What's Wrong with Avatar?

At this moment, in the midst of the frenzy, not caring for Avatar is like dissing Dr. Seuss, or insulting Monty Python. People look at you with a combination of confusion and pure, personal hurt. “How could you?” Or more precisely, “What’s wrong with you?”

But I didn’t care for it. Sorry, I just didn’t. Avatar left me cold. Unimpressed. Not elated or angry; not filled with hate or transported. And not so much disappointed as just … meh

At first I thought my fellow science fiction fans, as jaded and often betrayed as I, would join me in standing up to declare the emperor was missing his jock strap, but … nope. Even guys like Harry “Ain’t-It-Cool-News” Knowles were wildly positive, at once saying it was just like or even better than John Carter of Mars (how right he was! See below…) while at the same time saying it was like nothing he’d ever seen before.

I turned to the younger set, to gamers, who have seen better CGI on the Xbox that Avatar offered. And here, too: most of the sixteen-year-old gamers (of both genders) that I talked with were as crazy for the movie as their elders. The same guys who shrugged at Twilight and are totally over Harry Potter.

I feel alone. I feel as if I’ve failed some test for having a sense of wonder, that 55 years of exposure to bad movies and good special effects has finally taken
its toll.

But I’m not like that. I’m not. I really believe that the reaction to Avatar is wildly out of scale with its accomplishment; that it is derivative at best; that it does not represent a high water mark in film, storytelling, or technology.
There are a few gaps in the wall of wild-ass positivism. Some have pointed out that the story is nothing special – but then they immediately move on to florid praise for the characters, or the depth and detail of the manufactured Na’avi culture, or the amazing CGI/live action meld.

But it’s not true. None of it. There are better examples of mythic storytelling, character development (even in fantasies), world-building and even CGI/live action interaction than what we’re seeing here – recent ones, in widely available media.
I have thought about this long and hard. I’m willing to talk about it in some detail, if only to explain that I’m not really such a bad guy.

Same Story, Different Day

Avatar’s plot, simply put, is at best trite, sloppy at the center and end to end, and at worst insulting.

Trite: The “foreigner saves the local savages” plot was old when Edgard Rice Burroughs blew through it in the John Carter of Mars series (note that: we’ll be coming back to Carter and Burroughs many times). Using terms like “classic” or “mythic” or “archetypal” to describe a tired old plot we’ve seen before does not excuse it; it’s still just a tired old plot we’ve seen before. The cliché’s are as abundant as the trees on this arboreal world: the evil corporation, the crazy militarist, the noble savages (another ‘archetype’ we will revisit), the outsider falling in love with the princes, the bitter monarch who sees the error of his/her ways too late. There’s not a character or a concept here that doesn’t’ ring a dozen bells of recognition; the one-page treatment of this plot wouldn’t get past a lower-echelon reader in any modern studio or publishing house. We have seen all of it, all of it, every scintilla of it, before. Repeatedly.

Sloppy: The premise and the plot itself are both almost painfully illogical. Begin with the cursory presentation of of the RDA’s, the “let’s rape nature” corporation’s, motives for being on Pandora in the first place. “Unobtainium”? Really? Twelve years of story development, and that’s the best Cameron could come up with? An awkward 30 seconds of exposition about a mythical element that’s absolutely essential, apparently does not exist on or near Earth, and so gob-smackingly valuable it warrants a five-year trip across interstellar space and the subjugation of an entire planet? We are asked to accept from the outset and without explanation that an Earth 150 years in the future has a technology so advanced it can travel (albeit slowly) to the stars, clone humans and recombine DNA, but hasn’t found an alternative energy system – not solar, not fusion, not even the mining of the asteroids or other planets – but instead has to travel five light years to dig some rock out o the earth to save humankind. And not even a single sentence acknowledging the unlikelihood, or at least the irony, of that situation. It’s so hollow it hurts.

