Is one of the stupidest movies ever made:
If Avatar were drawn like a regular cartoon, or had been made on soundstages with sets and the like, would it be interesting? Would it hold our attention? The answer is, unquestionably no. There’s no chance anybody would even have put it into production, no matter that Cameron made the box-office bonanza Titanic. So the question is: Does the technical mastery on display in Avatar outweigh the unbelievably banal and idiotic plot, the excruciating dialogue, the utter lack of any quality resembling a sense of humor? And will all these qualities silence the discomfort coming from that significant segment of the American population that, we know from the box-office receipts for Iraq war movies this decade, doesn’t like it when an American soldier is the bad guy?
Podhoretz’ review is chock full’o’spoilers, but when something is as apparently ridden with PC cliches as this, it’s pretty hard to spoil it. Let’s hope they can apply the film-making technology to a good movie soon.
[Monday morning update]
Kurt Loder over at MTV has similar thoughts:
Cameron is a great action director. There’s a lot to look at here: the luminescent glow of the jungle in which the Na’vi live, the ancient Tree of Souls with which they commune, a spectacular range of mountains hanging high in the sky up above Pandora — and there’s a lot going on. The director and his battalion of digital technicians have cooked up a fantastical bestiary of Pandoran creatures — futuristic hammerhead rhinos; dogfighting battle dragons; and, in one virtuoso sequence, a vicious six-legged thingy that chases Jake through the jungle and off the edge of a cliff (see trailer). The meticulous detail in which these creatures have been rendered, and the complexity with which they’re arrayed in the film’s exotic environments, are undeniable marvels of moviemaking art.
Unfortunately, whenever the action lets up and we’re returned to the piddling story, the picture slumps like a failed soufflé. It’s also heavily laced with political instruction of a most familiar sort. Cameron, who’s now 55, is a self-acknowledged aging hippie, and his boomer worldview is strictly by-the-numbers. Quaritch and Selfridge are evil Americans despoiling the Na’vi’s idyllic planet in exactly the same way that the humans have (we’re told) trashed their own native orb. The invaders are armed with deplorable corporate technology (an odd animosity in a major-studio movie that reportedly cost more than $300 million to make), and they speak the familiar — and here rather anachronistic — language of contemporary American warmongering. (“We will fight terror with terror!” “It’s some kind of shock-and-awe campaign!”)
The Na’vi, on the other hand, with their bows and arrows and long braided hair, are stand-ins for every spiritually astute and ecologically conscientious indigenous population ever ground down under the heel of rampaging Western imperialism. They appear to have no warlike impulses themselves, and they live in complete harmony with their environment. (They even talk to trees.) Why, the movie asks, as if the question were new, can’t we be more like them?
No one argues that it’s not a brilliant technological feat. It’s just a shame that it seems to have a cliched, politically infantile story line.
1D characters plus 1D story plus 1D humor equals the greatest 3D experience ever made ?
In the latest trailer the aliens look much better. Still, I think the designs are not that great, and the story seems full of fail. Even adding a nice large ham or two (Stephen Lang, Sigourney Weaver) isn’t going to save it. The main actor is quite wooden. God knows how its got an 8.9 score in IMDB. #25 motion picture of all time? Please. Tell me it isn’t true.
Then again IMDB always bloats the rankings for the latest hypefest. The ranking of Titanic as fallen below The Abyss as it should.
Tron Legacy had a nice trailer.
I actually liked the movie quite a bit. The best part is second-guessing the background details that aren’t mentioned. . . the Na’vi are clearly not native to Pandora, for instance.
I’d love to see the technology used in making Avatar used for a much more intelligent story, of course. Hyperion, for instance.
You’re dead wrong on this one. Absolutely stunning movie.
You’ll have to complain to Podhoretz. It’s not my review.
It was an absolutely stunning movie. Many have compared it to the first time watching Star Wars in ’77 – I was not born then, but I can see what they mean.
