Something needs to be said about the failings of Avatar, if only for some relief from all the oohhing and ahhing of awestruck fans. Don’t get me wrong, this film deserves to be spoken of in superlatives—extraordinary, phenomenal, groundbreaking, most beautiful, entertainment of the highest order, shock and awe. In Avatar, director James Cameron has dreamed up a whole new world with its own, internally consistent rules of gravity, biology, and ecology. Its creatures have just the strangely necessary mix of familiar and foreign features that make them believable to us. One can’t think of any other imaginative venture as thoroughly creative and aesthetically fulfilling as this one. Avatar indeed is an extraordinary achievement—and that is precisely why it also fails. In trying to be more, it ends up being less.
It is easy to be carried away by all the special effects—floating mountains, fluorescent flowers, dinosaur-like aliens, and some kind of super-sized Sequoia tree—and forget the storyline entirely. But strip away all the computer generated imagery and the plot could be summarized thusly: Evil corporation invades foreign land, plunders its natural resources, and uproots the indigenous people. The natives confront missiles and machine guns with bow and arrows, facing certain annihilation. Mother Nature steps in deus ex machina, saves the day, and drives out the evil corporation. Kind of reads like environmental pulp fiction, right? With its use of mercenary soldiers and a scowling commander who speaks of shock-and-awe tactics, the film also takes some cheap shots at American imperialism.
But the audience is too absorbed—entranced—by the nonstop CGI to notice any of this. Call it simulation inebriation—the result of the imbalance between being visually over-stimulated and underwhelmed by plot and theme. One reviewer put it best—a wonder to behold, a story to forget.
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