In fact, Earth’s current state is scarcely mentioned at all outside of one short, sarcastic, and hideously stilted speech by Giovanni Ribisi’s corporate shill character. There’s not so much as a moment’s screen-time given to portraying the desperate situation at home, though it wouldn’t have taken much; 2009’s overlooked and underrated sf film Pandorum (forgive the unintentional similarity in names) manages to communicate exactly that same situation in a few deft strokes at the beginning of its own deep-space-chase adventure. No, in Avatar, we’re just here and we have to destroy the planet to get what we want and that’s that. No arguments.

As deep as that flaw might be, if that was the sum total of the film’s difficulties, even a nitpicker like me could probably overlook it. But the illogical and convenient fractures in the plot just keep coming:

• The RDA is shown as vastly superior in firepower and untouchable by the natives; the worst the Na’vi can do is put arrows into the tires of the corporation’s massive transport vehicles, apparently without ill effects, And yet the military branch of the RDA can’t control the natives after years and years, and they are still a ‘problem’ too big to handle. You’d think by now they would simply ignore them; they can’t do any real damage to the mega-machines or the soldiers encased in steel.

• The “unobtanium” deposit in question is under one of the apparently thousands of world-trees that connect the tribes to the planet. And we have no interest on what’s on top of the ground (or even the tree itself), just what’s under it. So if the RDA is truly as insensitive and acquisitive as it seems, why not simply round up the Na’vi tribe and move it halfway round the world, where even the most determined members can’t get back, and then mine away to their heart’s content? This isn’t a world-spanning disaster, it’s a case of moving one indigenous tribe of a few hundred people away from a valuable mining operation. We’ve done it a hundred times, everywhere from Brazil to South Africa to the Arctic. Involuntary relocation isn’t a good thing to do, maybe, but it’s hardly the breakpoint of an entirely planetary occupation.

• We are told at the outset that the Na’vi are notoriously ‘hard to kill’ and yet … they’re not. Other than being 20% bigger and faster than your normal human, they seem to die quite readily from a hail of bullets, flame throwers, or simply being crushed by trees. If at its core the RDA is just a violence machine that wants that mysterious element for its own, wholesale slaughter seems an easy alternative. What’s the big deal? And why hasn’t it happened already?

• There seems to be no command structure at all. We have one (scarred and nutty) “Colonel” in charge, and even as he becomes increasingly irrational, he’s never called to task, nor do his nameless and voiceless subordinates every raise any questions. Think about it: this guy broke the atmosphere seal on the station, risking the lives of all the men and women in his charge, just to shoot at a few escaping traitors – unsuccessfully, no less. And yet there is no challenge from higher up or question from below. And the same goes for Ribisi. A trazillion-dollar operation run by a callow thirty-year-old and a psychotic colonel, with no oversight? Really? If this mission and the “unobtainium” it represents is so all-fired important to Earth, why would they put a nutbar in charge and not even try to supervise him? There were even people who questioned Jack D. Ripper in Strangelove (and come to think of it, these two characters resemble each other – almost as much as they both resemble Sarge in Small Soldiers).

• The RDA thought the scientists were important enough to fund, put on the planet, and even support … but they let the military roll right into Eden with its killing-machines without telling them, risking not one but two of their insanely expensive clone-bodies. Why have the avatars there at all if you’re going to ignore them? Simply drag them off-planet and save the oxygen. Otherwise ... they don’t even talk? Not so much as a phone call before finally destroying the Na’vi?

• So the RDA is truly ‘defeated’ by the Na’vi and driven off the planet by this one battle? They actually lost all of their ordnance, and the ability to make more killing machines, in this one sortie? The entire reason for coming to Pandora, the overwhelming technological commitment to stay there for so long, is that fragile?

… and on and on and on.

It’s one thing to pick away at a single plot hole or coincidence; it’s another to have trouble following or believing in the basic plot because it simply doesn’t make sense.

