Avatar is no Star Wars

I read and heard a lot of superlatives about James Cameron’s Avatar in the last two months. Some from well-known critics and mostly from the gen-pop — “awesome”. I knew very little about the story itself and that may have helped ground my expectations closer to Earth than Pandora. I waited for the opportunity, and now having watched it on IMAX 3D, I am not gushing.

Avatar has the best CGI ever, ably enhanced by 3D which itself is not great but sufficient. Cameron wasn’t trying to show how good the 3D can be; he knows most of us have experienced it by now. What he seemed to be saying was, “I have a great technology prototype for making movies, and this is a demo.” And thus, while great care has been taken in displaying the technology, the demo itself got little attention.

In one of the opening scenes, Jake Scully the paraplegic is shown wading past large vehicles and heavy machinery in his wheel chair. It is a clever scene where for a moment the protagonist and the audience feel alike. It may have been a scene to establish some quick bonding. The movie starts with a narration that reminded me of hard-boiled crime novels and gory computer games, more bonding, but its standard fell with time. That is true about several other things.

We hear about greedy corporations exploiting exotic lands on Earth all the time. We don’t give a shit. Cameron, who apparently does, transported the exact situation to Pandora. I probably could have gotten more engrossed had he stuck to one of those exotic lands on Earth as I couldn’t buy the premise on a different planet.

Could this really happen 150 years from now? They are on a new planet with a new species that has striking similarities to humans, but is not just another leaf-clothed tribe hugging trees. With the extremely dedicated folks of SETI, and the popularity they enjoy, it seemed to me that science would venture into a space before business, and explore it satisfactorily enough before the other plunders it for prosperity. Forget the military pumping megatons into an apparently superior (greener) planet, the Jill Tarters would be allowed to take all the samples they need unlike the Grace Augustines here. I hope. I admit it is entirely my disability in satisfactorily willfully suspending disbelief.

The Na’vi are an interesting species about which we get to know little, like their body colors, dressing sense, agility, luminescence, and that thousand-word vocabulary developed by Paul R. Frommer. When Jake Scully’s avatar gets seamlessly accepted by one of their tribes, it comes as a terrible disappointment considering that the movie was close to three hours long. Throughout, Scully like Cameron is more in awe than curious. For a man who got accepted and lived with them for months, and who got tutored by one of them, what does he know? We don’t know what he knows. How do they select the tribe leader? Are they matriarchal or patriarchal? Where are the children? How are the women treated? How does any woman other than Neytiri and her mother look like? At least the ones who we are told sing or dance or hunt better than all others? Even the one love scene could have been filmed carefully enough to further satiate my curiosity about their peculiarities. Instead, Cameron gave us an awesome scene where Harry Potter tames his Norwegian Ridgeback.

Greed, curiosity, faith, even slavery and white man’s burden are a few themes that the background could have been wonderful to explore. Of course, what Cameron chose to touch upon, rather not to touch upon were different. He chose awe. For about 250 million dollars money and decades of hard work it seemed to me like a great opportunity wasted, despite the fact that it already grossed over two billion dollars.

In the aftermath of Michael Bay’s Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, Roger Ebert may have felt about Avatar the same way he did after watching George Lucas’ Star Wars in 1977 ( or it’s been so long that he may have forgotten) and Cameron may be warming up to make the sequels, but Avatar is no Star Wars. Sure, Avatar is the most technologically advanced film of its times, but Star Wars became what it did for more than the technology, and more than the clever merchandising of lightsabers and stormtroopers. Fans still remember the music score by John Williams, R2D2 squeaking, Chewbaca growling, Han Solo and the Skywalkers stepping on each others’ shoes, and Darth Vader breathing through that respirator. They made James Cameron quit his job as a truck driver to enter the film industry.

Image Source: IMDB

Amazon Ads: