Avatar (2009) - by Faro

This film cannot be watched on a small screen. Watching this on your television or computer would be laughably underwhelming... as is evidenced by the trailers which looked to be populated by anorexic Smurfs stretched tall and gangly by some medieval torture device. The subtle and exacting attention paid to every created detail on every CGI frame cannot be properly experienced without the proper canvas ratio, which for this film should be roughly the size of a football field... and thankfully the 34th Street cinema provided me with just such a screen.

It is appropriate that this film demands such size, because it is selling myth on two levels, and all successful myths must be simultaneously larger than life and cleverly re-imagined in the details. And James Cameron, as he has done in the past, succeeds admirably in the selling the technical myth of film-making creation and completely fails in selling a coherent an convincing myth of how we should then approach reality after we have left the theatre. (I point to the technical achievements and thematic failures of The Abyss with its brilliant water movements and psychological terror, but failed attempt to find salvation in the deep watery depths... and Terminator 2 that brought static metal into spark-inducing tension with fluid metal, but failed to make sense of timeline flaws and an unreconciled nihilism and hopefulness for the future... and Titanic which put us on the boat that captured the world’s imagination a 100 year ago, but was only able to momentarily convince 12 year old girls that true love is to be found when two people meet for a few passionate days and then one of them dies.)

First and foremost, and most important to those who sunk over $350 million into the project, he succeeds in selling the myth of the computer generated world of Pandora with a skillful blending of special technology and assured and energetic camera work. It's not enough to create a virtual world, you also need to know how to frame it... and he does. I dare anyone to watch this film and not get caught by the power, motion, and emotion of the visual world that is created here. After 2 hours it will pummel any person into believing in Pandora.

But Cameron is also selling the myth of the obliquely compassionate and fully integrated Natural Life Force as understood and experienced by a peaceful and organically-aware indigenous population. His blue-skinned natives, the Na’vi, call this Life Force by the name of Eywah, and can readily commune with it by means of a variety of fibrous outlets coming out of trees, horses, and dragons... and whose name is for some reason a poorly disguised anagram of Yaweh, the English spelling of the Hebrew word for God. (Astonishingly this screenplay blunder is actually bested by the name given to the precious metal that lures humanity to this alien world... "unobtanium".... this is too stupid to comment any further upon.) But this is no deranged desert dwelling monotheistic being with riveting soliloquies and bold actions; Cameron is selling an all together more interwoven and pantheistic sort of mythology here... aptly defined a few years ago by the brilliant theologians of the Disney Corporation as "the Circle of Life".

Not only is the myth he is trying to sell us an over-used and reductive imitation of numerous far more complex and rewarding philosophies of several different cultures, he also fails to excitingly and effectively re-imagine the details of it's delivery. This Life Force is too perfectly connected too everything, when we know full well by experience that nature, at least at our daily conceptual level, moves in fits and starts and without much meaning*. The natives are too perfect as well, with every facet of their society blended so harmoniously with every tendril of their natural world and with each other; there is no sense of there ever having been Mayan forest burnings or Incan human sacrifices or Plains Indians tribal fighting across generations. They are perfect, and they always have been, and always would have been till we showed up... or so we are to believe.

Indeed, Cameron’s overwhelming success in selling the myth of Pandora at a technical and visual level starts to highlight the foolishness of this all-knowing Life Force myth that he is attempting to sell at the same time. The irony of creating a story with hyper-expensive technology to attack and denigrate technology and the societies, like ours, that are slaves to it becomes increasingly difficult to over-look. Sure, he tries to ease us into the myth by letting an anti-ecological “jarhead”speak for the film and for us until he is slowly overwhelmed by the truth of Pandora, but this storytelling technique is unoriginal and unconvincing... its endpoint is known to us all well in advance of reaching the end. All things don't just converge into such a perfect visual, mythical, thematic teleology... and when someone tries to sell me on the idea that it does, I’ll be the first Scrooge to stand up and say what needs to be said.

So I left the theatre, glad to have seen such a terrific spectacle, and excited to come back and write another RAW review... the first of the new year. And as I walked past Macy’s, I saw a big bold word written in lights 30 feet high affixed to the side of the building... “Believe”. So I stood a moment, snapped a picture for this review, thought to myself "that's appropriately vague", and said aloud to no one in particular, “Bah-humbug”.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year everyone.... welcome to 2010!

*Natura non facit saltus (nature does not leap), though apparently still a binding concept in current evolutionary synthesis, is not something this reviewer is interested in discussing as being a process that is consciously organized by itself... it is just how it moves, not why it moves. Otherwise, it would sign its handiwork.