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Maybe if Avatar hadn't been an unholy amalgam of Pocahontas, Fern Gully, Dances with Wolves, and The Last Samurai, it could have been a great movie. I'm pretty sure nothing could have made it revolutionary- as anyone who has been playing video games for the last fifteen to twenty years could tell you, there is nothing revolutionary about pretty CGI anymore. And, I'm sorry, but there's more to creating an immersive experience than filming it in 3D. (I'm sure 3D enhances things for some people- but it makes me motion sick, so it's more of a bug than a feature for me.)
A lot of other people have examined the massive amounts of fail with regard to skeezy colonial narratives, racism, sexism, and ableism, and they've done so far more eloquently and thoroughly than I could. So these are just a few of my more visceral reactions and thoughts.
The first thing that bothered me- before anything else, before we're barely ten minutes into the film? The idea that, some sixty years in the future, we will not have invented a cheap, light weight, portable motorized wheelchair. In a future where you've got people piloting bloody battle-mechs in a galaxy far, far away, there's really no reason to put the paraplegic in a manual wheelchair, particularly not when he's got to maneuver on a military installation full of said bloody battle-mechs. Maybe I have too much faith in the human race, but I really feel like this shouldn't have been that hard. So much of this movie follows the "Fly away, logic! Be free!" approach to certain details, and it fills me full of >___<.
The second thing that hit me- punched me in the face, rather- was the anti-intellectualism. Sully is able to adapt to Na'vi culture so well because he isn't a scientist, and he hasn't spent his career studying their language and culture and planet. He's a warrior! Therefore he's automatically going to get on better with the natives- nevermind that the Na'vi's first reaction probably ought to have been "Oh, shit, now they're making those creepily horrifying psuedo-people with combat skills, let's shoot first, ask questions never, and nail his corpse to the nearest alien compound to nip this in the bud." Sully can relate to the Na'vi on a purer, more instinctual level, and he isn't going to be blinded by all those scientific prejudices and big words that all those bumbling science-y types have. *sigh* I'm not saying that scientists can't be incredibly close minded, but come on. The way the audience is supposed to sympathize with Sully's smug admission that he hadn't even read the best selling dumbed-down-for-pop-culture book on Pandora and the Na'vi set my teeth on edge.
There are dozens upon dozens of films where the ruggedly good looking soldier-type saves the day; it'd be nice if we could have a few more where the ruggedly nerdy PhD saves the day instead. (Also! Wouldn't it be radical and shocking if we had an evil drill-seargent sort of character with, oh, I dunno, a New England accent? Or maybe a Northwestern one? Just- can't we have an evil military character who speaks something other than ridiculous, parodies-itself Texan hardass?)
The part where Sully makes his rallying speech to the gathered Na'vi tribes in English nearly killed me with irony, and it takes a better storyteller than James Cameron to get me to suspend my disbelief long enough to accept that Sully could have mastered all the arts of the Na'vi warrior in a bare three months. (See: how I will gleefully watch the new season of Chuck even if it is ridiculous and illogical, because the show doesn't take itself terribly seriously. Avatar takes itself far too seriously for me to swallow similar nonsense from it, particularly when said nonsense is supporting the Jake's position as the Great White Savior.)
I did enjoy parts of the movie in spite of myself, though- the CGI was beautiful, and I was right there with Jake when he kept whacking the bioluminescent plants to make them light up. I liked Neytiri, I liked the scientists (Norm hits a lot of my kinks in very specific ways, you guys, I can't help it); I enjoyed Trudy's moments of badassery; I found the death run of the Na'vi to be more emotionally effective than the death run of the pirates in the third PotC movie, when I ignored all of the extraordinarily problematic aspects of the entire situation. The worldbuilding has enormous holes in it, but that apparently just means those holes have grown teeth, and are now chewing on my brain.
I find the whole concept of the avatars to be kind of...horrifying, honestly- cultural appropriation is bad enough, but the avatars are a totally different level of obscenity and theft. You don't get more personal and vital than someone's DNA, you know? And no one mentions who they took the Na'vi DNA from to build the hybrids- obviously the human contributor was the source for most of the physical features, but there had to have been a Na'vi person to provide the basic body template, too. (It irritated me that Grace's avatar was so human, down to her blunt teeth, narrow nose, and D cups.)
