A Film Review: Avatar

Has my blog been reduced to this: amateur film reviews? Bear with me, this one has been building in me for a while - I think that James Cameron's hype-driven, hyper-drive 3D epic Avatar has enough cultural ripples to warrant examination.

Aliens vs Pocahontas is quite a good film. It's better with the passing of time, as I can now don rose-tinted shades and look back at my last cinema experience of the noughties decade with something approaching warm feelings (I must here note, that there is a mournful lack of good "-ies" names for the decade now upon us - "teenies"? "tennies"? ugh, no.) I was skeptical, too. It had been so long in production that I had come to see it as uncool - Cameron had invested an embarrassing amount of effort into one film, past that line where respect for creative investment gives way to an impression of overinvestment and, ultimately, nerdiness. But the film succeeded in both its sheer enjoyment factor and on a nerdier level - at least for my mother, no small achievement, since I've been trying to involve her in nerdy pursuits for some 16 years or so.

It is firstly, a good story, but it is a genuine pity that Cameron felt that in order to make it qualify as "epic" he had to pepper the narrative with unmitigated clichés and stock ideas.

Let me explain: when I say that the film is a great story, I don't mean that it's original (it's highly derivative in a multitude of ways), or that it did anything but follow the anticipated trajectory, but I do think that it conflates enough human cultural threads into a single narrative to make that narrative resonant in the same way that Disney animations have traditionally succeeded at. That works. But you can't miss the completely un-self-consciously processed-cheesy dialogue, any more than tired pantomime villainy of Giovanni Ribisi' "money-without-a-soul" capitalist or Terminator-surplus Colonel "Quaritch" whose absurd hyper-masculinity produces script gems such as "You are not in Kansas anymore" and "Come to Papa!" These starchy, 2D characterizations stand in stark contrast to the lush 3D visuals.

The IMAX was actually very immersive - the seats were at a bizarre, leg-cramping height that made me identify with the wheelchair-bound protagonist! Is it a revolution in film-making? The 3-D was artful, its importance easily missed and dismissed, precisely because rather than dominate the experience it instead enhances the visual perception of the film whilst remaining subtly integrated, leaving the world's environment utterly engaging.

Zoë Saldaña deserves to be commended - her acting as the CG-generated heroine was phenomenally raw and believable. And she can be credited with one of the only subversive moments in the film - the female lead taking the final killing blow to save the day, protecting a male "damsel in distress." Despite a 'disabled' lead, and the forefronting of the issues faced by aboriginal populations in colonialism, the film is nevertheless a far cry from the ideological exploration of Aliens. The colonial themes, whilst admirable, are also produced through some colossal unsubtleties, particularly about environmentalism and a version of white guilt that has more to say about the white lead's internal life than that of an oppressed people.

James Cameron is perhaps more comfortable expanding on existing concepts - such as in the masterful Terminator 2 and Aliens, which both dwelt on complex ideas about parenting. He seems to have definite trouble with originality - his other original feature Titanic is even more melodramatic. Of course, finding the films that Avatar liberally borrows ideas from has become an international cause celebre (everyone knows about Pocahontas - I also noted FernGully, Dances with Wolves, and the brilliant La Planète sauvage). But the threads it brings together create a surprisingly enjoyable and entertaining whole - what Cameron undoubtedly knows best is entertainment. That the film remains so good despite its innumerable flaws is one of the most confusing things about film, and reviewing it critically, because it seems callow to say that the film is good and yet full of flaws. Maybe the initial impression of embarrassing overinvestment by Cameron has actually worked in reverse - he spent so long on it now, that we now just feel we ought to like it! Regardless, like it I did.

And the best thing about the movie? Sigourney Weaver is (part of) god!