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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Movie Review: The Road

Movie Review: The Road GPA 3.9

Viggo Mortensen, Kodi Smit-McPhee, Charlize Theron

Screenplay: John Penhall
Based on the novel by Cormac McCarthy

Director: John Hillcoat





I thought it was only the cockroaches and their ilk that would survive nuclear winter, but The Road (based on Cormac McCarthy’s novel) says there might be a few of us humans left after all. This is the story of two of them, a father and his son (about ten years old?), traipsing around the earth their species has tried to destroy. And these two are not alone.

It’s a miracle that a premise this grim kept me in the theater at all. In fact, I was the proverbial rivet.

First is the simple fact that there is a plot; things happen, in a sequence, for a reason. We’re tense about what will happen next, and I see no reason to be disappointed; whether bleak or cautiously optimistic, these scenes and episodes make sense, even as they keep us guessing with each test of character, each inconclusive comment on what we humans are.

Pictorially, the movie is not one dreary photograph after another; instead there’s remarkable variety within the sameness of the constant grey sky and November landscapes. Changes in subject, changes in light and angles, shifts from landscape to characters—including the humans other than the two at the center—plus a few brief flashbacks provide enough variety and surprise to keep the eye and psyche satisfied, though always sober and never complacent. Also, as much as I hesitate to say it, even without sunlight there is a kind of beauty in these bare trees and Appalachian hills covered with fallen leaves. Also, watch for the possibility of something important in the images of water; I'm trying to avoid words like symbolism and redemption, but my grip is loosening.

Like the landscape, the themes mix a little hope into the starkness. On the obvious and dominant downside, humanity has finally done the unthinkable: the holocaust has happened, a few years prior to our current story. But as a father and son make their way south to survive the approaching winter, their individual characters, their relationship, and one or two folks and scenes along the way illustrate that there was and is virtue and beauty among us, even as we face ourselves at our worst, in the wake of our most self-destructive disaster.

So why not a 4.0 for The Road? First, as much as I love Robert Duvall, so distinctive a voice has no place here, especially not coming as a surprise and in a feeble effort to disguise an iconic actor. Already I've grudgingly forced myself to accept Viggo Mortensen and Charlize Theron as a couple of poor and ordinary country folk. Why not drop Sir Laurence Olivier and Lawrence Welk into Appalachia while we’re at it?

Also, in last 15-20 minutes, I find some implausibility in the father’s choices, given weather and topography, about where to plop down and whether going for a swim might be a good idea. Finally, the appearance of four and half or five new characters at the end comes entirely too close to a deus ex machina for my tastes. The final scene is not impossible, but the fit is a little loose in a world where cannibalism is common.

I don’t know what scientists are saying about the likelihood of the McCarthy and Hillcoat vision of post-apocalyptic America and earth, but with the minor reservations voiced above, it feels realistic, including the possibility that writing us off as entirely evil and stupid is simplistic and premature. So, whether you’ve thought a lot or not at all about nuclear holocaust, this film ought to rub some hard edges off your conclusions, one way or the other. And that’s what art is for.

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