Reviewed by Lamar Kukuk
12/20/09
James Cameron hasn't been
gone, per se, he's just been, well, around. Since his Titanic
became The Biggest Movie Ever and won a bazillion Oscars back in 1997,
he dabbled in TV with the series Dark Angel (writing the pilot and
co-writing the series finale, which he also directed), and made documentaries
like the snazzy Ghosts of the Abyss and the deadly dull Aliens
of the Deep as an excuse to play at two of his favorite hobbies:
underwater exploration and the emerging technology of digital 3D.
The later has finally inspired his return to the venue in which he became
the self-proclaimed King of the World, live-action blockbusters.
Avatar has been in the works for years, and Cameron developed so
much new technology to make it that the movie is sure to change the way
future movies look just as his groundbreaking Terminator 2: Judgment
Day did almost 20 years ago. As such, it arrives perhaps overhyped
as a “game-changer” equivalent to the likes of Gone With the Wind
and The Wizard of Oz 70 years ago. Try to put the hype out
of your head: Avatar takes technologies like 3D and motion
capture photography to places just a little bit ahead of where they've
been before, but it's not like seeing the movies reinvented, particularly
since the story is a slam-bang update of Dances with Wolves that
bears more than a passing resemblance to May's little-seen 3D flick Battle
for Terra. But it is an engaging natives-vs.-colonials tale that
piles on the spectacle and delivers a half-dozen great performances.
It's middle-of-the-pack Cameron, but last time I checked, that's pretty
damn good.
In the distant future, Marine
Jack Scully (Sam Worthington) suffered a spinal injury in combat that forced
him into a wheelchair. His identical twin brother, a scientist, is
killed, creating an opening for Jake on a project that requires someone
with the same DNA. Millions of light years away, humans are mining
the ridiculously valuable Unobtanium on the planet Pandora, and have run
into trouble with the native population known as the Na'vi. Dr. Grace
Augustine (Sigourney Weaver) has drempt up a solution: create look-alike
Na'vi bodies of human and alien DNA that can be driven by humans in sensory
deprivation chambers. These creatures will relate to the natives
in a way humans couldn't (not the least because Pandora's atmosphere is
unbreathable for us) and hopefully be able to negotiate mineral rights
and peace. Jack takes quickly to the technology, which allows him
to walk again in his Avatar body, and makes contact with the locals through
Neytiri (Zoe Saldana) the daughter of the Clan's leader, Eytucan (Wes Studi).
The Na'vi know about humans, and wisely do not trust them, but the revelation
that Jake is a warrior rather than a scientist intrigues Eytucan, and Neytiri
sees several signs from their Goddess Eywa that he is special. The
Na'vi agree to train him in their culture, but Jake awakens each night
from his sleep on Pandora to the human world where he reports the intelligence
he gathers to Colonel Miles Quaritch (Stephen Lang). Quaritch has
given Jake just three months to persuade the Na'vi to leave their massive
Hometree, under which lies the planet's largest deposit of Unobtanium.
But that time is almost up, and the natives aren't going anywhere.
With the corporation for which they work ready to kill every Na'vi they
have to in the name of profits, each human on Pandora will have to choose
a side.
As I've mentioned, the filmmaking
wizardy on display in Avatar is more akin to a new version of Windows
than the introduction of it, but this is one seriously impressive technical
display. While 3D's gotten the headlines, it's in the use of motion
capture where the film really shines. A lot has been written about
the Uncanny Valley syndrome that causes our brains to reject artificial
creations that look almost, but not quite, like humans, and the way the
original motion capture technology that created all those Robert Zemeckis
animated movies and movie character like Gollum and Davy Jones struggled
to find a way around it. Here, Cameron pretty much drops a hydrogen
bomb on the Uncanny Valley, creating alien creatures whose eyes actually
seem to contain souls, and dual human/alien roles in which actors like
Worthington and Weaver are completely free to perform as their Na'vi doppelgangers.
In the case of actors like Saldana and Studi, who play only the natives,
it's possible to imagine them as living, breathing creatures with no human
counterparts. And the perspective, weight and physical presence of
the Na'vi is completely consistent: there's never a moment when the
seams of their effects show.
