Avatar… a Review

Normally, when I see a movie, even a great movie, it warrants about the character limit of a Facebook Update plus whatever conversations I might have with friends and family about it. However, my opinions about Avatar were a tad too complex for that, and I miss the good ol’ days of freshman year when I posted a couple movie reviews. Oh, and I’ve been sitting on my notes for an Assassin’s Creed 1 review since the middle of last semester because I was just too busy, and I feel like this would be a nice warmup before finally writing that one.

But enough appetizers, now for the main course!

I’m tempted to not start off with the lengthy discussion of how beautiful the movie is and my major gripes about what I perceive as VisDev failures, but beyond aesthetics, there’s not much else to say; a couple little gimmicks do not change a generic plot into Best Movie Ever material no matter how pretty the setting is. And what the heck, the movie is chock full of eye candy, I feel pretty justified devoting a lot of time to the ocular confections.

So, the pretty bits:

Avatar is one of the prettiest things I’ve seen in my life. Leading up to the release, I saw a number of articles about designing the world of Avatar over on io9 (specifically the ones linked to in this hub article), and, as an aspiring creature designer and world-builder myself, I ate it up. There was finally something to get me excited about this movie that had otherwise been only floating on the periphery of my attentions. Almost all of the alien creatures are really cool, as are a lot of the interfaces the humans have with their technology. However, the design of the Na’vi and most of the actual human technology were, to borrow a friend’s terminology, huge, heaping piles of wasted potential.

The Na’vi, despite their fancy language (which I didn’t catch nearly enough of to make a judgment on what it sounds like because I was too busy trying to read subtitles that I’m fairly certain would have been barely legible even if I had worn my regular glasses under my 3D glasses) don’t feel alien enough. We have a world populated by organic deep sea sports cars -yes I just combined all the inspirations from the io9 link- and the planet’s humanoid race are just blue bipedal cats who just got scaled in Z to about 1.5x the height of a human. Come on, guys, couldn’t you have a little fun there? This isn’t Star Trek where ear extensions, eyebrow prosthetics, and a lack of emotion are all it takes to make an alien. Look at the precedent set by the other aliens on Pandora, and give us an intelligent race that captures some of the awesome aspects of those other creatures and distances them a bit from humans.

Of course, I hear some of you saying that if you make them too different from humans, we won’t be able to relate to them. That’s all well and good, but I don’t think the Na’vi were in any danger of hitting that threshold. If my love of science fiction has taught me anything, it’s that humans can relate pretty easily to any alien with similar proportions, limbs in roughly the same spots, the ability to use a language, and an expressive face. The Na’vi hit all those landmarks, so what would’ve been wrong with a snappier paint job, some more prominent glowy bits, and maybe some frills instead of boring old hair?

Oh, right, hair. That leads me to my biggest complaint about the Na’vi. So, lets look at every other creature on Pandora. For whatever evolutionary reason, they’ve all (at least the big ones) got a pair of tendrils sticking out of their shoulders that can link up with the tendrils on other creatures and allow them to “bond” (which I’m guessing is something like a Vulcan Mind Meld or perhaps a Goa’uld blending), and the Na’vi are no exception… except that their tendril somehow forms out of their dreadlocked hair. I hope Mr. Cameron has shown the door -ideally in the most passive aggressive manner possible- to whichever designer decided that was appealing or made any sense. I like the “bonding” mechanic, but why couldn’t the Na’vi have done it in a way that A) made them more interesting, visually, B) made them feel more like a part of their world, and C) made them feel more alien? Would it have added a significant chunk of time to the already Duke Nukem Forever-esque development of this movie to have given the Na’vi a pair of tendrils sticking out of their shoulders like most of the other animals on Pandora? Heck, worst case scenario, why not stick the tendril on their tails (assuming they could tastefully position it while riding the creatures)? The dread-ponytail is probably the worst place to put that (especially since all the Na’vi have different hairstyles, which leads to a whole new can of functionality worms regarding the tendril-hair relationship).

