James Cameron (2009)

In 2009 the increasing divide between ‘prestigious’ pictures and commercial successes caused the US Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to revert to more nominations for Best Picture than for any other Oscar category – in the hope of admitting more box-office smashes into the competition for the top prize and arresting the decline in TV ratings for the awards show.  This year there will be ten instead of five Best Picture nominations, for the first time since 1943.  It’s an irony that the thinking behind the Academy’s decision is already being overtaken by events.  James Cameron’s Avatar is now set both to become the highest-grossing motion picture of all time and to win the Best Picture award[1]. Cameron started developing the idea of Avatar in 1994 – three years before the release of his last non-documentary feature Titanic and long before the technology needed to realise his vision for Avatar was available.  Fifteen years in the making, at a cost of (say) four hundred million dollars[2], and a cast of at least hundreds, even if plenty of them are computer-generated:  Avatar is a technically new-fangled spectacle yet there’s also a nostalgic aspect to its appeal – a widespread sense that this kind of ‘big’ picture is what going-to-the-movies-is-really-all-about.

Avatar is set in the middle of the twenty-second century.  Humankind, having trashed the Earth, is looking to exploit the natural resources of another world, a small planet called Pandora, rich in a mineral called unobtanium.  The mining operation is headed by an American corporation, which uses former marines for security.  The inhabitants of Pandora are the Na’vi, blue-skinned humanoids who are physically much taller and stronger – but also more slim and graceful – than humans.  The Na’vi live in harmony with nature and worship a mother goddess called Eywa.  Because Pandora’s atmosphere is poisonous to humans and in order to improve relations with the Na’vi and learn about Pandora’s biology, scientists have developed Na’vi bodies – avatars.  These are modified with human DNA and controlled by genetically-matched, mentally-linked human operators.  It’s the DNA factor that brings Jake Sully, a paraplegic former marine, into the frame – as a replacement for his dead twin brother, a scientist who was trained to be an avatar operator.  At first, Jake is treated with contempt by Grace Augustine, the head of the scientific programme.  (The members of the corporation and the scientists seem to cohabit the same transporter-in-space.)   Grace, an anthropologist called Norm, and Jake go on a mission to Pandora in their avatar forms and Jake gets lost in the jungle, where he’s rescued by a female Na’vi called Neytiri.  From this point onwards, the narrative is mostly about Jake falling in love with Neytiri and about how the Na’vi resist the would-be colonists’ invasion of Pandora, which threatens both the Na’vi and the planet’s ecosystem.  In other words, Avatar draws on the story of Captain Smith and Pocahontas and its propelling themes amount to a pick ‘n’ mix censure of various expressions of American imperialism – contempt for the traditions of indigenous peoples, environmental irresponsibility, and so on.

The received wisdom is that Avatar has advanced filmmaking through the development, with specially made cameras, of 3D imagery and viewing, and that James Cameron himself has played a major role in developing this technology.  The picture is amazing to look at for a while even if, after the best part of fifteen minutes of trailers for 3D films beforehand, what’s initially most striking about Cameron’s picture is seeing normal human beings, rather than variously animated figures, moving in three dimensions.  Even so, the Pandora landscape, from its ‘floating mountains’ to little white airborne organisms that suggest a sea anemone-dandelion clock hybrid, is ingeniously realised.  The local fauna includes horses of expressionist design, and flying beasts with heads that are a cross between a bird and a fish.  The faces of the lofty, slender Nav’i – in particular the shape and set of their nose and eyes – are charmingly cat-like (with Native American details and make-up).  I liked Zoe Saldana, who is physically and emotionally flexible as Neytiri (her feline snarls are especially good)[3] – although I did wonder if Cameron was trying to boost the allure of the Na’vi through the dullness of his strictly human cast.  As Jake, Sam Worthington is uninteresting (and at first inaudible in his voiceover narration – although that may be doing us a favour).  The villainously red-faced head of the security staff (Stephen Lang), the corporate administrator (Giovanni Ribisi) and Norm (Joel David Moore) don’t have a surprising moment among them; Michelle Rodriguez as a girl marine hasn’t many more than that.  Even Sigourney Weaver, as the chief scientist, is pretty drab until she peers at a computer screen to see what’s happening under one of the Na’vi’s sacred trees and diagnoses ‘ … something really interesting going on in there biologically’.  Delivering this daft line seems to perk Weaver up – she starts to get some wit into her lines (her commanding height, relative to most of the men on board, is amusing enough all the way through).  It’s too bad that not long after this Grace Augustine is mortally injured.

According to press notes, the picture aims to ‘deliver a fully immersive cinematic experience of a new kind, where the revolutionary technology invented to make the film disappears into the emotion of the characters and the sweep of the story’.  In fact, it’s essentially the reverse:  the emotion of the characters and the sweep of the story disappear into the revolutionary technology, which is all that really counts.  You soon adjust, though, to your new relationship to the screen.  Within an hour I found I was no longer reacting much to the 3Dness of it all:  the picture had turned into something largely indistinguishable from any 2D blockbuster which lives or dies by its special effects.  For as long as the 3D magic holds, the sophistication of the non-human sights and the non-verbal sounds of Avatar and the poverty – or cynical shrewdness – of James Cameron’s themes seem to be existing in parallel universes.   You switch between the rich CGI images and the ropy sci-fi acting back on the transporter, as the lame New Agey dialogue echoes in your head (it’s no surprise to learn there’s-a-mysterious-force-which-runs-through-and-joins-together-all-living-things).   Once the magic wears off, the dichotomy between technical brilliance and the dim-wittedness of everything else dissipates too and Avatar degenerates into noisy, expensive-looking trash.  It’s thought-provoking not in its content but in what it represents in cinema.

