Avatar: movie review

Who needs Pandora?
Who needs a booby-trapped box?
Let's save this guy.


Avatar: B-

I finally gave in and went to see Avatar in 3D, expecting to leave after 15 minutes because of motion sickness or boredom or irritation. However, I had no problem with vertigo except for a couple of flying scenes, during which I simply closed my eyes for a few seconds. I must admit the movie was visually spectacular, and I never stopped wondering how anyone conceived of these images and techniques, never mind implementing them.

In the end, however, I’m afraid Avatar is typical sci-fi/fantasy fare—special effects, a lot of message, and caricature instead of characterization. Considering it for awards alongside genuine achievements like Hurt Locker, The Road, A Serious Man, and others is one more red flag about the quality of American intellectual life.

I don't really follow entertainment news, so maybe I've missed any uproar about Avatar’s offenses to this or that group, including the American military-industrial complex and mainstream culture. As always, those targets deserve to be examined by, and take some hits from, the art and science communities.

However, the pseudo-intellectual assault by Avatar is so hyperbolic and one-dimensional that it’s fatuous, yet bothersome. The movie would have us believe that, except for scientist Sigourney Weaver, hero Jake Sully and one female helicopter pilot, there are no good guys in the U.S., just psychopathic land developers and killers-in-uniform. I wonder how many of the film’s creators live in areas cleared--nay, ravaged—by precisely the unthinkable means portrayed in Avatar.

Oddly, I also found much about Pandora’s jungle people to be laughable in a way that could be insulting to native peoples of North and South America as well as Africans—or any non-industrial culture. In addition to their harmony with nature, the indigenous humanoids of Pandora have mouse ears, long tails, and noses that appear crushed by multiple boxing matches. I cannot be sure their language sounded more odd to me than any foreign language, but I found it hard to take seriously, I suppose in the context of their other features.

Like The Book of Eli, this movie owes much to the tradition of American westerns of the 1950s. “A stranger rode into town.” It offers native peoples about as much dignity as those old flicks did, or maybe less, and its heroes are even less believable and more one-dimensional than the old B movies, western or otherwise.

In short, Avatar is extraordinarily skillful and original in terms of technique, but in depth and complexity of theme and characterization, in creative uses of language, it amounts to just one more cartoon.

It’s also one more reason for the political Right to flap its feathers about a simplistic, laughable or even treasonous Hollywood Left, which is their way of flapping about creative, thinking people with legitimate ideas and axes to grind. Maybe Glen Beck and Rush Limbaugh were secret partners in the production of Avatar. It's a flick that gives them ammo. (And you thought the Right had a monopoly on paranoia).

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