Tuesday, January 5, 2010

The Un-imaginarium of Dr. Cameron

It took me awhile to get around to seeing Avatar, which it seems is the same way for a lot of people, as the film's box office receipts are holding steady instead of declining.

While James Cameron has made some really fun movies -- Aliens, the first two Terminators, the underrated Abyss -- he's also done some schlock, like Titanic (Spoiler alert: The ship sinks). The more advanced his career and the more chance he's given to produce his own vision unfettered by studios or folks who can tell him what to do, the less interesting his stories have become. And Avatar, as we've heard over and over again, is a story he's been working years to tell.

Cameron himself had a big hand in inventing some of the technology used for the 3-D version of Avatar, and he's said he had to wait for computer-generated imagery (CGI) technology to advance to the place where it could realistically show the world of Pandora and its large blue inhabitants, the Na'vi. The story, however, is an utterly by-the-numbers account of a human being first exploring Pandora mentally linked to an artificially grown Na'vi body so that humans can negotiate (or bully) a way to get something called -- I am not making this up -- unobtainium that they want really badly. Of course the human realizes the back-to-nature Na'vi are much better than his own people. Of course he learns the ways of the natives and becomes one of them, and of course this happens because of a girl. Yes, she is blue, 10 feet tall, has a tail and her face looks kind of like a cat's. But so are the rest of the Na'vi, so it's OK.

Because of its technology, Avatar has been compared to Star Wars and another movie whose wizardry broke new ground in the way movies looked, Pixar's Toy Story. Avatar's story is flat and completely predictable, but people could make the same arguments against Star Wars and Toy Story. Step back from the first, and there's no way anyone could really believe the Death Star is going to destroy our heroes or that Luke isn't going to make the shot that blows it up. Step back from the second, and there's no way anyone could believe that Woody won't save the day for the other toys or that Buzz won't somehow be a part of it so they can be friends.

You don't have to take the same step back to predict nearly every turn of Avatar, though, down to a good percentage of the dialogue. Both Lucas and the Pixar people created entry points to their stories along with their trailblazing use of moviemaking technology. The amazing (for their time) visuals and such simply helped set the characters and action in the places that their stories described.

Had Toy Story been a traditional hand-drawn cartoon it would have worked -- differently, perhaps, but it would have been just as effective. Had Lucas made Star Wars with, say, 1960s-level Star Trek TV series technology, it probably would have worked as well. After all, the "prequel" trilogy showed that when Lucas had access to more impressive cinematic magic-making tools, it didn't necessarily translate to more impressive movies.

I read an Avatar review in which the writer compared the movie to a very beautiful woman who comes up a bit short between the ears; the kind, he said, that every guy has dated at least once even though he knows there's not a whole lot there. I never had that opportunity, so I'll take his word for the comparison, but I definitely had an understanding of Gertrude Stein's description of her hometown of Oakland, CA: "There's no there there." Avatar is a wowser of a video game and offers a lot of new things that we'll probably see a lot of in movies to come, and those things will help moviemakers stretch the boundaries of what the screen can show us. But there's no story in this story and no character in these characters. We don't have to be told to ignore the man behind the curtain, because there's nothing back there.

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