Chad’s Grade: B
After the Oscar-winning triumph of Titanic in 1997, you can’t blame director James Cameron for taking some time off. The film pulled off the rare trick of being an Oscar darling, winning 11 statues, and becoming the highest-grossing film of all time. One could imagine Cameron taking a few years off to recharge his batteries, especially compared to his contemporaries like Ridley Scott or Steven Spielberg, who seem to crank movie after movie every year.
After a 12-year sabbatical, Cameron resurfaced in 2009 with the ambitious and big-budget Avatar. It’s a film that’s a different animal from the historical Titanic, returning the director to his hi-concept, science-fiction roots. It was also a chance to tinker with the new stereoscopic 3-D format that was beginning to take off, utilizing digital technology that eschewed the cheesy red & blue glasses in favor of slick, pristine images with stunning depth and clarity. Before starting work on Avatar, Cameron developed the Fusion Camera System, which would be a huge step forward in the burgeoning 3-D format.
The story of Avatar follows Jake Sully, a paraplegic marine sent to the distant world of Pandora, an untouched yet dangerous paradise that houses a rare and precious mineral. Jake is taking the place of his deceased twin brother, a scientist part of the “avatar” program, where humans synch with genetic copies of Pandora’s native alien race, the Na’avi, that look like tall, blue humanoids with cat-like features that are strong and can survive the planet’s harsh environment. The RDA company funding the mining operation hopes that Dr. Grace Augustine can use Jake and her Avatar program to broker a deal with the Na’avi so they can start extracting several rich deposits under the native’s occupied village.
Using their avatars, Jake and Augustine convince the cautious Na’avi tribe to allow them access, where Jake befriends and falls for Neytiri, the chief’s strong-willed daughter. Neytiri shows Jake the native’s customs which include an almost spiritual and biological connection to Pandora’s ecosystem, where the Na’avi bond with the dragon-like banshees and many other creatures. Over a few months, Jake feels more alive and interconnected with the Na’avi in his avatar versus his broken human body. Jake will have to make the ultimate choice between his dual loyalties once he learns that the RDA corporation plans on using the military to clear the Na’avi tribe by force, if needed, to make way for their destructive mining operation.
Director Cameron, who also wrote the screenplay, borrows heavily from the “white man experiences a spiritual transformation while living among the natives” playbook. There’s much of Dances with Wolves and The New World in the film’s DNA while borrowing the environmental imagery reminiscent of director Terrence Malick. Yet Avatar adds the science fiction wrinkle of our hero becoming a native through the avatar technology versus living among the natives. An immersive plot point enhanced by the stunning 3-D technology.
And that’s where Avatar shines as Cameron gives his Fusion Camera System a muscular workout. The 3-D technology brings a tactile and tangible impact to the world of Pandora, with its hyper Amazon rainforest environment teeming with dangerous wildlife and mystical-style floating mountains. It’s a sensory experience that amplifies the movie’s overt environmental themes. And the thrilling banshee sequence, where Neytiri shows Jake how to bond with the dragon-like creature as they sour through the skies, has an inertia-style sense of height and depth with the added 3-D effects.
Avatar was also a big step forward for the motion camera technology pioneered by Andy Serkis’s Gollum performance in The Lord of the Rings trilogy. All the Na’avi characters, performed by actors in specialized motion capture suits, have a pristine photo-realistic look that captures much of the actor’s facial expressions, losing little of their performance. While a few minor angles and shots show the digital seams, for the most part, this is a wholly convincing artificially created world.
But I wish all this groundbreaking tech and razzle-dazzle was built around a more involving storyline. As a screenwriter, Cameron has strong storytelling instincts, even if he paints in broad strokes. He draws interesting characters but saddles them with uneven dialogue that swings between elegance and cheese. One of the director’s worst instincts is adding one-dimensional villains that swirl their mustaches with ridiculous menace. Here, the corporate stooge Parker Selfridge and the Patton-inspired Miles Quaritch practically invite the audience to boo and hiss them onscreen.
With such a middling script, the actors do what they can, even if many are digitally altered with the motion capture tech. Sam Worthington is solid as Jake and shines during his human-based scenes bringing a cynical weariness to his marine soldier cursed with a broken body. Sigourney Weaver is always a welcome presence, imbuing Dr. Grace Augustine with a feisty edge as she battles with the corporate execs hindering her science-based exploration of this rich ecosystem. And Zoe Saldana breaks through the motion capture trappings as Neytiri, giving her native princess a hunter’s spirit and a warrior’s gravitas. Saldana is quickly becoming the queen of the sci-fiction blockbuster with Star Trek, Guardians of the Galaxy, and here in Avatar. She just needs to land a juicy role in Star Wars to complete the crown.
Despite its flaws, Avatar is still a highly entertaining movie designed to be seen on a giant IMAX screen. Cameron hasn’t lost his touch crafting huge, emotionally charged, and propulsive action sequences. The epic 30-minute finale is staged with clean camera angles and a clear sense of geography, never losing track of the dramatic beats of our main characters. Here, the director finally ties the strands of the visual effects wizardry, 3-D effects, motion capture technology, and his strong, character-based storytelling into a satisfying package.
Avatar was a massive hit in 2009, earning an impressive 9 Oscar nominations, including Best Picture. But despite becoming the highest-grossing film of all time worldwide ($2.9 billion and counting), the movie had a tiny cultural impact. It seemed to come and go with little fanfare, although it did help usher in the short-lived 3-D boom during the 2010s. And the movie is usually ranked lower on Cameron’s filmography, so it’s curious that he’s chosen to do 4 (so far) sequels. It hasn’t helped that he’s waited 13 years to finally realize the rest of his vision with the 2022 release of Avatar: The Way of Water.
Yes, 13 years between movies. As a huge James Cameron fan, I’m frustrated that he’s chosen to stay on Pandora for the rest of his career. Even the director’s sub-par films like The Abyss and True Lies are highly entertaining. One wonders how Cameron would operate on a smaller scale, doing a character-based drama or a period-piece film-noir. For now, we’ll have to settle for the grand Pandora adventures that the director is itching to tell.