So too is the Planet Pandora
an amazing achievement. While it fails to dethrone the Skull Island
of Peter Jackson's King Kong remake as my favorite movie ecosystem,
it does come close. Pandora is a savage land full of things that
want to eat you, but also totally alien plant life that looks more like
the things we see at the bottom of the ocean than anything on Earth's surface.
It's kind of a letdown that all those weird tentacles occupying the Pandoran
jungle never actually do anything, but I'm in no hurry to stand near them
either. That Cameron manages to eventually make their inhospitable-looking
alien world feel like home is a testament to his success at creating
an environment that is totally at peace with itself even as it has no tolerance
for anything outside its' balance. Avatar is a “tree hugger” movie
and a half, but it gets away with being a little preachy because Pandora
walks the walk in addition to talking the talk: the connections between
its' life forms are not just metaphorical, and when they talk about the
world having a spirit, they are not just babbling New Age mumbo-jumbo.
Don't mess with Eywa.
I suspect that most of Avatar's
virtues would translate to 2D, coming as something of a surprise since
it's as a revolution in 3D technology that the movie has been most hyped.
Cameron shows us a few amazing feats of depth perception, particularly
an opening shot of dozens of cryo-chambers opening at once through an astonishing
depth of field, and also a breathtaking look down from a log suspended
high above Pandora's surface. But he's mostly concerned with 3D's
use to make surfaces look convincingly real, and I do believe that this
alien world is so believable in large part because its' surfaces have been
rendered in 3D. This isn't a pop-up book (a shame, too, because I
like pop-up book 3D as much as anybody), but it does have its' moments.
Although Avatar's
story is familiar, it does a lot of things right that its' predecessors
on the plot's well-trod road did wrong. The mechanics of the Avatar
technology allow Jake to toggle back and forth between the two worlds competing
for his allegiance, preventing the story from bogging down in either one.
And while the Na'vi are clearly stand-ins for any number of conquered indigenous
peoples, the literal nature of their connection to their world keeps them
from seeming like a bunch of crybabies who just don't want to move to a
new tree. They certainly run circles around the drab, saintly natives
of Battle for Terra's world.
All of which doesn't mean
that Avatar isn't at least a half-hour too long at roughly 165 minutes.
Cameron's got an old-school sense of pacing and an 80's-trained screenwriting
style where virtually nothing is mentioned onscreen that isn't intended
to set up some future payoff. But he's created solid archtypical
characters and assembled a great cast to play them, so while the movie
could have been tighter, it never truly drags.
Worthington is a budding
star in large part because of his oh-so-Australian ability to be both Killing
Machine macho and sympathetically sensitive at the same time. For
a man who spends half the movie in a wheelchair and the other half literally
encased in special effects, he's able to keep his performance surprisingly
spontaneous. It's great to see Weaver back in such a large role,
and she balances the egomaniacal and virtuous aspects of her character
very effectively so she never ends up being That Wishy-Washy Scientist
(she's said in interviews that she modeled the performance on Cameron himself).
Michelle Rodriguez provides her usual strong support as the most sympathetic
of the mercenaries to the Na'vis' plight. Saldana disappears very
effectively into her alien skin, being both effectively inhuman with her
body language and recognizably human with her emotions.
But it's Stephen Lang who
really steals the show. Quaritch comes from a long, proud line of
cinematic military men whose preference is to kill every native he comes
across, but what makes the performance really sing is the way the 57-year-old
actor persuades us he's the toughest man in the universe. Perhaps
the movie's most delightful moment comes when he sees one of the corporation's
ships being stolen from the oxygenated comfort of their control center,
whips out a gun, shouts “masks on!” and then kicks down the door, steps
out into the Pandoran atmosphere and opens fire for what seems like five
minutes before someone helpfully rushes out to see if he needs any oxygen.
Quaritch need to breath? Fat chance!
Cameron's seven Hollywood
films split right down the middle between Red Meat Cameron (the Terminator
movies, Aliens & True Lies) and Touchy-Feely Cameron
(The Abyss, Titanic). Avatar joins the latter
group with its' environmentally conscious themes and sentimental love story,
so it may not console fans who viewed Titanic as an off-day for
the man who invented liquid metal cyborgs. But it does have a lot
more automatic weapons than his Oscar-winning historical epic, and puts
him right back in the catbird seat as a special effects innovator.
Let's not wait another 12 years before we do this again. |