That could have been an interesting story- if the Na'vi DNA had come from someone who had died, and Neytiri or Tsu'tey kept seeing their fallen brethren every time they looked at Jake or one of the scientists. The features would be distorted by the human DNA, of course, but the ghost of that other person would still be there, in the curve of the ears, the shape of the smile. And when they fell asleep, and the human consciousness left the body, taking all the human behaviors and mannerisms with it, all the things that make the body not Na'vi- how horrifying would that be, to see that body, who could have been a loved one, lying there unresponsive and corpse-like?
The movie kind of touches on that when Neytiri tries to wake Jake up as the bulldozers come in, but she had to have noticed he didn't sleep so much as fall into a coma before then. (Some part of me likes to imagine the times when Jake's human schedule and his Navi schedule didn't line up properly, and he slept in as a Na'vi- cue Neytiri encouraging the children of the tribe to rub slime in Jake's hair and paint dicks on his face or something.) The way the avatars shut down in sleep would have been another reminder that they aren't Navi, they're alien, something that most emphatically doesn't belong.
I also wish there'd been more examination of the fact that Jake is piloting his brother's avatar- but maybe this is just the part of me that wants to inflict creepy incestuous dreams on Jake or have him suffer occasional neural-pathway glitches. It also makes me wonder if Jake is so Super Speshul and Blessed By Eywa because he's just that special, or because Pandora just likes the way Tom's avatar smells. Basically, is it his hardware or his software that makes him so Awwwsum?
Pandora itself being a gigantic biological computer reminded me a lot of John Varley's Gaea series. Pandora and Titan are completely different, true, but the whole situation with all of the flora and fauna on Pandora being part of the planetary network and being controlled by that network (as evidenced by all the ikran and forest creatures fighting in the final battle) sort of parallels the way Titan is a sentient being with the ability to create, manipulate, and control all the native lifeforms on its surface. There's no indication that Pandora has a higher consciousness, though- at least, not one that interacts directly with mere mortals.
I haven't read the Gaea books since high school; there were some creepy gender and sexuality issues in them (and they had to have been bad for me to have noticed them at sixteen), but they were still pretty awesome books.
I think I'm lamenting how awesome this movie could have been- if it had just been three hours of playing in the forest, ferinstance, or if the characters had been actual people and not just very pretty cardboard cut-outs with things like "EXOTIC ALIEN PRINCESS" and "EVIL MILITARY TYRANT" stamped on the backs. Or if it had been District 9, which had a far more interesting and effective take on the "main character must assimilate into oppressed alien culture" idea.
A lot of other people have examined the massive amounts of fail with regard to skeezy colonial narratives, racism, sexism, and ableism, and they've done so far more eloquently and thoroughly than I could. So these are just a few of my more visceral reactions and thoughts.
The first thing that bothered me- before anything else, before we're barely ten minutes into the film? The idea that, some sixty years in the future, we will not have invented a cheap, light weight, portable motorized wheelchair. In a future where you've got people piloting bloody battle-mechs in a galaxy far, far away, there's really no reason to put the paraplegic in a manual wheelchair, particularly not when he's got to maneuver on a military installation full of said bloody battle-mechs. Maybe I have too much faith in the human race, but I really feel like this shouldn't have been that hard. So much of this movie follows the "Fly away, logic! Be free!" approach to certain details, and it fills me full of >___<.
The second thing that hit me- punched me in the face, rather- was the anti-intellectualism. Sully is able to adapt to Na'vi culture so well because he isn't a scientist, and he hasn't spent his career studying their language and culture and planet. He's a warrior! Therefore he's automatically going to get on better with the natives- nevermind that the Na'vi's first reaction probably ought to have been "Oh, shit, now they're making those creepily horrifying psuedo-people with combat skills, let's shoot first, ask questions never, and nail his corpse to the nearest alien compound to nip this in the bud." Sully can relate to the Na'vi on a purer, more instinctual level, and he isn't going to be blinded by all those scientific prejudices and big words that all those bumbling science-y types have. *sigh* I'm not saying that scientists can't be incredibly close minded, but come on. The way the audience is supposed to sympathize with Sully's smug admission that he hadn't even read the best selling dumbed-down-for-pop-culture book on Pandora and the Na'vi set my teeth on edge.
