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City Paper Grade: C+
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[ City Paper Grade: C+ ]
No one knows how to show off a technological advance like James Cameron. Terminator 2 made a wham-bang case for CGI, and for the past decade Cameron has been biding his time and tinkering before finally pulling back the tarp on his 21st-century 3D. Avatar works perfectly as a show reel for how the process can be used — but it will have to wait a bit longer for a filmmaker to apply it to an actual film rather than merely a game-changing novelty.The elusive goal for Cameron’s creative process seems to strive is not originality but amplitude. So Avatar is a simple, very familiar story of Cowboys and Indians, a child’s game played in the most spectacular sandbox that modern special effects can conjure. Essentially, it’s a bald-faced retelling of Dances With Wolves, made bionic with pieces borrowed from the director’s other films: the dour, gritted-teeth voiceover from T2, the omnipresent soaring Irish flutes from Titanic, the stock company of Marines employed by a heartless corporation from Aliens — not to mention Ripley herself, Sigourney Weaver, whose role as a botanist/anthropologist also recalls her portrayal of Dian Fossey.
The "Indians" in this case are ten-foot tall, blue-skinned aliens, but in every other particular way — the Mohawk haircuts, the loincloths, the broken English and spiritual connection to the land — they could be riding through Monument Valley and shooting their arrows in John Wayne’s direction. The Na'vi are an idealization of the noble savage that only a gun-worshipping technophile could create, somewhere between a new age romanticization of Native Americans and the Whos singing around the Whoville Christmas tree. Cameron has given them the outward trappings of a spiritual civilization with none of the inner life of a people.
The natives' idyllic existence is disrupted, of course, by the arrival on their planet, Pandora, of trigger-happy Earth marines out to reap the undefined benefits of an element known as "unobtainium." In a half-hearted attempt to talk them into voluntary evacuation before unleashing the incendiaries, the mission’s scientists create human-Na'vi hybrid avatars controlled remotely through a linked consciousness. Jake (Sam Worthington), a wheelchair-confined ex-Marine who takes his scientist brother's place in one of the Pandoran bodies, eventually becoming enamored of the Na'vi culture and of Neytiri (Zoe Saldana), with whom he strikes up the inevitable forbidden romance.
In the early going, the story's abundant clichés are eclipsed by the breathtaking visuals — an early shot of a vast gravity-free chamber in which the space travelers awaken evokes the kind of wonder that must have greeted Kubrick's 2001 visuals four decades earlier. The military base is stacked with planes of action, bustling soldiers and holographic displays packing the frame. Pandora's bioluminescent forests and floating mountains also impress, if more in the fashion of a Disney theme park ride — bolstered by James Horner's incessant nonspecifically-ethnic world-music score. But gradually, over 160 minutes, the senses become numbed to the overkill of spectacle, and there’s nothing left to care about. We've heard this song before, and Cameron doesn’t even bother to reharmonize it; he simply transposes it up a couple of octaves and plays it really, really loud.
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