Avatar

It’s almost impossible to imagine anyone in North American who hasn’t at least heard of James Cameron’s Avatar. The 2009 science fiction epic is everywhere and is racking up accolades and excitement from all sorts of different types of people. It’s also winning awards, including the Golden Globe for Best Motion Picture – Drama and Best Director. Avatar is expected to scoop the Oscar for Best Picture, too.

Cameron started development for Avatar in 1994, but he held off on making it because the technology was not available for him to make it how he wanted. Fast-forward almost ten years later and Avatar started to take shape thanks to Cameron’s development of the Fusion Camera System in stereoscopic 3-D. The Fusion was actually used by director Robert Rodriguez to film a pair of family films.

Now the thing you’ve got to know about James Cameron is that he’s a “big vision” sort of filmmaker. He loves to tell broad, large-scale stories on the screen. Avatar is a story of epic proportions and it swells and heaves in large part due to Cameron’s presentation. The tale is brought to life using Cameron’s use of stereoscopic filmmaking techniques and, of course, the 3-D. But beneath all the technological work, there’s still a story to be told.

So Avatar is set in the year 2154 and centres on a planet called Pandora. People from Earth are hoping to colonize Pandora because of the existence of a substance that can bring a lot of energy. The substance is called, I kid you not, “unobtanium.” Staggering. Anyways, we’re introduced to a basic group of humans that are working for a mining company. The mining company has dispatched a series of mercenaries, of course.

Pandora is inhabited by Na’vi, a relatively tall species of blue people that resemble a combination between elves and Native Americans. They live in harmony with nature, but they’re standing in the way of all the unobtanium and the mining company needs the mercenaries to bust in there and get the Na’vi out of the way. To do this, they’ve dispatched some scientists who’ve come up with a way to infiltrate the Na’vi using things called “avatars.” Avatars are basically Na’vi forms with humans inside.

Cameron’s picture zeroes in on all of this and tries to create personal connections, of course. In order to make said personal connections, he’s going to need actors and that’s where Sam Worthington comes in. He gets to play the film’s protagonist Jake Sully. He’s a paraplegic former Marine and he’s supposed to get the inside scoop on the Na’vi, but there are a few complications and he finds himself falling in love with their love of nature and Pandora.

If the basic story outline sounds familiar, it’s because it’s reminiscent of just about every “going native” storyline in the history of film. As though to stress the point that things aren’t exactly entirely original, Cameron’s Na’vi are essentially blue Native Americans. They worship in similar ways, they communicate with animals in similar ways, and they have similar mythologized aspects. They give off an aura of mystery and majesty, sure, but don’t worry: the humans are still smarter.

For all their communion with Pandora’s environment, the Na’vi don’t wind up being all that bright and it isn’t until the human Jake Sully shows up as a Na’vi and gets into the tribe that they start being able to learn valuable lessons like fighting for what’s theirs and so forth. Prior to his arrival, the Na’vi sort of demonstrate a primitive sort of energy and remain objects designed to help elevate the hero.

Cameron does treat Pandora with a certain amount of respect and intrigue and there’s a lot of beautiful stuff to see, but I couldn’t help but struggle with the idea of the natural world being portrayed in a way that was so damn synthetic. I appreciated his use of colour, but I wasn’t overly enamoured with the animals or the plantlife. It all seemed pretty basic to me and the appearance of the Na’vi as merely blue and tall humanoids with pointy ears and glitter seemed a cop-out.

At the end of the day, though, people are going to worship this movie. Have I seen better expressions of honouring the planet and the natural world? Absolutely. Any Hayao Miyazaki film offers that. But Avatar is visually stunning and Cameron’s achievement should be seen. That it lacks a single original line of dialogue counts against it, too, but these sorts of big budget blockbusters are rarely meant to be examined this closely. In fact, I’ve probably already said too much. Sorry.

Trailer: