colonialism
James Cameron's 15 year in the making visual spectacle
There is not a moment in Avatar that left me doubting the love and work that has gone into this movie. It is a visual spectacle unlike anything I’ve seen so far. But the movie left me feeling like Cameron put time into making the best Lego blocks and then assembled a cuboid. The plot is unoriginal, the characters one-dimensional and the dialogue predictable. The cause he takes up is worthy, but the circumstances he builds around it appear painfully contrived. As a study of creativity, this movie is a good example of how one can build a new experience without an ounce of originality as long as one can be inventive with adaptation and repackaging.
The setting is Pandora, a distant moon. Pandora has life on it, tall blue skinned Navi being the human equivalents of its ecosystem. Unlike us humans though, the Navi live in perfect harmony with nature. Every creature is precious; the planet is their God. The earthlings; mercenary soldiers, corporates and scientists, are primarily there to mine, unimaginatively named Unobtanium, a valuable mineral, even at the cost of damage to everything the Navi hold dear. Pandora is not habitable and the humans need a variety of gizmos to be able to stay alive and the Navi are putting up whatever resistance they can. Except that the scientists can now let a human consciousness control a lab developed Navi body, the Avatar. The human sleeps while his Avatar roams about Pandora. Jake Tully, an injured marine, in Avatar form, begins a mission to infiltrate the Navi on a pretext of friendship and bring them down, but switches sides after knowing their ways and falling in love with their princess. The rest of the movie is about how this does not go down very well with the bad guys.
A large section of the movie is devoted to Jake’s discovery of the Navi way of life. This is enthralling but does little to progress the plot. It is, though, a fantastic canvas for the special effects work in the movie. If you are like me, this gets boring after a while. Not to mention painful, given the stiff 3D glasses. At 160 minutes, Avatar is far too long not to give a headache; and with all this time, Cameron still could not evoke an emotional connect with the characters, from me, thanks mainly to dialog like “I see you”(Jake to Navi princess) and “I trusted you”(Navi princess to Jake)
Science fiction and fantasy movies only become engaging when there is originality in them that questions our world. Avatar is an obfuscated Rambo movie, where the whole script gravitates towards a convenient logic defying unlikely victory with loads of money thrown into making the fireworks pretty. It lacks both the cleverness and soul for anything more. But it is a work of immense labour; and for that it wins credit.
