Avatar or Wow...Shiny

I can’t exactly not talk about Avatar. It would be ridiculous of me, me the girl who watches more movies than any living human being ought and reads (or used to read) more fantasy books than any living human being ought (as opposed to dead human beings who are judged by entirely different standards) to watch Avatar and not talk about it.

The problem is I don’t know exactly what to say. We’ll start with the things that are important:

1) Watch it in a good theater with 3-D; I recommend IMAX if available.
2) Part way through, when you’re thoroughly caught up in the world, try to remind yourself that none of the things you are watching are real. You’re brain probably won’t be able to process that.
3) Try to count all the lines/characters/stories that are blatantly ripped off of other movies and/or video games.

Avatar is a really, really beautiful movie and the effects are everything they were cracked up to be. It was a truly tremendous movie watching experience. The problem was the story; the story was good enough for the effects, but that was all. The story absolutely couldn’t stand on it’s own...at least not solidly.

But that, by itself, is another problem. Even as I wished the story (think Pocahontas) could be different, I have no idea how it might be different and still be the story that Cameron is telling. At times he does some really brilliant things--he plays with the hero quest in an unexpected way, he plays with gender roles in a manner I’ve grown to expect and love him for, he attempts to make what has become a joke something serious in its own right. I actually respect the attempt to present a nature based culture as not hoakey; the problem is he doesn’t exactly succeed. Partly I think because he relies too much on cliché and stereotypical Native American tropes, but mostly because as I was watching it I could feel how hard it was trying. A story should be like any other creative act; the audience should never know how hard it was to present.

A story should feel seamless, easy, and inevitable. Regardless of whether we can predict what will happen next, if we feel the plot is exactly the right plot for the story being told we forgive it. None of us doesn’t expect the hero to succeed and live happily ever after, and, in fact, many of us will be incredibly irritated if we aren’t presented with an ending that fulfills those requirements acceptably. But, the story can’t feel forced, preachy, or stolen. Nothing is original (and I really mean that) but everything great is individual. The problem with Avatar’s story was that it didn’t feel like James Cameron’s story. It felt like a lot of James Cameron’s stories, plus Independence Day, plus New World, plus Starcraft/Warcraft with a dash of Star Wars thrown in a blender and mixed around.

And the parts that were original to this movie, the parts that you felt encapsulated the movie best sometimes felt forced. Like Cameron had this great idea for a world where biology is magic and life and connection...but he just didn’t have the time to make it work in a narrative. That made me sad.

But it was good enough. It was good enough because the visual aspect of the movie was so stunning that as a viewer I didn’t necessarily care about the finer points of storytelling while I watched it. The story was solid enough that, while at times I was pulled out of the imaginary world, most of the time I could accept it and enjoy the sensation of seeing my childhood imagination brought to life...quite literally at times.

So it’s worth it. You have to see it in the theater, and you absolutely should do whatever you can to see it in a good theater. And if, at times, you find yourself finishing the quote from Empire Strikes Back that has been lifted directly, just concentrate on the shiny things. There are a lot of them and they are very cool to look at in this movie.