Insulting: I’m actually surprised that a host of commentators with credentials in political correctness haven’t brought this up already. Notice that the Na’vi, after decades of domination by humans, are incapable of saving themselves. They’ve barely been able to survive at all. Only a human, in blue drag, has the courage, brains, and vision to save them. This really is, like South Park says, Dances with Smurfs. It’s one thing to have a newcomer, or a Westerner, be used as a window of understanding onto a new or unknown culture; it’s entirely different to make him and only him the change agent, while making the natives stupid and suicidally resistant. One is respectful and open-minded; the other is arrogant and imperialistic.

The Lethal Atmosphere Question

And then there’s than non-breathable atmosphere -- the one element that actually could have offered some interesting and even non-cliched speculation, thrown into the mix and largely ignored.

At one level, it’s an incredibly convenient plot detail. Since the planet is irrevocably lethal to human habitation, it avoids the most obvious exploitation by Earth: colonization. With a single stroke, the real issues of imperialism are rendered moot. We don’t want this planet for ourselves; we can’t use it as a new home. And there can never be ‘real’ contact between our people and theirs, because we can’t even be in the same room (or open field) without suffocating. So skip all those annoying and complex issues – this is so much simpler.

On another level, it makes the entire strategy of the RDA even more nonsensical. Since we cannot put human workers on the ground without huge expense and risk, and even then only temporarily, and since there is an intelligent and organized species that can exist in this hostile environment … why hasn’t slavery even been mentioned? It is, after all, an economic imperative, and the RDA is all about economics. With all this brain-science advancement – enough to make Avatars to begin with – we didn’t even think about either enlisting or enslaving the only creatures that can work these mines without survival technology? We either want to ignore them or kill them, and nothing else?

For one brief moment, I thought this detail might lead to an actual fresh idea: that the RDA’s real mission was to terraform the planet, to use the “unobtainium” to kill all the Pandorans, in all those tribes, and take the planet for its own. The morality of that kind of imperialism, and the tragic binary nature of the dilemma, would make for some very interesting nuances: let this primitive people live, even if your own planet dies in the process? But no – it never comes up.
Cameron seems to have thrown the unbreathable atmosphere in as a way to heighten tension (he uses the “take a deep breath and keep fighting” bit at least three times) without giving its real implications a moment’s thought. And we’re all the poorer for it.


A Brave, Old World

Much and much more has been made of the wondrous world of Pandora, and how eye-opening, amazing, different it is. For the most part, I’ve chalked this up to viewers and reviewers who haven’t read a science fiction novel written in the last fifty years or so; in truth, Pandora is just a beautifully rendered Earthly rainforest with fantasy elements added, and the Na’vi aliens are humanoids prettified with big-cat DNA. Attractive, yes, but … different?
A number of sf writers have struggled with and explored the concepts of real ‘alienness’ in recent decades, whether it’s extraterrestrials, artificial intelligence, or paranormal. Others, like Niven/Pournelle’s Known Space series and a zillion movies and TV shows, have reveled in the concept of aliens as evolved or disguised Earth creatures. There are dog-aliens, bird-aliens, slug-aliens, lizard-aliens, insect-aliens and, of course, cat/lion-aliens. A glance through most sf comics or the DC and Marvel Universes, will tell you the same story, and there’s nothing wrong with that particular thought experiment. There’s just nothing new about it. In fact, short of the leaner build and bluer fur, Jake’s Na’avi form isn’t far from the Disney version of The Beast in Beauty and the Beast, or the Ron Perlman’s Vincent in the 1987 television series of the same name: the tragically beautiful lion-man.

Virtually all the ‘alien’ creatures of this ‘new’ world are equally familiar – old wine in polished-up bottles. The hammer-headed megadons are rogue rhinos who become battle-elephants; the beautifully colored flying lizards are obviously dragons with a bit of eagle thrown in (and writers and artists alike have fantasized about riding dragons or eagles in fantasy literature for a hundred years or more); there’s a horse-analog as well, and the friendly little jellyfish that float around Sully on more than one occasion aren’t even in disguise: they’re jellyfish that float in the air rather than the water. The plant life, too, is a color-variant on the rain forest; the healing tree is something like Spanish moss on a weeping willow; the Tree of Voices in an impossible huge oak, and the world-tree icon itself exists in everything from Norse mythology to E.R. Eddison to Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle: the world as a Big Damn Tree.

