Inessentials

Significant spoilers for Avatar; medium-sized spoilers for Aliens

When I was a kid, my favorite movie was Return of the Jedi. (Now known as Star Wars VI.) It’s not that I was especially fond of the Ewoks. Any kid knows that their treehouse homes are way cooler than the Ewoks themselves. It took me many years to realize it, but what fascinated me about Return of the Jedi is that the Star Wars universe suddenly was transplanted into a verdant forest. After the khakis and browns of A New Hope and the blacks, whites, and grays of The Empire Strikes Back, to suddenly see the speeder bikes racing through a lush forest of greens made the whole world more real. I grew up around forests, and seeing speeder bikes and light sabers in a forest was the coolest thing ever. Ever since, I’ve found science fiction stories set in wooded areas to be very compelling. (Similar for fantasy stories like The Lord of the Rings, or sci-fi set in that other great untamed area of Earth, the sea.)

So I was pre-disposed toward the world of Avatar, created by the man who made The Abyss (about strange life in the ocean depths) and Aliens (about the strange interaction of biological life and mechanical steel). Watching the film, I was struck by Cameron’s fussiness. Here is a man who never leaves an inch of frame unfilled. Showing off his command of technology and filmmaking, Cameron plugs every scintilla of his computer-generated world with some creepy-crawly, some background figure, something to fill the frame. When depicting the rich world of Pandora, this adds to the thrill that I felt watching Return of the Jedi as a kid. But over the course of 162 minutes, I did find myself occasionally yearning for the sparse landscapes of No Country for Old Men, a film content to let its characters drift through barren landscapes and barely decorated hotel rooms. Like the Coen Brothers used those repeated shops of nearly empty landscapes to engross the viewer in the moral emptiness of the universe they depicted, Cameron uses the lush greens and blues of Pandora to demonstrate the biological and spiritual connection the Na’vi have to their planet.

As a side note, Cameron also seems to forget about his camera. He’s so interested in filling the frame, that he forgets the cinematic possibilities of changing viewing angles. Of course, he expertly crafts the flying scenes, but it is not until a rush down the halls of a spaceship (strongly reminiscent of the Alien films) that we see the camera put in motion in a way that adds to the storytelling, rather than just showing off the admittedly wondrous world that Cameron and crew have created.

And of course, this world is supposed to be made even more life-like by Cameron’s embrace (and advancement) of 3-D technology. And I must say, at times I was really sold on the tech. Watching a spaceship glide through space, like we’ve seen a thousand times in Star Trek and Star Wars and a dozen other outer-space epics, I had never seen one quite as realistic as the ship at the beginning of Avatar. At other times, though, the 3-D effects were simply laughable. Any shot with multiple foci (for instance, a character walks across the foreground, a computer station sits a bit further back but still in focus, and more activity occurs at a distance in the background) comes across in the comical style of Captain EO. And fast moving characters were very choppy, at least in the theater where I watched. (I’ll be interested to see if that is still the case in 2-D.) Frankly, I’m glad I gave Avatar a chance in 3-D, but it will be a long time before I bother watching another film in 3-D. The pain and price just aren’t worth the payoff. It was barely worth it this time.

But back to the world of Pandora. Cameron presents the Na’vi as a mish-mash of indigenous peoples who have more to teach the “civilized” than the “civilized” have to teach them. As morality tales go, this one is a groaner. As a good liberal, I prefer it to a paean to the military or a we-can-do-no-wrong propaganda campaign. But the deadly serious New Age-y religion (captured in an unintentionally hilarious group hug-and-swing that recalls the Wachowski Brothers’ dance marathon in Matrix Reloaded) and the uber-intense way that Cameron enforces his point is, shall we say, less than subtle. And like many attempts to show how much we Westerners have to learn from indigenous peoples, the film slides into a subtle form of liberal racism. You see, these savages are noble savages. Look at how they commune with the animals they kill for their survival. Look at how connected they are to the world around them and each other. (Succinctly captured in those three oft-repeated words, “I see you.”) Clearly, the film pounds into our brains, we Westerners have much to learn about ourselves and our world from the National Geographic sort. As if to bring out a big yellow highlighter to make sure we don’t miss the point, the central characters among the barely clothed Na’vi are motion-captured and voiced from three African-American and one Native American actors. So the only time we see people of color in the film, that color is blue. (The lone exception is Michelle Rodriguez, whose Latino skin is two shades darker than her lilly-white pals.) I’m not claiming that James Cameron is a racist in any strong sense of that word. That word is too important. But his film does reveal a tendency to paint (blue?) a portrait of people of color as noble savages who could teach a thing or two to white Westerners who come after their resources. And that is a subtly racist message, at the very least in its racial essentialism, which is one short step from stereotyping, and in its praise of “noble savage” qualities in native people.

But the issue of race pales (ha! a pun!) in comparison to Cameron’s shockingly anti-military message. Watch movies for long enough, and you’ll see your fair share of anti-war films. But you’ll have to watch a long time to find a film that is not only so anti-war, but anti-military. What’s the difference? An anti-war film chronicles the terrible consequences (on soldiers, civilians, the land) of waging war. It may emphasize the futility of war. But it can also present soldiers positively in the face of these terrible evils. Even anti-war films can present soldiers as heroic, brave, virtuous, and wise. Cameron’s film bluntly opposes the very idea of a mechanized military. We consistently are presented with a contrast between Colonel Miles Quartich (Stephen Lang), the film’s clear villian, and every other character in the film. He’s not a scientist who just wants to learn, like Dr. Grace Augustine (Sigourney Weaver). He’s not a noble warrior like Tsu’tey (Laz Alonso). And when given the choice, he chooses evil (=Western =militaristic =colonial) when Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) chooses good (=indigenous =communal). The film’s only other villain is Parker Selfridge (the always-welcome Giovanni Ribisi), who stands in for the cash-hungry mission leader who is here to rape and pillage the land for profit.

In case the trailer or the description so far hasn’t made it clear, the film is a thinly disguised allegory for the war in Iraq, with that thin disguise coming in the form of an allegory of colonization of North America, with just a splash of Vietnam for color. Like a said before, the film isn’t exactly aiming for subtle.

What strikes me about the message of the film is how it inverts many of the images of Aliens, which Cameron directed nearly 25 years ago. In Aliens, Sigourney Weaver’s Ripley enters a giant walking robotic suit to battle the titular alien, who is a queen defending her progeny. In this story, the hero uses technology to defeat an alien biological life form that is following its biological imperative to defend its young. In Avatar, a similar suit is used by the evil Colonel Miles Quartich to defend himself against a tribal leaders defending their clan. The same images of a technological exoskeleton fighting an alien are used in both films, but to remarkably different effects. In one, a battle between mothers is made equal by human technology. In the other, military technology is the very evil that is being battled, since it is what enables the destruction of these people, their home, and their sacred places. It’s as though Ellen Ripley, at the end of Aliens decided to join the acid-for-blood alien and fight the Company because, after all, what business do we have on her world?

Avatar is an ambitious film that holds an interesting place in Cameron’s corpus. Its images suggest Aliens, but its message suggests The Abyss. For a big-time Hollywood director, Cameron has always been a critic of moneyed power, and he takes that further in Avatar then he ever has before. It’s visually rich (maybe too rich – I recommend a strong shot of espresso to ease digestion), and thematically blunt in a Steven Spielberg manner, but, like many of Spielberg’s films, a rather stunning filmmaking achievement.