The release of Avatar puts James Cameron right back at the forefront as a heavy hitter in big-budget movie making. At a time when 3D movies have become almost a dime a dozen, Avatar takes cinematic immersion to a whole new level. This is not only a tribute to the film’s technical skill, but to Cameron’s ability to spin a good yarn and fuse technology into his extravagant storytelling style.
It has been more than 10 years since Cameron’s last outing as a director, when Titanic (1997) became the most expensive and highest-grossing film of the time, and it is hard to believe that classics like The Terminator (1984), Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991) and Aliens (1986), which have become milestones of cinema history for scores of movie-lovers, were released so many years ago.
Cameron shows that his passion for big ideas (revolving around the interaction of mother nature with human nature and its love of technology), big emotions and big explosions has not faded, and he now has production methods that enhance them still further.
With Avatar, he has created a massive movie that seems to have something for everyone, tapping into contemporary issues while telling a story that possesses all the classic elements of loss, love, initiation, challenge, self-searching and redemption which characterize the mythologies of the human race.
More than just a bold enterprise, Avatar is audacious; and like much that is audacious, it is occasionally ridiculous. Is Cameron trying to encompass too much? You ask yourself this during the flabby midsection of the movie. Fortunately, Cameron’s emotional investment in his characters and in the 3D CGI artistry of Pandora, the film’s lush planet, generates such momentum that he is able to carry the audience through some of the film’s minor infelicities.
The very name Pandora underlines Cameron’s mythological aspirations. This isn’t just a big action flick, he seems to be saying, but a story that looks at man’s loss of innocence, his evil and his greed, and also his ability to embrace, in the face of all adversity, hope for a better future. When you can’t take the sermon anymore, you only have to turn your attention to the visuals, which provide more than enough interest to keep you watching.
The central character of Avatar is Jake Scully, a paraplegic ex-Marine who finds himself on the mission to Pandora, where a huge military-industrial station is located to extract a mineral called unobtainium. A little heavy-handed in the allegory department there, but the name itself is unimportant, and what Cameron is tackling is the exploitation of the natural world and first world contempt for the wisdom of indigenous people. Post-colonialist dogma gets a thorough workout.
All that is good in a life is embodied in Neytiri, a member of the indigenous Navi people, who is played, through the agency of elaborate motion capture technology, by Zoe Saldana.
Scully meets Neytiri through his avatar, a genetically linked body which he controls while lying in a semi-coma back at base. Scully takes to his avatar with an exuberance born of his desperation to overcome his disability.
Fortunately, the tall blue-skinned Navi manage to overcome the Ja Ja Binks phenomenon and emerge as real, if rather simplistic characters with whom it is possible to sympathize. Through his Navi avatar, Scully takes delight in a physical life of hunting and exploring a phantasmagoric forest full of dangers and inexpressible beauty. The idea of a computer transposing us to another life is hardly new, but Avatar puts a less geeky spin on it and fiddles with the notion in a more sentimental fashion.
Although Scully’s mission is to understand the natives so his superiors can relocate them away from a sacred site they wish to exploit for its mineral wealth, he soon falls in love with a new way of life and inevitably with Neytiri. The rest is rather predictable. There are powerful echoes of Roland Joffes’ The Mission (1986), with Scully as Robert De Niro’s warrior-convert Rodrigo Mendoza. Cameron’s flirtation with a rather New Age spiritualism and nature worship might be a trifle over the top, and the reading of the conflict between man and nature is annoyingly superficial, but then, this is an action adventure after all, and whatever one might think about the tree-hugging proselytizing, Cameron certainly manages to keep the audience entertained in other ways.
While much of the hardware of the military mission on Pandora looks like it came from a garage sale of Aliens props, the forest world of Pandora is where the 3D Imax really comes into its own, creating a fantasy artist’s dream of vertiginous perspectives and deep panoramas that extend far out into space. Unlike many 3D action or horror films, Cameron does not use his 3D effects to shock with every conceivable thing jumping out off the screen. Rather, he uses it as an artistic medium, drawing his audience into the world his artists have so painstakingly created. When Scully’s avatar runs, leaps and flies through the forests of Pandora, the excitement of the paraplegic freed from the bonds of his body is palpable. As the audience, we too are released into a new and liberating space.
Avatar is a great big Christmas hamper of a picture, and audiences can pick and choose from the huge range of goodies available. Whether it’s some chocolate-coated environmental awareness, mean-looking gunships blasting away at magnificent flying dragons, or just a some old-fashioned romance, Avatar is almost enough fun to make you forget about those uncomfortable 3D shades.
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