The story was completely banal. I tried not to like it, and laugh at the characters. It did hit every PC/watermelon/Evil-Mining-Co.-Inc. hot button with wild repetition, but it hit them so soon and so frequently that I was soon able to just suspend that part of the experience and revel in the world I was being immersed in. I am the first person to complain that movies are too often heavy on action and visuals and light on storyline and editing. But once in a decade or generation or so an entertainment technology comes along that gives a truly new experience, and it is okay to celebrate the technology and ignore the story. The last one to come close was The Matrix, a similarly inane and overdone storyline with even worse actors, but a masterpiece nonetheless. Avatar is one of those movies.
I would echo the Tron analogy. The visuals were video-gamey, and I think the movie will seem silly in 10 years once we have all seen a dozen or two of these things done with better writing and more developed forms of the technology. I almost went into the non-3D version, and boy would I be posting different thoughts if that had happened. But that is the point: the movie was so groundbreaking in its one quality way that the rest didn’t really matter.
[Oops. Sorry Rand.]
There are most definitely clichés in Avatar, but even some of the best composers in history have borrowed from their predecessors, and the same is true in movies. There are also clichés in life, and those are echoed in the movies. Avatar is not Citizen Kane … thank goodness! If you go with kids (note that there are reasons Avatar is rated PG-13) you will likely see them riveted to the screen for every second of the movie – that was my experience, anyhow. If you can suspend disbelief for a while, you won’t be disappointed. I had fully intended to allow myself to be entertained, and I was not disappointed. I thought it was a good story, and it was magnificently told.
Didn’t they make Avatar about 25 years ago and didn’t they call it “Tai Pan”?
The plot is that some English dude is installed as the colonial governer of some Chinese island, but he gets all self righteous and everything about how he is governing the “Chinese way” instead of the stuffy “English way”, and in the end he stays to ride out a typhoon and the picture closes with majestic pictures of the office towers in modern-day Hong Kong.
Also part of the plot is how the English dude “goes native” to the consternation of the folks back home he answers to, and part of going native is taking on a local mistress.
A friend of mine got all bothered about the cheesy dialog, especially the part about the mistress, true to movie cliches that all East Asians speak a form of English absent of any definite articles “the” or “a”, and substitute proper names for all usage of pronouns, and that beautiful women East Asians accentuate those speech patterns as a sign of subservience to European men who are their lovers.
I told my friend all of that was true, but that the cheesy dialog could be material for a “romantic role playing game” a guy could engage in (with mutual consent!) with one’s wife/female domestic partner/steady girlfriend. He could be “Tai Pan” and his partner could be the mistress speaking Hollywood-East-Asian-broken-English.
I though my friend would tell me I had a completely stupid idea in the age (1980’s) of liberated women of our generation, but then he let out a sly smile and mentioned a mutual friend of ours, who really was from Hong Kong and whose wife was from Hong Kong, had independently come up with that idea (the role-playing part — even though his wife was from Hong Kong, she would have to “get into character” of the mistress in the movie, and even our friend from Hong Kong who could have taken offense at the entire movie, thought there was some potential there).
So maybe the cheesy love story part could inspire, how shall I say, “romantic role playing” using the cheesy dialogue in the movie, and, the rest is up to your imagination.
Absolutely loved it! Aside from the incredible and
artistic imagery that hits you immediately, the
story is very spiritual and thought provoking. In
fact, there are so many internal and external
messages going on within the story line that you
would have to see it more than once to get it all.
I do not see how the critics came up with bad
reviews, maybe they have ties to greedy corporate
CEO’s, which by the way, has a strong part in the
storyline. Have fun, and go see it 3D IMAX or at
least 3D!
Is this the first sci-fi movie where the aliens were the good guys and the humans were the bad guys?
Alan:
The Day the Earth Stood Still. In Star Wars the Galactic Empire does not allow non-humans to be part of the armed forces. Not to mention District 9. Which had better alien designs IMO.
And of course there’s Alien, where a bunch of psycho, human, deadbeat, corporate drones are trying to kill a poor innocent alien hitchhiker who’s just getting by. The alien almost wins, eating all but one of the drones, but gets blown out the air lock at the last minute. Truly a 70’s ending. At least the cat doesn’t die.
