Avatar - an opinion.

The most disappointing thing about the movie Avatar is this idea of failed expectations. If a guy goes into hiding for a little short of a decade, brooding over whatever amazing peace of artistic genius he happens to be sculpting, when he emerges, it better be a Sistine Chapel or a Washington Monument or a War and Peace. And it better not tease us with the some sort of facsimile; we see the mansion from the road, but once we enter what we think is the front door, we turn around to see the ‘mansion’s’ backside, and it’s nothing but plywood, lumber, and studs. It’s got to have width as well as height. This is the main reason why Axl Rose’s Chinese Democracy was a commercial failure: the mechanical pyrotechnics had no soul - the madman went underground to be an aloof monk, having over a decade to craft a Mona Lisa, and comes up with a hodgepodge of unrelated, and overlong, singles, technically apt, but over-conscious and over-stuffed.

Avatar is a visual goldmine, accomplished with state of the art technology, and perfected by the craft of a genius, using never-before-created tools to present a 3D image the likes of which had never been done before. It was the element of something new, progress, an evolution into new regions of cinematic creation that was the meat of the buzz surrounding the movie. Cameron’s love for dark and light blues had the opportunity to be splashed on a canvass never before manufactured. The only problem was: we’ve got to get the images to say something. Herein lies the heart of Avatar’s Achilles’ Heel. When such beauty is mixed with such adolescent speech, the result is a peculiarly unfortunate and discordant mix. If a morbidly fat woman began to speak fluently and logically, had an engaging personality, and humorous wit, or could tell a great story, we soon forget the image and preoccupy ourselves with the personality. But the beautiful blonde with the voluptuous torso, with the tan skin, who happened to talk at the level of a second grader or who happened to be mentally retarded, is not as quickly forgotten, and in social circles, is soon ignored or mocked. The looks produced high expectations for the woman; when she spoke, not just our estimation of the woman dropped, but the appearance does too. This might be Avatar’s curse. Avatar is a drop-dead gorgeous babe, elegantly dressed, lightly but effectively perfumed, with a graceful gait, and a seductive smile; but then she talks. The discordance comes at you almost like a skipping CD during your favorite song, or like the power going out on your TV during your favorite movie.

I also thought the story cliched. There was once a time when the story wasn’t cliched. There was a time when every story was at one time not cliched. By a story being cliched, I mean that the fundamental skeleton of the story has been repeated so many times with so little adjustments or tweaks, that you can’t even pay attention to the latest permutation without thinking about all the prior clones. A good way to break away from a cliched story is the fixing of elements with the aim of avoiding that psychological possibility. A cliched story is the one about the good guy protecting the protagonist from the antagonist. But a good movie that made use of this cliched story is Terminator 2; a bad movie that made bad use of the cliche, and is because of this a bad cliche, is probably Cyborg. But Avatar couldn’t allow me for a span of two minutes to forget about this recycled, cliched story Cameron is making use of to preach to me this liberal parable about the evils of colonialism or military mindlessness or the evils of Western Civilization, or the evils of all the ways through history ‘superior cultures’ have instituted their own brand of ‘Manifest Destiny’. Have a moral, but don’t consciously use a cliched story as the unwitting puppet for your sermon; you come off as obnoxious, not caring about art for art’s sake, and sanctimoniously snobbish.

If you’re going to have a sermon, you better couch it in a very good story, a story good enough to distract the audience’s attention throughout the film, so they are so engrossed, that the thought of any kind of moral you might have implanted into the film germinates only after the movie is over, and germinates in a way that is not noticed. In this way, the audience gets the feelings of being in control of their thoughts, and the moral seems to be considered as a result of their own, or what they think is their own, thoughtful ruminations about the movie. But throughout Avatar, the moral, I felt, was shoved in my face, that the moral was screaming at me, that Cameron was shouting at me how my own sentiments were awful, and the shouting was so loud I nearly missed the movie. In my ear, I heard Cameron constantly whispering things like: “Yes, the women are mostly good; yes, the military is mostly bad; yes, most white men are either sniveling or feminized or alpha-male drones obsessed with guns and death; yes, any minority is good; yes, the victims of colonialism were completely helpless tribes, utterly sinless, with no hand in their own subjugation, utterly spotless in their transgressions, with no possible hostility toward neighboring tribes; that is, until the evil Westerners ruined everything.”