Grade:
B-

What’s It About?:

This is going to be a hard logline to write.

First try: A marine employed as security for a mining company on a distant moon befriends the local native aliens and helps them in their struggle against the company.

Oh my god that is awful.

A marine stationed on a distant moon is used as an Avatar, disguised as a local native alien to gain their trust for a mining company’s nefarious purposes.
I think the “you can figure out the rest” is implied in that?

What’s it’s Bechdel Test Score?:
2/3 I think… there are some pretty cool female characters, but I’m trying to remember if any of them said more than two or three sentences to each other, and wondering if two or three sentences counts.

Minorities:
Oh god.
There is only Michelle Rodriguez (who is pretty cool in this) and a few backgrounders among the humans. It seems all the other minority cast members were playing the natives of the moon Pandora, the Na’vi. Which makes sense, I guess.
That isn’t really the issue though.
So, um, B+ for having minority actors, F for racism in the story?

I actually had no expectations in mind when I went to see this movie, but now I am chock full of things to say.

Can I get the obvious stuff out the way first? My Point A will be that this movie is pretty racist, my point B is that James Cameron needs a writing partner.  If you are the type of person who doesn’t want to read about the race stuff, skim along and I’ll put big font in when I’m talking about the regular movie stuff.

SO! Point A.

Wow, this movie turned out to be pretty racist! I was actually kind of okay with what was happening, giving the film the benefit of the doubt that something would happen differently, when we slammed into the third act and…

Okay, well. This isn’t really a spoiler because if you’ve ever seen Dances with Wolves or Fern Gully then you already know this story, and even if you haven’t seen those movies, you still know this story since it’s part of our western cultural narrative/cultural lie. But if you are really paranoid about it, just skip this paragraph.  In this particular manifestation of Noble White Man Saves Savages He Happens To Be Oppressing there is basically this dragon-type creature, and once every few generations, a particular Na’vi can tame this dragon in order to unite the tribes. The last time this happened was five generations ago, and it’s only happened five times in all of Na’vi cultural memory. Wow, whoever tames this dragon has got to be a pretty fantastic Na’vi, like, the best Na’vi ever. We’re talking like Na’vi Messiah territory, the Na’vi chosen one. OH! It’s some stupid white guy who had never even heard of these people before he came on this mission. And he figured it out after only hanging with the Na’vi for a couple of months. Man, this culture is so easy to figure out! Too bad those stupid Na’vi couldn’t even save themselves. Good thing a jarhead white guy, who is pretty stupid by earth standards, was there to show them how it’s done!

CUSS!

Why do we keep telling this story? The story of an oppressor culture bearing down on another culture, and one enlightened, (sometimes also downtrodden in his own way) soul taking compassion on the poor oppressed culture, and showing them not only how to be better at their own culture, but how to empower themselves? It’s a bullshit story. Sure, there are allies, historically there have been people who have switched sides. There are also scores more actual oppressed people empowering themselves. We just almost never get to hear that story.

The old story of noble white man helping out the savages and being a better native than the natives is part of our narrative consciousness because it’s one of the lies that allows our culture to continue. We can watch stuff like Dances with Wolves and think, wow, what a terrible tragedy happened in the past. I’m so glad we moved on. That one guy sure was enlightened for his time, how great that what he thinks is now the default. That sentiment is only true if the oppression is no longer happening, and in the case of Native Americans, I hate to break it to ya, but that oppression is definitely ongoing.

And even if it weren’t actively happening, in the case of disproportionate number of NA women who are murdered then non-NA women, or the disproportionate number of NA people who are homeless, etc etc, there is still a legacy of genocide and abuse from the residential/industrial schools. If your parents were in residential school and were beaten for speaking their own language (and worse), and now have an extremely valid distrust of public schooling and aren’t particularly inclined to support you in your education, that has a profound effect on your life. If your grandparents or great grand parents witnessed genocide, that still effects you. These things just don’t go away in one or two or three generations. Stories like that in Avatar just make it easier for us to brush it all under the rug. Oh we’re still capable of causing these awful things, but we’re also capable of helping the Other in their struggle against Us, by… what, teaching them to be more like us? Showing them how to be better Them because we instinctively just know?

And it’s disingenuous to say there is no parallel between the Na’vi and anybody on Earth. There are obviously influences from various aboriginal cultures in the design of the Na’vi – the most pruriently titillating influences, anyway. I can’t get too worked up about that, because nothing is created in a vacuum, there is no made up culture that doesn’t look somewhat like a culture that already exists. But it’s clear – the Na’vi are noble natives. James Cameron wanted to make a movie about natives whose land and culture was being encroached upon by white humans, and his solution for these natives was… to give them a white hero.