Sounds like we might have a couple of shills in the thread. Nobody is ever that ecstatic about a movie, unless they’re getting paid to be that ecstatic. Given the political nonsense that contaminates the movie, I’ll see it on somebody else’s dime.
Dances with Smurfs would entertain a child or perhaps an unfortunate adult with mental retardation.
The shot at greedy corporate CEOs from a guy who claims to have found all sorts of profound life-altering messages in the film is amusing. Who do you think financed the half-billion dollar movie? Wood nymphs or greedy corporate CEOs? What do you think their intention was when they shelled out 500 million – a big return on investment, or just the good feeling they get from spreading the wealth around?
it must really suck to be you, Randy.
No, it’s great to be me. What it must suck to be is an anonymous moron who has nothing to contribute except insults to the host, whose name he’s not even capable of spelling correctly. Consider yourself banned, Sparky.
Oh, snap!
“Sounds like we might have a couple of shills in the thread. ”
Um Karl, don’t I get credit for suggesting that Avatar, in the spirit of Tai-Pan, could be source material for “adult role-playing games”, as sarcasm or perhaps satire?
No, I haven’t seen Avatar, and it is completely unlikely that I will ever see Avatar unless it works its way down to network television in 20 years, but in the spirit of Rand’s gift of bandwidth, I think I can make snide comments about.
I once fisked The Day The Earth Stood Still, a classic how-not-to lesson in diplomacy.
I don’t really count this film as humans-as-bad-guys. The Earthlings are not a malevolent entity – they’re just trying to defend themselves against an unknown. (A theme seen in other films like Starman and E.T.)
And Klaatu was begging to get shot. From my review:
“He wants to give the President some sort of scientific gadget as a goodwill gesture. So how does he deliver it? Does he exit the saucer holding a tray with the artifact lying on it and announcing that he has a gift? No. Klaatu reaches into his shirt and pulls out this strange device, and parts of the artifact make a sudden movement – and Klaatu says nothing in advance to tell the scared Earthlings what this thing is. His superiors…failed to collect sufficient intelligence to warn him that reaching into your pockets in the presence of armed keepers of the peace is a bad idea.”
Star Wars doesn’t really count – humans are plentiful in the Rebel Alliance, and there are quite a few alien villains.
I’ll clarify – has there been a film where most of the humans are aggressors, and most of the aliens are non-agressors?
I do know of one TV precedent: the Star Trek: Enterprise two-part episode set in the mirror universe, which explains the origins of the Terran empire. (Not sure if the other mirror universe Trek episodes got into the human supremacist angle – I missed half of DS9’s tenure.)
I missed half of DS9’s tenure.
You didn’t miss much. Well, the essence of “heroic fiction”, be it a western or space opera, is that your hero(s) go off into the unknown, overcome almost insurmountable odds, and return bearing valuable gifts for those who waited for them. On this basis Avatar fails badly, no matter how purty the eye candy may be. If this had been about India in the days when the East India Trading Company was taking over the place I don’t think anyone would have watched it. Which it really was, if you think about it. Point is aside from the eye candy there’s really not much here to get the audience on the writers’ side.
It was great. Boy gets girl in complicated three dimensional love triangle. Good defeats evil. Spiritual rebirth. Stunning and imaginative special effects. I’ve been waiting for a movie like this for fifty years.
If you replace “Avatar” with “Star Wars: Episode I” in Podhoretz’s review, it’s pretty much spot-on for that movie, too. Banal plot, horrific acting and dialogue from people who are otherwise decent actors/actresses, all wrapped up in stunning visuals and special effects in an attempt to hide it and wow movie-goers.
I wonder how James Cameron would take to being compared to Spielberg and Lucas? I suspect he’d miss the implied insult in this case…
John, I think you’d be correct on all points.
Kurt Loder obviously doesn’t like the movie because it goes against his libertarian politics. He shows animosity towards environmentalists and spiritual people. He’s clearly allowing his personal politics to overtly interfere with his objectivity. It’s unfair to everyone who came here looking for an honest movie review. The movie might be formula but there’s nothing inherently wrong with that. It’s formula at its best.