The culture of the Na’vi is almost startling in its familiarity as well. With bits and pieces lifted visually from Native Americans, Celts, and African tribes, they are presented as essentially, Super-Pagans, what Druids would have become if we’d left them alone. They are a science fictional twirl on Dryden’s Noble Savage, a human who is connected to the planetary spirit, to Gaia, through some mystical connections (though Sigourney Weaver’s character is given a couple of lines of randomly assembled sentences using quantum Ai.I. and brain-biology terminology to make that connection seem ‘real’ on Pandora, rather than ‘religious’ on Earth.). But Romantic Primitivism isn’t a new concept in anthropology or in popular fiction; once again, every cultural concept implied or explicit in the Na’vi culture comes from human cultures hundreds and even thousands years old. And the Na’vi don’t do anything with this apparent super-power. They’re just connected – and therefore, one assume, a little bit holy.

There are also some almost embarrassing echoes of other pop-lit icons present in the Na’ai culture. The long sequence of Sully and Neytiri dashing through the branches of the world-tree is uncomfortably reminiscent of Disney’s bland but energetic version of Tarzan not so long ago. The swaying bodies and luminous ceremonies are painfully evocative of Disney’s The Lion King, right down to the close-up of the flat-nosed, lion-eyed characters looking both nobly feline and human at the same time. We have been here before, recently, and not in a good way.
The point is not that it’s badly done; for the most part it’s beautiful. But it’s nothing new; it’s nothing we haven’t seen in literature and even on film over and over, so this constant drumbeat of “Avatar has redefined film; Avatar has used startling new technology to create world as real as our own, one you have never seen before” simply doesn’t work for me.


The ‘Amazing’ Technology

Is this what is enthralling the critics and audience so much? The “seamless” melding of live action and CGI, the “new” variation on 3-D technology? Because there seems to be very little ‘there’ there.

I cannot begin to understand the comments about “a new kind of storytelling;” there is literally nothing new about the way Cameron tells the story – not in terms of structure, composition, camera movements, or character. Cinematically, it’s astonishingly old-school. From a storyboard/shot-for-shot perspective, this is a very standard piece of storytelling; lots of uninspired but workmanlike shot composition -- two-shots, establishing shots, close-ups, both in the live action and the animated worlds. And nothing outré; Cameron avoids anything like handheld camera work, extended and (without CGI) impossible zooms or Hitchcockian dollies, extreme angles that other technologically advanced film-forms are prone to. The only slightly unusual cinematic detail is the somewhat expected number of unnecessary and intrusive camera-moves that are there just to show off the 3-D effects – moving in front of the semi-transparent (and truly cool-but-impractical) monitor screens for yet another 3-D moment, or dollying left-right/left-right in front of a writhing victim of na’avi arrows, so the shafts can ‘stick out’ of the screen at the viewer. This is camera movement that exists only for the tech; if you’re watching a flat-screen version of the film, it’s almost as distracting as watching Vincent Price in House of Wax, constantly looming forward/back, forward/back simply to make the audience go “ah.”

As for the marriage of CGI and live-action – the fact is, it isn’t married much at all, especially in the first 90% of the film. We see almost nothing but live action among the humans, while the Na’vi world is entirely CGI. In fact, the whole concept of the cloned Avatars makes it easy to keep that separation intact even as key characters move back and forth, notably Worthington and Weaver. The recombinant DNA angle even allows their avatars to look like their human counterparts, so even the least attentive audience member can’t get confused. Except for a few shots of the Avatar floating in a tank early on – safely unconscious and separate from live-action interaction – these two worlds exist entirely apart from each other, and even side-by-side comparisons are carefully avoided without the intervention of TV monitors or long shots.