Rawles over at livejournal sums it up best: The movie needed to either tell the Na’vi’s story and have it actually be about them or not tell it at all. But, as ever, the choice they made was to instead co-opt that story and make the marginalized people whose story it actually is just a backdrop/accent to the story of a privileged person.

I don’t even want to get into the whole crap about his being reborn into a new body because obviously the body that was in a wheelchair was useless. Christ on a cracker.

One of these days I really just want a movie where the natives fight back and stand their own and don’t need help from some dipshit white guy. Where the empowerment of these natives doesn’t come at the cost of fetishizing them (and their ~*magical connection to nature*~), or making them a backdrop to the journey of the white character. When will we get the actual stories of the oppressed instead of the noble people helping the oppressed? In terms of science fiction, or stories where the natives are aliens, the only thing I can think of is the backstory of the Oddworld video games. Which are great.

SO! Now that that unpleasantness is out of the way, let’s talk about Point B.

This movie could’ve easily been about 45 minutes shorter. In the very beginning, there is this big monologue giving backstory that was totally unnecessary. One of the first things Sully (Sam Worthington), our hero, says, is something like “I can’t believe I’ve been in cryo for nine years” as you see him get out of his deep sleep on the spaceship. About five seconds later someone else says “you’ve been asleep for nine years.”

Christ, I thought. Is the entire movie going to be like this? A very basic tenement of screenwriting is that if you are showing something, or having a character say something, and also saying it in voiceover – then you don’t need the voiceover. Now of course he was speaking into a video log, but really – that was just a glorified device to have voiceover. We didn’t need that much constant recapping.

And for the first twenty minutes or so it continues on like this. The first few minutes Sully goes on about how his brother died, and he was asked to replace his brother on the mission. Okay, fair enough. After that, every time someone mentioned his dead brother – which was about four times – made that opening monologue redundant. How much more emotionally resonant it would’ve been if the first time we heard about it was when Sigourney Weaver’s character threw it in his face. How little respect Sully was given by James Cameron in revealing his entire emotional weakness right away, like he is not a real person at all who has any reason to hide these things.

Those are exhibits A and B in the case of James Cameron Needs a Writing Partner. There are more but they are small examples and I’ve forgotten most of them already.

A lot of the dialogue in this movie is fairly mediocre, but not exactly bad. But Sigourney Weaver and Zoe Saldana were acting their faces off, and a great performance can mask bad dialogue. Giovanni Ribisi also plays a really great bad guy, and I’d love to see him in more roles like that.

Zoe Saldana is actually so good in this it makes me feel bad that this movie is such racist garbage. She, and her awesome character, deserved better.

The supporting characters were all pretty varied and did what they needed to do – the ones I was supposed to think were likeable and cute I thought were likeable and cute, the ones I was supposed to hate I hated. Zoe Saldana’s character has a betrothed who is not treated with very much respect, so that kind of sucked, but who’s counting what sucks at this point.

So what IS worth watching in this movie, besides some stellar performances on the parts of Ms Sigourney and Saldana?

Well, you probably already know. Blah blah this movie looks gorgeous, the special effects are great. And they are. Nobody is disputing that. I totally want to live on Pandora. I could totally watch just, you know, scenes of Pandora constantly. I want to see more of that world.

I saw it in 3D and I felt I missed out on this “groundbreaking new method of filmmaking” that was apparently used because the 3D was so distracting. So if you still must see this movie, I’d recommend seeing it in 2D. The 3D adds nothing to it.

The CGI however, was pretty great – I was actually happier with the CGI scenes than the live action scenes, I wanted to stay in CGI land. It was amazing how much the Na’vi looked like the human actor who was portraying them, without falling into the Uncanny Valley. However, they still don’t look necessarily like convincing aliens – they look like cartoons. Gorgeous cartoons, but cartoons nonetheless.

I really can’t get over how beautiful Pandora is and how great the effects are. Honestly the only thing worth seeing about the movie is the special effects, which is a shame. There is absolutely no reason these fantastic special effects couldn’t have been used on a better story, actually groundbreaking story. A beautiful looking movie does not make a beautiful movie. It’s all just window dressing. But, hopefully this technique James Cameron has apparently invented will be used on better stories in the future.

Having said all that, I didn’t hate this movie? I wasn’t bored, I wasn’t so offended I couldn’t enjoy parts of it… but it really isn’t a good movie. I’m giving it a B- because I didn’t actually hate it, but I’m kind of ambivalent about it. I think James Cameron was the right guy to create this visual world, but not the right guy to tell this story. The movie, as it is, shouldn’t have existed. It could’ve been so much better.

I am somewhat gratified that a google image search for “Avatar” brings up mostly A:TLA pictures. But Christ, the story about THAT fail of a movie is a story for another day.