Some Thoughts on Avatar

One of the interesting things about seeing a movie that has been as commercially successful  as Avatar is hearing so much discussion about it before you go and see for yourself what all the hype is about. Now, I religiously avoided any kind of spoiler discussion. But I couldn’t help but notice that the Catholic Church decries the movie’s pantheism, that right-wingers see the movie as an anti-military, anti-America parable, that others see it as a glorification of redemptive violence, and that even video game players are railing against the dig against them offered via the character of Sigourney Weaver.

Interesting. After seeing it, I feel like very few people have covered the movie very well: just a lot missing, distorted, or overemphasized from pretty much all the conversations about the film I have encountered. Here are a few things I noticed that don’t seem to bear much mention from the critics I’ve encountered (WARNING! WARNING! SPOILERS! LOOK AWAY NOW!):

1. How is it even possible that, after seeing some previews of the film and having heard people try really hard to ruin the movie for me for about a month now that I had NO IDEA that the protagonist, Jake Sully, was paraplegic? How is it that there is so little discussion about disability in this movie. To my mind, you can’t really even begin to discuss the movie without the lens of disability–it’s the character’s primary initial motivation to come to Pandora, and it’s used as a prime motivator to get Jake to provide the paramilitary muscle in the movie with intel. And, at the end, (SPOILER! SHIELD YOUR EYES!), Jake gets a new body, one that is more powerful and able than the one he was born with. This is not subtle filmmaking folks, but what kills me is how little disability and ability are being discussed, when the movie’s plot literally can’t be understood without them.
2. Hated the USB Ponytails. I am going to avoid the obvious scientific/evolutionary problems of Avatar’s plug ‘n’ play view of nature–Flying Dragon Thing That Lives at the Top of the Food Chain and Has Absolutely No Need for a USB Override of its Free Will, I will now take command over you with my ponytail!–and just ask a simple question: if the Na’vi get a haircut, is their connection to nature destroyed? Also hated the “time-warp” effect they used to indicate entering an Avatar body. Really, that’s the most original thing you could come up with?
3. I’m surprised of all the acclaim the movie is getting around its visual effects. To my mind, Titanic was such an incredible visual spectacle because it was so difficult to tell computer-generated effects from other effects from plain old reality. Avatar, by contrast, is so blatantly CGI’ed that I would have thought more people would have thought of it more like a really well-done video game. Some criticism of this nature exists, I know — I’m just surprised how little play that criticism is getting, and that instead people are enthralled by this use of … well, let’s call it what it is: animation. I myself love CGI and animation; again, just surprised. Maybe folks are just ready to accept it more now?
4. I agree: a rather hokey and simplistic reimagining of Native American cultures; a pretty obvious collection of well-worn tropes, including the “World Tree,” a fascistic military machine, and corporate greed (“Unobtainium”? Really?); characters drawn with such broad strokes it’s hard to feel anything but the broadest of emotional connections to them. But hear me out. Great works of art help the best minds in the world think more deeply about the profoundest questions of our existences. But precisely because that that’s what they do, they tend to be hard to comprehend, even for the artists who make the art (and more so for critic on the outside looking in). It’s perhaps that inescapable, irreducible quality that makes them so enduring. Maybe though, just maybe, there’s a place for another kind of art: not so immortally complex, perhaps, but accessible to many, many, many more people. So maybe it doesn’t advance human understanding at the most sophisticated of levels, but maybe it moves a great mass of people incrementally towards something history will tell us is a more desirable way of being in the world. Call me crazy, but I think it’s desirable for us to respect nature more as a society, to not wage war the way we have over the last 15 years or so and which the movie obviously attacks, and to see the great and good power of science along with the risk that scientific advancement brings. If millions and millions of people have a little more insight into those issues now thanks to Avatar, I think I’m okay with the fact that I myself found a lot of the movie, thematically speaking, a little banal.

I know this isn’t exactly a review, but maybe it can help to introduce a few ideas that have been really overlooked in Avatar’s coverage. Oh, and generally speaking, I liked it. Generally speaking.

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I still have to see Avatar, with the emphasis on *have*, as I’ll be moderating a panel about it at Odyssey, the British EasterCon, in about 6 weeks.

But I agree in general that if Avatar, for all its shortcomings, helps people view war, nature and science in a different light, then that is definitely a good thing.

Maybe more after I’ve seen it.

February 17th, 2010

Jetse