When the two worlds finally interact directly in the last battle scenes, the action is fast, blurred, and explosive, with Lucasfilm-like quick cuts and motion that don’t the viewer more than milliseconds to see the match-cuts or variations between live ation and CGI. Speed, fast editing, and context make it tough to compare. In fact, the Lord of the Rings trilogy, with a completely different design and pace, does a far better job of marrying live action and awesomely naturalistic CGI in a truly undetectable whole, scene after scene, for hours and hours, even when cut and viewed at a leisurely pace.

One of the weakest examples of the ‘marriage’ is in the final death scenes of Sigourney Weaver’s characters, where the superimposition of her live-action face in the lighted faceplate of her digital body double is hard not to notice. The single scene in which`Sully and Neytiri interact directly – Sully’s ‘death’ scene -- is a series of alternating one-shots; straight comparison of the human version of Sully and the cartoon Na’vi is skillfully avoided, and the final, sullen evacuation of the humans by Na’avi and Avatars a few minutes later is a short series of moving long shots, where no one speaks (the narration handles it) or touches, once again avoiding direct interaction as much as possible. This is no Roger Rabbit; this isn’t a the latter-day iteration of Yoda or Gollum. This is two worlds – one live-action, one animated – existing side-by-side, with some fairly ragged work at the interfaces. If anything makes these worlds function together as a single whole, it’s the story, not the tech … and if the story doesn’t work for you, then the technology won’t help.

The Re-Re-Rebirth of Edgar Rice Burroughs

Rumor has it that Cameron’s going to do something ‘easy’ next – a film version of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ John Carter of Mars. This is a smart move; he has the team and the technology already in place to make a great adaptation of this hundred-year-old classic. In fact, he’s already made it.

Avatar IS John Carter, with a thin anti-corporate pro-Pagan shell, including the primitive empire, the exotic creatures, the stubborn and warlike locals, and the savior from another world in love with the planetary princess. Maybe it will take the completion of this other film to show the wider world how truly unoriginal Avatar is: not in the mind of James Cameron (who, quite, frankly, has always been an expert at adaptation, not originality – just ask Harlan Ellison) but in the works of Burroughs, and in the notions of romantic primitivism that extend another two hundred and fifty years farther into the past. We’re not talking Pandora here – there is nothing new in this box. We’re talking Barsoom. And Carter visited Mars for the first time in 1912, almost a hundred years ago.

I do hope the technological improvements continue – not the 3-D stuff; I could live to a much riper and older age and be quite content without wearing the glasses yet again. (Where’s that holodeck we were promised back in the Fifties?) But the easier, cheaper, and more flexible we can make the marriage of CGI and live action the better, though I continue to think Lord of the Rings and even the poor, beleagured Star Wars tech did that just as well or better long before Avatar premiered. I want to see more Roger Rabbits; I want to finally see Ringworld or Rendezvous with Rama or any of half a dozen Greg Bear novels; I want to see Howard the Duck done right, or even E.E. “Doc” Smith or King’s Dark Tower or These Mortal Engines. (In fact, I hear Steven Jackson is condsidering Mortal Engines as his next project. Yes!) So please: continue.

But what I saw this week in Avatar was really not much more than a beautifully designed design of a poorly told Burroughs pastiche. It is certainly nothing new or eye-opening, and certainly not the future of cinema as we know it. I think we’ve already seen that future, and this isn’t it. At least I hope not.
Meanwhile, have I lost my sense of wonder – or even my ability to experience that pure, simple “wow” in the dark? I don’t think so. I’ve felt it recently – most recently and more than once with Iron Man, which may be the world’s first truly good superhero movie, and the most recent Potter. Avatar just didn’t have the tools to trigger it in me. And I have to believe there are others that feel as I do; they’re just afraid to speak up, and I don’t blame them. Right now, talking trash about Avatar is like saying you enjoy the taste of baby seal.

As far as I’m concerned, that elusive sense of wonder has to come from something that is perceived as either never seen before or perfectly represented amd better than imagined. None of that is present in Avatar for me; just moderately clever variations on old, old material.