I had was that the environmental overtones of Avatar were basically persuasion by vilification of humanity.  We simply are interested in ruining their beautiful paradise for resources.  We are not sustainable people.  It was even said we killed “our mother” in one scene and are coming to do the same to the planet of Pandora.

Oh, and the planet, Pandora, seems to have an energy and intelligence all its own, which the Na’vi tap into.  We seemed to have somehow ignored our Earth’s brain and constructed one too many Wal-Mart Toupees on it.

I found the story overly preoccupied with particulars such as environmentalism and colonialism versus universals such as common human suffering and the imperfections of all intelligent beings unless the Na’vi were perfect.  I imagine how this would play out differently if we, Earthlings, needed more space to live because Earth had been taken over by fascists that succeeded in global conquest and we needed a planet in which there was room to worship freely and escape persecution but the resources we needed in order to live were buried underneath their land.  What if humankind wanted to live in harmony with the Na’vi.  

There was a time in history when such sympathetic historical scenarios were true and a world planet called Elis Island was testament to it.  That Avatar dramatizes the worst in contemporary humanity and greed motivated by capitalism, is sort of a particular that lessens the film’s weight.  I suppose I can’t really fault it given the economic times.  However, Star Wars was concerned with universals that transcended culture and the problems of a decade.    

George Lucas in telling the story of Star Wars, did not exaggerate any other culture to be the bad guys per se unless Communism was the Empire.  Essentially, absolute power corrupted the spirit and the Universe.  That was the center of the dark side of the Force and whether you were an alien or human, you were in the world together.  In Avatar, the fact that we are human, seems to be the chief reason evil has come to Pandora.   Mind you these are all deep structural plot elements in Avatar but someone should speak up for us Earthlings when we are being entertained by dramatizing what devils we are.  

I never got the sense in Star Wars that we as humans were the bad guys.  In Avatar we are the monsters and are expected to cheer our defeat.  In fact, Jake Sully (Sam Worthington), the human Avatar hero of the flick, is no longer human by the very end of the film.  He is a living breathing Na’vi.  He ascended into the Na’vi.

Don’t’ get me wrong. Many parts of this film are downright excellent.  

I greatly enjoyed the scene when this massive, towering twisting tree was destroyed by an assault of incendiary missiles.  All the Na’vi watched in terror and disbelief as it came crashing to the ground.  I couldn’t help but think “Hey, this is the 9-11 for the Na’vi.” In that particular scene, I felt that writer/producer/director James Cameron may have been sympathetic to what it must have been like to experience a great tragedy such as 9-11 when terrorist planes took out the World Trade Center.  That entailed universal suffering.  Then again a cynic could see this scene as another way to underscore that we, the American-style variety of humankind, are the terrorists come here to wreak havoc on Pandora.

Avatar is good entertainment and I would have loved to see it in 3D.  The points it makes are not necessarily wrong points, but they are hidden by Cameron, which to me means Cameron doesn’t trust us to swallow what he is really trying to tell us here. I believe these hidden opinions deserve to be pointed out.  Perhaps I would have been distracted by the wonderful next generation graphics and would have paid little heed to the uncomfortable fact that  at heart this colorful visually entertaining experience is also James Cameron’s personal and scathing critique on humanity.

Matthew J. DeReno is managing editor of CoolFilmz.com