I was right to leave so much time between my first and second viewing of Avatar. People stopped talking about it. Even my chatter had subsided along with the early indignation (pathetically misplaced in hindsight- it’s only a movie for god’s sake) that something with such a meagre core could be generating so much buzz.
So sitting down for my second visit to Pandora, I allowed all the unnecessary parts to be trash-dumped like an overfilled diaper of detail doo-doo. What you’re left with is something so stripped back it goes beyond the lazy recycling of old myths (the white man and the noble savage) and topical terrors (the Invasion of Iraq, shock and awe); the superficial characterisation; the illogical plot; the flat and ugly dialogue.
Avatar might not be the great movie everyone wants it to be, but it certainly speaks to people on an experiential level. Like a camp fire story or primitive tale that lacks enough substance on first telling, but gains solidity and strength through the application of imagination. To many it is the ultimate spectacle, part rollercoaster part fireworks display. To people like me it is a travelogue. A soul-stirring journey into an alien world. And to a rather strange, though no less enthusiastic group, it has become a transcendent experience. A cult of being that has generated talk of people threatening suicide on finding out that the planet Pandora does not exist.
Picking up on my response to the movie, Avatar may lack the subtle poignancy of a Richard Attenborough documentary. This is more an American mutation. Things are picked up, molested, high 5’d over and not just observed without outside interference. It’s more akin to Bravo’s ‘Deadliest Warrior’. But even with this heavy-handedness, taken in this way, detached from narrative responsibility, you have something far more primal.
It’s going back to the beginning. A new start. And it’s probably why Cameron wastes so little time on Earth’s backstory. This is a new start for humanity, specifically Jake Sully. It’s not really a surprise he makes such a feeble hero. He’s ignorant, disobedient, brash, insensitive, inarticulate because in many ways he’s regressed back to the state of a child. In fact when Neytiri berates him at the first meeting for being exactly that, she’s already falling in love with him. He exists in a state that is closest to the state of innocence and purity that the Na’vi and Pandora value most.
The problem is, when Jake steps out of the Avatar chamber after every exhilarating transfer to his Na’vi body, he is removing himself from a womb built from technology, not nature. One that leaves him weak, depressed and useless. Jake is desperate to get back his legs and Quaddritch uses that desperation against him, promising that the corporation will repair him. The truth is, it is the natural state of Pandora that is the only means of his salvation. The synaptic womb found at the Tree of Souls might not have saved Dr Augustine (Weaver), but it will save Jake.
This is a little hokey, and the Gaia hypothesis isn’t particularly revelatory as a central conceit, but what makes it work for the most part are the Na’vi as a feat of CGI. While the 3-D is at times mind-blowing, especially if, like me, this is your first exposure to it, it’s because it’s so judiciously applied that you’re barely aware of it. It drops back into the overall experience of the travelogue. Instead observing the Na’vi and how they interact with the environment takes up most of your time. It’s genuinely wonderous.
A lot of that can be explained by Zoe Saldana. She is extraordinary behind the big, beaming brass eyes of Neytiri. Saldana’s yelp, her syntax, her behavioural tics are so well judged as part of an overall performance that not only am I surprised that there isn’t an Oscar campaign for her, it makes you want to reassess Andy Serkis’ brilliant work as Gollum. You’re not afraid to acknowledge Neytiri’s beauty because it is all Saldanas’. You’re not embarrassed to see yourself through her eyes as she falls in love with Jake Sully’s Avatar. It isn’t two actors falling in love, it’s two fully fleshed, deeply feeling aliens. It makes sense that Cameron made the female Na’vi – Weaver being our first contact, her smile coming through with striking similitude – the most arresting. They are the most connected with the planetary deity. The astonishing level of articulation, texture and expression, communicating perfectly all the anger, pain and joy that they elicit through the story.
What an exploration and understanding of the Na’vi tells us is that humanity is still not ready to search out new life. It is too devoted to a technology and science that leaves it single-minded and destructive. Quaritch, as a career soldier, has little interest in expanding his mind beyond conquest and subjugating the natives. Spirituality is an unnecessary distraction. The spectacular geography of Pandora with its floating mountains like some surreal aspect of a Dali landscape defy scientific explanation. They exist outside of that narrow point of view. They’re not there to be understood by one person definitively, only expressed infinitely, by everyone.
This all sounds very positive, but this being a James Cameron movie he has to overdo it. Even though we are bombarded with imagery signifying connection – synaptic global networks, human and Avatar, Na’vi and Pandora, a 3-D immersion in action- he overcomplicates things, leading to disconnect. We know from even the briefest look into cinema’s history that it might take only a single, simple shot to bring an audience to their knees, and yet Cameron has to embellish and turn that emotion from deep to derision.
When Sully bonds with his ‘Dragon’, why does Cameron spin the camera so wildly, and not simply drop it just behind his head for us to enjoy the vertiginous descent in the same dizzying way as someone sky-diving from a plane. This tainted all the action that came later. No amount of clever choreography brought that same sense of expectation. For a movie that features pioneering 3-D effects this is unforgiveable.
Similarly when the Na’vi attempt to the save the life of Dr Augustine, it is the coupling between her human form, and her Avatar that is so touching. The glowing fibres of the planet encasing and then connecting in an umbilical embrace. But just as you are being transported Cameron decides to throw in some tribal whomping and wailing that seeks to lift us to a place we’re already at. Again, the connection is broken and we are dragged back to the reality that this is just a movie. And not a particularly good one at that.
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