Yes, Avatar Looked Real. No, That Doesn't Make It Any Good.

I apologize in advance to Tucker Mills for this post, because I’m about to do some Ultimate Hating Intimacy on Avatar, which the other night won approximately one billion Golden Globes, a number to be honest with you I’m not particularly pleased with.

First off, I’d like to register my disappointment that Roger Ebert, a critic I genuinely respect and admire, gave Avatar four stars and said it was like seeing Star Wars in 1977. The fact that he actually did see Star Wars in 1977 notwithstanding, Avatar is no Star Wars. The thing that made Star Wars so great is that George Lucas came up with this great, amazing galaxy full of these fantastical creatures, and it was only when he started actually making the movie that he realized that he had no idea how the fuck to make the images in his head become the images on the screen, so he and his boys at Industrial Light and Magic invented a whole bunch of new technologies in order to make that happen. After having seen Avatar, on the other hand, it just feels like James Cameron wanted an excuse to invent a bunch of fancy moviemaking toys that he could play with, AND THEN he was like, “Oh shit, I have to have a story along with this technology that I just invented.”

While I'm on the subject of Star Wars, I should mention that part of me feels dumb for writing about my problems with Avatar. On some level it feels like someone just having seen Star Wars and then complaining about how everyone seems to be able to communicate perfectly with Chewbacca even though he just kind of grunt-yells at them and why if he can understand English and people can interpret what he says as coherent speech why the hell he just doesn’t speak Real English already. But on the other hand, I’m mad as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore.

Before I lay into Avatar, I realize that what I'm about to say isn't the most wildly original analysis, but what I've got here are a bunch of problems that I (and, um, lots of other people too) have with it. Mainly I was bored and didn't want to do homework today so I wrote about this buhshit instead.

I'll start by admitting that James Cameron succeeded – he made Avatar look real as hell. The blue, nine-foot tall Na’vi people of Pandora might as well have been sitting next to me they were so for rizzle. On the other hand, in thirty years some film is going to come along with such dazzling visuals that it’s going to make Avatar look grossly pedestrian, and Avatar will just be remembered as an average-looking – if at the time groundbreaking – movie with a stupid plot and vaguely racist undertones.

This is the problem.

In fact, there are several problems.

There's the whole thing about the movie’s anti-corporate, anti-technology message. I found it to ring particularly hollow, seeing as the movie reportedly cost a QUARTER OF A BILLION DOLLARS TO MAKE AND REQUIRED THE INVENTION OF A NEW CAMERA. It’s the issue of agency. It’s hard to reconcile having something tell you to go out and not support big business, especially when a bunch of conglomerate-ass-motherfuckers are getting paid by the very presence of your ass in the movie theater seat, not to mention the countless tie-in money that dudes in suits are making due to the Avatar video games, action figures, Happy Meals, et al.

And Another Thing: why are they making Avatar Happy Meals? I would have totally shit my pants if I’d seen that movie when I was still into Happy Meals, even though the implication of selling an Avatar Happy Meal is that you should totally take your kids to see this movie, preferably several times until they can’t sleep because of the nightmares of gigantic red pterodactyls swooping down upon them and eating them. Because I did a scientific study, and that’s the exact dream that kids have after they see Avatar. Not cool, guys. Seriously. Just go to Wendy's instead.

And then there’s the issue of the central conceit of the plot, which is Jake, this ex-Marine who can’t use his legs (aka FUTURE LIEUTENANT DAN), is sent to go be an Avatar and hang out with the Blue Cat People, learning their ways so that he can figure out how to best destroy them. BUT. He falls in love with Uhura from the new Star Trek movie, saves the Na’vi and becomes one of them. That’s the entire plot of a two-and-a-half-hour movie, summarized in seventy-six words. In addition to being astoundingly slight, it’s also wildly unoriginal, openly cribbing vast swaths of story from Pocahontas, Ferngully and Dances With Wolves and playing into a bunch of tired tropes about race that I’m going to talk about now.

Even though Avatar is decidedly Pro-Blue People, it remains Pro-Blue People from a stance very much rooted in white condescension. From a plot standpoint, there was absolutely no need for the Na’vi to need Jake’s help in taking down the Big Evil Corporation Run By Giovanni Ribisi Playing Ari Gold. Instead, they could have done it all by themselves and it would have been a nice little story about how the underdog can take down the bad guy if they try reallllllllly hard. Instead, the filmmakers had to bring Jake The White Dude in and save them.

Jake is no ordinary white dude. He’s the most awesome and best white dude our culture can produce. He’s tough – a Marine, as the movie constantly reminds us – smart without being a whiny intellectual, and willing to sacrifice himself for the betterment of others. He comes in, learns how the Na’vi culture works, and then uses his knowledge of his own culture in order to help the Na’vi beat them back and continue their way of life. Basically, the movie is saying that without Jake The White Dude helping them, the Na’vi (the “other”) would have been helplessly crushed when the bad guys knocked down that gigantic tree. By doing his movie like this, Cameron says that while the culture of the “other” may be more pure and good, it can’t survive without a little help from White People Culture.

Oh and before I go do homework, here are a couple more things about Avatar that were stupid: The wild and crazy planet was called Pandora, the bad guys tried (and failed) to snag some sort of material that, in a wildly original move, was called “unobtainium,” and for some reason Sigorney Weaver’s Avatar looked twenty years younger than her and had to wear a belly t-shirt.