There is a Christmas dinner debate that lives in infamy at my house: It's 1997, and Titanic had been released a few days earlier -- should we go? My brother was almost ecstatic in his derision: James Cameron was a buffoon and no one was going to go see a movie where everybody already knows the end. Nix. I was sure, and looking back I don't even remember why, that the thing was going to be huge, and everybody knew the end to the Civil War too, jerkhole. We didn't go see Titanic. You know the rest. But the fact that people were still shit-talking the prospects of what went on to become the biggest grossing film of all time even after it hit the theaters (but before the first returns came in) says something about the boulder-sized grudge the zeitgeist seems to hold against Cameron. History repeated with Avatar, which the blogging classes seemed only too happy to relegate to the shitcan of overweening hubris. Then the thing actually screened. If whiplash has a sound, last Thursday evening it was reverberating through Cineplex lobbies on either coast, as critics and the commentariat hit the streets, shaking their heads free of three hours on a planet called Pandora and managing only the occasional expletive as they went.
Because his films make tremendous bank and occasionally press a little too firmly on our cinematic pleasure points -- sex, violence, blowing shit up -- Cameron is often lumped in with lock and loaders like Michael Bay and Roland Emmerich, despite the fact that he keeps reminding us, if only every ten years or so now, that his are usually passion projects in elaborate disguise. Avatar, a story which Cameron has been stewing over for decades and actually working on for at least four years, is as heartfelt as it is spectacular; and while it's all too easy to tangle with the political and situational gauntlets he lays down, as a showman Cameron will not be denied.
Using motion capture technology and an entirely digitally created world, Cameron sets the majority of Avatar on a distant planet called Pandora, an Edenic realm populated by a people known as the Na'vi, who are ten feet tall, have large, slanted amber eyes, goat-like ears, long, agile tails and skin that's a rippling, robin's egg blue. Much of what you see on Pandora is human- and earth-like enough -- from the expressive Na-vi features to mountains that float and lemurs with six arms instead of two -- that Cameron creates an interesting visual tension in the viewer, who is invited to marvel at both the unbelievable strangeness and the equally incredible verisimilitude at the same time.
We arrive on Pandora with a paraplegic Marine named Jake Sully (Sam Worthington), who has been chosen to join the Avatar program after his twin brother's sudden death. Jake's identical DNA makes him the obvious choice to pick up his brother's role as the human "driver" behind the Na'vi avatar that had been generated for him. Run by a hard-nosed, ciggie-smoking scientist named Grace Augustine (Sigourney Weaver), the Avatar program represents one school of thought about how to "win the hearts and minds" of a foreign people: learn to look like them, talk like them; study their ways. Operating out of the same base on Pandora is an American military operation that is interested in the scientific approach only to the extent that it gets them closer to uprooting the Na'vi and pillaging their supply of "Unobtainium" (yuk, yuk), a natural resource that will ease Earth's energy crisis (it's 2154 and we're basically hosed). Initially, both approaches are proposed as equally suspect.
Locked safely in a sort of hyperbaric chamber and in a fugue, semi-conscious state, Jake is able to inhabit his Na'vi body like his own; restored to his upright position with not only functioning legs but a tail for ballast, our first look at the Na'vi world and people is via Jake's bounding, incredulous leaps around the Avatar base. Not much interested in science or the Avatar program, Jake seems strictly in it for the LOLs; if anything, he is more attuned to the lien a Marine Colonel named Quaritch (Stephen Lang) puts on his military pedigree, pressing him to use his avatar privileges to feed the unit and a corporate snake played by Giovanni Ribisi the necessary intel. On his second outing with the Avatar team, Jake is separated from his group, has a terrifying encounter with several hordes of Pandoran fauna, and is rescued by a Na'vi female named Neytiri (Zoe Saldana). Thus begins the middle third (that is, hour) of the film, in which Neytiri is slowly drawn to Jake, and then attempts to integrate him into her tribe.
The Na'vi aesthetic is largely drawn from a combination of Native American and African traditions, although they seem to speak English (and of course many of them do) with a Caribbean lilt. Their belief system is strictly eco-cratic, the crown jewel of their colony a large mother tree, under which, of course, a motherlode of Unobtainium lies. There is something tremendously, marvelously subversive in imbuing the destruction of a single tree with the world-rocking urgency and pathos that Cameron eventually does.
It is in this middle third that the use of 3-D is both most extraordinary and most germane: there are always half a dozen relevant planes of action in play, and the visual delicacies of Pandora envelop the viewer, creating -- and I'm about to get a little flowery here, so bear down -- a kind of womb which we, like Jake, are loath to leave. Combined with a level of fluidity and tactility I have never before seen in a CGI-scape, it makes for a completely immersive, goggle-eyed, slack-jawed experience. "You should see your faces right now," a fighter pilot played by Michelle Rodriguez says to Jake and Co. as she flies them through a cosmos of floating mountains, and I am certain mine looked about 7 years old. And so when the peace and beauty of Pandora is threatened and then completely obliterated, not just the action but the trauma is quite intimately felt.
Jake proves himself worthy of the Na'vi, then immediately betrays them, then changes his mind. "I was a warrior who dreamed he could bring peace," he says. "Sooner or later, though, you always have to wake up." Worthington's low, beveled voice sells a lot of iffy lines, although for all the received chatter about Cameron's crappy dialogue, I heard nothing worse than some of the pap smeared across Invictus. It is the references that are risible, and Cameron doesn't hold back: "When people are sitting on shit you want, you make them your enemy," Ribisi says, one in a long line of direct hits on the Iraq war and its corporate jackals. As a fellow Canadian I couldn't help but think Cameron was letting his Maple Leaf fly, particularly in the villainy reserved for Col. Quaritch, a pig-eyed American whose bloodlust outpaces his mission. To present, during wartime, a battle sequence that revels in legions of American Marines being blown to pieces is truly shocking, beyond subversive -- a confused, quasi-radical stance that undermines what is foremost a piece of entertainment, a truly transporting draft of movie magic. I couldn't decide if it was red- or blue-baiting, nor figure out why Cameron would want to vulgarly divide an audience already coiled so blissfully in the palm of his hand.
Avatar's legacy will not be that of an environmental epic, nor of an acid chunk of misanthropic, anti-American polemic, although it is both of those things, in turn and in tandem. What it is, foremost, is the most convincing and comprehensive packaging of the technology guiding the future of cinema that has yet been seen, and for that reason I hereby command you to see it. The film's central, unexpressed paradox -- the notion of using the most sophisticated technology known to the medium to advance a plea that we humans learn to leave well enough alone before we destroy ourselves in the name of progress -- is far more interesting than anything Cameron has to say about President Bush and his Daisy Cutters of Doom.