Avatar: A Second Opinion
So, Avatar has made a gajillion dollars and everybody seems to have something to say about it. Whether its talking about the stunning visuals or truly inspired character design, most of the comments are super positive. Hell, it holds a Metacritic score of 85, which for a movie, is a pretty big deal. Avatar more than proves that James Cameron is still on the top of his game. I don’t want to parrot what Kary had to say in his post, but I do have a few things to criticize about the biggest movie of the decade.
A lot has been said about the use of 3D in the film. Personally I was not a fan of the 3D. While it wasn’t gimmicky, it didn’t stand out as a necessity either. For most of the movie I forgot I was watching it in 3D. If anything, Avatar proved that without the gimmicks, 3D is disposable. In fact, my eyes kinda started to hurt while watching.
I am willing to accept that the biggest draw with Avatar is its lush setting and imaginative characters (the Na’vi). The planet of Pandora is so immersive that despite the predictable plot and characters, you still care about what will happen next. The design is something that has almost taken a life of its own outside of the film. I actually think that Avatar has invented a new kind of nerd, and its kinda creepy. I enjoyed the movie and will wholeheartedly recommend it friends, but I don’t see myself watching it more than one or two additional times. Support groups and crazed Star Wars like fans for this movie have me really worried about the topic that I am tackling next.
Warning: This area will probably contain spoilers. The underlying story of Avatar can be summed up as an allegory to what the earth is going through with global warming and climate change. The Na’vi people, who live in the what is essentially a rainforest, are being chased out by an evil corporation, so they can tear it down and mine its soil. So there, I spoiled it, the humans are the bad guys. Its alluded to in the movie that the humans had destroyed their planet (I believe earth was referred to as “dying”) and need Pandora’s resources. This bothers me on multiple levels.
First off, there is no need for that to be mentioned in the movie. It adds nothing to the story and only helps to remove the thinly veiled agenda that the movie is pushing. During most of the film the human characters, at least the ones not participating in the resistance, were putridly one-sided, with the most egregious being Col. Miles Quaritch.
He plays a wicked Gargamel and portrays the humans as the black to the Na’vi’s white. Adding the dying earth subplot turned the bad human characters in to part of the bad human species. Once the humans are designated a “bad” species it forces actual humans (the audience) to reflect on themselves and how they are interacting with the earth. Had they left the corporation as soley a greedy money hungry character, the “go green” ideals would still be there, they would just seem a bit more subtle.
Secondly, I find it disturbing that a work of high fiction is being used to push a real issue here, and its getting away with it. As I watched Avatar I almost felt like it was trying to trick me into caring about the environment. By portraying the Na’vi as an almost flawless species, with all of their actions being justified by cause and effect, they play an excellent victim in the “don’t cut down the rainforest” debate. I was very surprised to see that a Co-Producer credit wasn’t given to Al Gore. If you want to push an agenda, just push it, just don’t shit in my cereal and expect me not to notice.
Before you say it, no, I’m not trying to push an agenda. I just don’t like it when entertainment is used in devious and often nefarious ways. If I want news I’ll watch CNN, please just keep your hands off my movies. Crazed love for a franchise can make a person do strange things (anyone that has seen my TMNT collection knows I’m not lying), I just hope that people are smart enough to make their political and environmental decisions on actual facts rather than a movie with 9 foot tall smurfs.
With that out of the way, Avatar was good and actually needed all of its almost 3 hour length to tell a compelling story. Is better than The Dark Knight? I think not.