Many people who watch films casually and go out to see them occasionally regard cinema as ‘entertainment’ in a way they wouldn’t dream of regarding theatre or opera or ballet.  Films may be something they feel they’ve grown out of – and you can sense their irritation with someone who’s seriously – which means too seriously – interested in them.  You occasionally hear otherwise intellectually pretentious people say that when they go to see a film they want to give themselves over to it – they don’t want to think, as if anyone who thinks about a film, a popular film anyway, is precious or a spoilsport.   Some fans of Avatar will say that, because it’s such a spectacle, to think about it – or to complain that the writing and acting and music are lousy – is to miss the point.  (I have my suspicions that some of the same people will then try to tell you it’s a spectacle with depth because it echoes real environmental concerns and brings to mind what the US has done to Native American Indians or in Iraq or Afghanistan but never mind.)   Giving yourself over to this film, though, is a waste of 162 minutes.

If you’ve spent zillions of dollars it’s reasonable to want to show where the money went for as long as possible but Cameron takes a very long time to tell his small story.  (I can’t say I kept looking at my watch because I deliberately didn’t, fearful that if I did I’d be dismayed by what I saw.)  It is a mystery to me that people don’t find the film eventually numbing – just as it’s a puzzle that none of the reviews I’ve read comments on Avatar‘s protracted, deafening and boastful violence.  (Doesn’t it count as violence if it seems like a mega computer game and involves humanoids rather than humans?)   Another dominant feature of Avatar is its Dances with Wolves moral self-satisfaction and deep lack of humour:  if naming the precious mineral unobtanium suggests levity it’s about the only thing that does.  (And if giving the chief scientist incongruously Christian names and calling one of the corporatists Selfridge is mildly intriguing, the choice of Pandora for the mother-worshipping planet isn’t.)

It isn’t a shock that Avatar is a global hit – it’s already passed Titanic at the top of the all-time box-office takings league – or that in Hollywood the Academy is likely to reward it richly too.  The writer-director is quite candid about having drawn here on plenty of other sci-fi, in literature and cinema.  Of course that’s fine and, for many of those who can recognise the influences and references, it no doubt enriches the experience of watching Avatar.  It’s more striking though that the film is being so well received in some demanding critical quarters – even by Michael Wood in the London Review of Books.  (Perhaps not a surprise, though:  Wood is a very clever writer whose weakness as a film reviewer is that he’s evidently more concerned to show you how clever he is than to tell you about the film.  One way of Wood’s demonstrating his cleverness is to confound expectations – so that if you assumed Avatar would give him a chance to be elaborately contemptuous, he’s going to show you that you haven’t got his measure.)   But Cameron’s picture does raise a serious question.  If the survival of an art form – or of a form of entertainment without pretensions to art, for that matter – depends on its ability to do things that no other art can do then Avatar is an important event in cinema, especially when the unique qualities of the medium beyond its capacity to overwhelm the audience sensorily are not that easy to define.

David Thomson, in a Guardian piece a few days ago entitled ‘Ozu v Avatar – this really is what cinema has come down to’, wrote as follows:

‘This matter is all the more important at this moment as we all suffer the aftershocks of the disaster known as Avatar, which is being defended by notable film critics as not just the return of, but the redemption of, “spectacle” cinema. I will not dispute the level of spectacle in Avatar. And I am nostalgic enough about the engineering of prolonged battle scenes to concede that James Cameron has not lost the touch with armed struggle that he displayed in Aliens and the Terminator films. But Avatar is garbage, too, and that can only be pinpointed by stressing its abject subject matter and its inability to see that the most spectacular thing the movies ever had to offer (see Renoir, Ophüls, Ozu, Bresson … well, just keep seeing) is the human face as its mind alters or saddens.’

I sympathise – even if I find Tokyo Story as hard to sit through as Avatar – but if ‘the human face as its mind alters or saddens’ is the hallmark of cinema, how exactly does that distinguish the medium from television?    It will need more than this to persuade people that Avatar isn’t the-cinema-of-the-future and James Cameron is a firm believer in his own egocentric publicity.  I hope it’s at least another twelve years before he releases another picture but I think he’ll have the sequel bit between his teeth pretty soon.

21 January 2010

[1]  In the event, Avatar won only three Oscars (for cinematography, art direction and visual effects).

[2] According to Wikipedia (in January 2010), ‘Avatar is officially budgeted at $237 million; other estimates put the cost at $280–310 million to produce and $150 million for marketing’.

[3] Cameron developed, according to Wikipedia, ‘an improved method of capturing facial expressions, enabling full performance capture. To achieve the latter, actors wore individually-made skull caps fitted with a tiny camera positioned in front of the actors’ faces; the information collected about their facial expressions and eyes is then transmitted to computers. According to Cameron, the method allows the filmmakers to transfer about 95% of the actors’ performances to their digital counterparts’.