John Rickards and/or Sean Cregan are... the Nameless Horror

I finally succumbed and saw Avatar last week. With a pair of 3D glasses on top of my regular ones I felt like some kind of Ultranerd. Anyway, I’m very, very late to this party, but that’s largely because I had low expectations – pretty effects, the most hackneyed story ever – and in the end it lived up to them. Not a bad film, per se, but nothing out of the ordinary.

To be clear, I don’t actually mind a hackneyed story in, say, the case of a 90 minute actioner with a snappy script and some suitable pantomime performances. I do object to it in the form of a 150 minute “epic” which clearly takes itself very seriously.

I said before it came out that from the trailer, I could predict everything that happened, and I came out basically right on all counts (I’d have expected the Michelle Rodriguez character to survive, or die with more drama, but otherwise, spot on). That, though, wasn’t the big problem for me. No, the problem was the lack of characters.

A Dances With Space Elves love story/culture war plotline like this requires audience investment in the characters involved. I’ve got to like the initially cynical dude who encounters the foreign culture, comes to feel it suits him and the world he’s in more than his own, and who overcomes suspicion, prejudice and adversity to win the woman he falls in love with and to fight for his adopted people. Dances With Wolves did all these, and did them well. Last of the Mohicans has the gender roles and some of the conflicts reversed in the Cora-Nathaniel relationship, with the addition of the Alice-Uncas quiet “I fancy you” thing thrown in for good measure, but you certainly run with it and come the final sacrifices on all sides, you really do hope that maybe it might all work out well for everyone.

Avatar doesn’t. The Sam Worthington character (I can’t remember his name – bad sign – Jake something or other) arrives as rough slightly don’t care-ish “I’m just a grunt” guy and flips to “being blue is cool” with barely a blink, while reporting back to Scenery Chewing Commander Guy (likewise) and betraying the program with an equal lack of concern. He goes through the whole process of becoming one of the Na’vi and swapping human for alien on a daily basis with nothing but hair growth to show any genuine development or change at all. His choice to betray his own side, his consequent struggle to be accepted again by the aliens, what should have been his initial conflicts of loyalty are never explored beyond the most cursory brushstrokes. The whole paralysis thing – a potential great source of inner conflict and temptation – gets a brief lingering-shot-of-working-alien-toes trot out of the stable, and is then put firmly back there and forgotten about within moments.

Likewise the villains. Commander Ham hates hippies and blue people just because. Weaselly Suit does too, but with more of a don’t care either way kind of attitude. Dr Science Woman hates Commander Ham and loves blue people because they seem nice. Pilot Woman and Other Avatar Guy like Dr Science Woman because they do. Grunt Soldiers like Ham and hate blue people because they do. There is precisely zero movement on any of these counts throughout the film’s run time. No one flinches, no one professes doubt, no one pauses to consider the other side. All of which are kind of important in any cultural betrayal story.

(All of which reminds me of the sequence in the 70-minute Phantom Menace review where people try to describe the characters involved and fail miserably. Really, you could pull the same trick with most of these here.)

Then there’s the Na’vi and Pandora in general. What exactly is Na’vi culture? Simple enough question, given that half the film revolves around it. They believe in the Great Spirit and every other rip from pop Native American myth. They talk about warriors and hunters quite a lot, and they ride animals. Some of them live in a big tree, but not all of them. They have a male chief and a female spiritual leader. That’s sort of all I can come up with. There’s no colour whatsoever to any of this, no fine detail. We never see ordinary Na’vi people doing ordinary Na’vi things, the activities that define them as a people. The feudal samurai culture (as highly idealised and fictional as that of the Na’vi) of Ken Watanabe’s people in The Last Samurai was far more clearly portrayed and with far greater sense of depth. Likewise the plains Indian culture in Dances. Frankly, I couldn’t tell what it was Jake Thingy was trying to save. (A mate said, “That reminds me of the old woman on Kif’s homeworld in Futurama. ‘The ceremony is complete! I shall now take my leave! I live here so I won’t actually be going anywhere, but you don’t have to talk to me any more!’” And I realised that I had more clue as to the nature of Kif’s society in a 20-minute cartoon episode that largely concentrated on other things than I did of the Na’vi in a two and a half hour movie about them.)

What about the humans? Why are they so nuts for “unobtanium”? What’s going on back on Earth to make the world dead and people come to Pandora as mercenary marine types? How did the conflict with the Na’vi arise and how did it reach the state it’s in now? Why, if they’re so nasty, can’t they just kill the blue guys with impunity? No clue. Basically, they’re grimy labourers and army-talkin’ guys with guns and that’s just the way it is. Giovanni Ribisi’s an actor I like, but despite having a roughly equivalent amount of screen time I could tell you a lot less about his character (such as his name) than I could about Carter Burke in Aliens, pretty much cut from the same cloth. With Burke, at the very least, you had some kind of sense of who he worked for and why he was so happy to shaft those around him. This guy… yeah, so this ore’s valuable. Boo-yah.

The lack of attention paid to character makes the action sequences – which aren’t especially numerous; things don’t kick into high gear until the final 20 minutes – and the panto villain’s merciless destruction of the homes of the peace-loving warrior culture (yeah, one of those) rather lacking in bite. I don’t really care who lives or dies, there’s no tension because none of what I’m seeing really matters and the complete lack of any inner emotional conflict (Michelle Rodriguez comes closest, and her “I’m not doing this” moment is wholly without consequence – even the door-gunner who doesn’t seem to share her enthusiasm for the blues seems to be back riding shotgun for her later on; she even flies her chopper away from the other hundred or so flying machines and off into the wide blue yonder without anyone, including Cmdr Ham, questioning her) robs every threat, every fight, every argument of interest.

So much of the film’s story is performed through voiceover by Sam Worthington that I wonder – I haven’t looked it up to see if this is at all true or not – if the movie wasn’t originally much longer, and swathes of character/culture scenes and establishing material hasn’t been cut for time reasons.

Regardless of the reason for it, Avatar is basically empty of excitement. Sure things sometimes blow up real pretty like, and the jungle’s nice (even if it looks like an ultra-realistic version of the Night Elf starting zone in WOW at times), but it’s soulless. It’s not the fault of the cast (all, Cmdr Ham perhaps aside, good actors) or the dialogue (Cmdr Ham aside), but the director. Avatar looks like James Cameron’s “hey, this New Age shit’s awesome, and look at what I made in Spore” movie, with a cursory attempt at a story stapled unconvincingly to the front.

Edit: Shorter comparison time. Terminator: Salvation, a movie a lot of people panned, has far better characterisation and many more genuine moments of choice and emotional struggle in it than this. Hell, the latest Chipmunks probably does too.