Avatar

James Cameron’s Avatar is a visual delight, and a satisfying, if familiar, tale of love, heartbreak, oppression and triumph, as long as you are willing to suspend a little bit more than your disbelief. Suspending disbelief should not be difficult, as the world of Pandora is completely sold from the first interstellar view we get. Floating mountains and trees acting as receptacles for biological memory storage seem perfectly reasonable, even if the phenomena in question are never fully explained (which they are often not). How much you really do enjoy this movie depends more on how tolerant you are of archetypal characters, a by-the-numbers story and dialogue that often has all the subtlety of one of Pandora’s hammer-headed rhinos.

Personally, as a skeptic of CGI – live action hybrid movies such as Avatar, I was very doubtful about how well the technology could be integrated into this movie, while still keeping the audience’s complete immersion an attainable and primary goal. My doubts were assuaged, and any doubts you may have about this aspect of the movie will likely disappear upon the sights of Pandora’s lush wildlife, with gorgeous fluorescent purples and rich greens dominating many of the scenes, with incredible realism. Additionally, the 3D IMAX effects are never thrown in for cheap thrills, but quietly used throughout the movie to bolster the environment’s vivacious beauty, which was a welcome surprise. There are the occasional times when the CGI makes itself a little too apparent, especially with many of Pandora’s ground-based creatures (the airborne, polychromatic mountain banshees, alternately, look astounding). The Na’vi themselves look terrific and, when the moment calls for it, display the emotions of anguish, happiness and fury every bit as well as any human actor in the film (and in some cases, more effectively). By the end of the nearly three hour ride, the Na’vi have become so familiar and natural to us that we can hardly remember that they are the products of one man’s fertile, seemingly limitless imagination. James Cameron has achieved the admirable success of creating his own world, and making it accommodating to moviegoers.

The inhabitants of Pandora (human and Na’vi alike) are essentially stock characters. We have the trigger happy military aggressor, the single-minded businessman attuned to the bottom line, the naïve hero who learns about love and respect, the brave defector who no longer wishes to stomach the brutality of her side, and I could go on and on. To give credit where credit is due, the parts, derivative though they may be, are played with conviction and skill. Our hero, a marine turned researcher (of a sort), Jake Sully (Sam Worthington), starts off slow and a little boring. Once he gets into his Avatar, though, Worthington is fantastic, successfully channeling all the confusion, happiness, and rage that comes with getting lost in a foreign land (and having the use of legs for the first time in six years). Much like the CGI, some performances stand out as a little forced, but none are so glaring that they interrupt the sense of immersion that the movie as a whole creates.

The story, too, is nothing that hasn’t been seen before. The comparisons to Dances with Wolves, Pocahontas and Fern Gully are completely understandable (though these films only wish they could serve up the wonder of Avatar’s world). Without going into much detail, the story is your standard struggle of a native people fighting for their land against technologically superior aggressors (although it is humorously satisfying to note that, for once, the humans are the aggressors, rather than the aliens), coupled with a love story between a Na’vi and a human who learns to love her and the elegant way in which her and her people live. The parallels between this story and the current war in Iraq (and the displacement of Native Americans centuries ago, and the entire period of colonialism on the part of the Western world, and the environmental destruction begun during the Industrial Revolution) are unmistakable. In fact, if there is any threat to the audience’s ability to stay connected to Pandora, it is found in these. The links to Earth-bound issues, while appreciable, are bludgeons occasionally jarring enough to make one forget just how incredible this movie is (or could have been). I can appreciate Cameron’s wishes for us to think about the effects of the Western world’s actions, but direct references to “terror,” “shock and awe,” “savages,” and “the destruction of our mother (the environment of planet Earth, presumed to at this point be completely ravaged)” are at best eye-roll inducing, and at worst a little insulting to the intelligence of moviegoers. The lack of subtlety abounds in many other ways. Most notably, the lucrative material sought by the corporate man (Parker Selfridge, played by Giovanni Ribisi) goes by the handle of unobtanium, at the mention of which I felt dutifully obligated to groan and place my forehead directly in the palm of my hand.

Despite the abundance of clichés and telegraphed messages, Avatar represents a fantastic cinematic achievement. If this is a sign of the future for CGI movies, this former skeptic is now an eager optimist. The story and characters, though they have been told and seen before, still carry enough emotional (as well as physical) firepower to make us feel invested in their fates. Ultimately, we are introduced to a brand new world carved out of thin air, and are made to believe in its viability and pine for its survival. We are made to care, and that alone is worth the price of admission.