Moving on to the human technology, like I said, the holographic interfaces were really cool and pleasantly futuristic enough, but the big hulking machines that those interfaces allowed people to control feel like the product of a step backwards in time. Oh, they were futuristic, but they take me right back in time to 1986 when Aliens was fresh or 2001 when Halo: Combat Evolved was the new big game on the block. Human technology in Avatar is nothing that Science fiction hasn’t been showing us since the ’80′s, and that’s a little disappointing. I understand that they wanted to base them on where real-world technology is actually heading, but they showed us nothing new in the development of human technology. Take a look at any TV special about how much modern technology, from cell phones to .mp3′s to our incessant research into interstellar travel or teleportation, was inspired by Star Trek back in the 60′s. If Avatar was really gunning for the Best Science Fiction Movie Ever slot, I would have liked to have seen some technology more exciting and inspiring than a robot exoskeleton with a combat knife (which we’ve also already seen).

Well, that’s not entirely true. There is the Avatar device itself, a rather pivotal element of the movie’s story, but one which gives us hardly any clues or loopholes as to how such a device might even begin to function. Normally, when we see a piece of technology that far beyond real world human beings, such as folding space for numerous forms of Faster-than-Light Travel (see: hyperspace, warp drive, Event Horizon, Stargates etc.), we get some hints about how, in the fictional history of the world, something happened to allow such a technology to exist (in many cases, we see alien intervention as the cause for astounding breakthroughs). All Avatar gives us about its titular technology is that it exists, it works, and there’s a few rules that need to be followed. But when it comes to the Avatar machine itself, we get no such bone thrown to us. Maybe most moviegoers don’t need an intricate explanation of how the machine works, but an offhand quip about how the Pandoran “bonding tendrils” put the Avatar research decades ahead of where they expected to be would’ve been enough for me, and also nicely foreshadowed the “bonding” that kinda came out of nowhere when Jake meets his first real Na’vi.

Wow, 1250 words in and I haven’t moved beyond the movie’s Art Direction… Luckily, take out the pretty visuals, and there’s not really that much else to talk about. Lose the style, and we’re left with a story we’ve all seen before about how mankind can’t get over its love affair with violence and destroying nature. I could pick through the next version of Madden and find more new and exciting plot elements.

Brief Summary: Jake Sully, a crippled Marine, presumably discharged from humanity’s war against Earth because his legs no longer function, takes up his dead twin brother’s job as an Avatar on Pandora to try and convince the natives to move off of a massive vein of Unobtanium so that the humans can strip mine it, and of course stop there… So, they send in Jake, but in order to get the tribe’s respect, he has to go through their coming of age rituals, and by that time, he likes them too much, so the military decides to kill them all to get the Unobtanium. But then Jake and the Na’vi fight back, and drive the humans from Pandora, and he becomes a full-time Na’vi due to the moon’s pseudo-magical biotechnology…

The main characters are mostly pretty well-characterized, although some of the major villain-types are pretty stock. The evil corporal was the Air Cav captain from Apocalypse Now if you reduced his personality to that of a Saturday Morning Cartoon villain whose only goals in life are killing everyone not under his command and spouting military one-liners. The Corporate representative’s only redeeming quality is that he almost never got enough screen time to make himself known, and when he did, he couldn’t get in a word edgewise.

I think after seeing these sorts of sad, preachy stories about how human beings are the most horrible monstrosities ever unleashed upon a poor, unsuspecting universe for as long as we have, if we don’t get it by now, I doubt the entertainment industry is going to suddenly have a spark and finally convince everyone to Reduce, Reuse, Recycle, and Really Stop Waging Pointless Wars. So, can we give up on telling the same preachy story we’ve all seen, read, and played dozens of times and start telling some new stories? Heck, if the industries are really hell-bent on ending nonsensical wars for corporate gain and saving the planet, why not try making this sermon new and exciting again, because, obviously, the people who are destroying the planet and sending countless young men and women to die for nothing more than nationalism and profit, weren’t paying attention the first four-dozen times you told them.

So, in summary, Avatar is a pretty decent movie. I’m glad I saw it because it’s so frakking pretty, but I don’t have any plans to go out of my way to see it again until someone I know buys it or illegally downloads it.