There are dozens upon dozens of films where the ruggedly good looking soldier-type saves the day; it'd be nice if we could have a few more where the ruggedly nerdy PhD saves the day instead. (Also! Wouldn't it be radical and shocking if we had an evil drill-seargent sort of character with, oh, I dunno, a New England accent? Or maybe a Northwestern one? Just- can't we have an evil military character who speaks something other than ridiculous, parodies-itself Texan hardass?)
The part where Sully makes his rallying speech to the gathered Na'vi tribes in English nearly killed me with irony, and it takes a better storyteller than James Cameron to get me to suspend my disbelief long enough to accept that Sully could have mastered all the arts of the Na'vi warrior in a bare three months. (See: how I will gleefully watch the new season of Chuck even if it is ridiculous and illogical, because the show doesn't take itself terribly seriously. Avatar takes itself far too seriously for me to swallow similar nonsense from it, particularly when said nonsense is supporting the Jake's position as the Great White Savior.)
I did enjoy parts of the movie in spite of myself, though- the CGI was beautiful, and I was right there with Jake when he kept whacking the bioluminescent plants to make them light up. I liked Neytiri, I liked the scientists (Norm hits a lot of my kinks in very specific ways, you guys, I can't help it); I enjoyed Trudy's moments of badassery; I found the death run of the Na'vi to be more emotionally effective than the death run of the pirates in the third PotC movie, when I ignored all of the extraordinarily problematic aspects of the entire situation. The worldbuilding has enormous holes in it, but that apparently just means those holes have grown teeth, and are now chewing on my brain.
I find the whole concept of the avatars to be kind of...horrifying, honestly- cultural appropriation is bad enough, but the avatars are a totally different level of obscenity and theft. You don't get more personal and vital than someone's DNA, you know? And no one mentions who they took the Na'vi DNA from to build the hybrids- obviously the human contributor was the source for most of the physical features, but there had to have been a Na'vi person to provide the basic body template, too. (It irritated me that Grace's avatar was so human, down to her blunt teeth, narrow nose, and D cups.)
That could have been an interesting story- if the Na'vi DNA had come from someone who had died, and Neytiri or Tsu'tey kept seeing their fallen brethren every time they looked at Jake or one of the scientists. The features would be distorted by the human DNA, of course, but the ghost of that other person would still be there, in the curve of the ears, the shape of the smile. And when they fell asleep, and the human consciousness left the body, taking all the human behaviors and mannerisms with it, all the things that make the body not Na'vi- how horrifying would that be, to see that body, who could have been a loved one, lying there unresponsive and corpse-like?
The movie kind of touches on that when Neytiri tries to wake Jake up as the bulldozers come in, but she had to have noticed he didn't sleep so much as fall into a coma before then. (Some part of me likes to imagine the times when Jake's human schedule and his Navi schedule didn't line up properly, and he slept in as a Na'vi- cue Neytiri encouraging the children of the tribe to rub slime in Jake's hair and paint dicks on his face or something.) The way the avatars shut down in sleep would have been another reminder that they aren't Navi, they're alien, something that most emphatically doesn't belong.
I also wish there'd been more examination of the fact that Jake is piloting his brother's avatar- but maybe this is just the part of me that wants to inflict creepy incestuous dreams on Jake or have him suffer occasional neural-pathway glitches. It also makes me wonder if Jake is so Super Speshul and Blessed By Eywa because he's just that special, or because Pandora just likes the way Tom's avatar smells. Basically, is it his hardware or his software that makes him so Awwwsum?
Pandora itself being a gigantic biological computer reminded me a lot of John Varley's Gaea series. Pandora and Titan are completely different, true, but the whole situation with all of the flora and fauna on Pandora being part of the planetary network and being controlled by that network (as evidenced by all the ikran and forest creatures fighting in the final battle) sort of parallels the way Titan is a sentient being with the ability to create, manipulate, and control all the native lifeforms on its surface. There's no indication that Pandora has a higher consciousness, though- at least, not one that interacts directly with mere mortals.
I haven't read the Gaea books since high school; there were some creepy gender and sexuality issues in them (and they had to have been bad for me to have noticed them at sixteen), but they were still pretty awesome books.
I think I'm lamenting how awesome this movie could have been- if it had just been three hours of playing in the forest, ferinstance, or if the characters had been actual people and not just very pretty cardboard cut-outs with things like "EXOTIC ALIEN PRINCESS" and "EVIL MILITARY TYRANT" stamped on the backs. Or if it had been District 9, which had a far more interesting and effective take on the "main character must assimilate into oppressed alien culture" idea.
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