Cast: Sam Worthington, Zöe Saldana, Sigourney Weaver

Director: James Cameron

Screenplay: James Cameron

Running time: 2 hrs 42 mins

Genre: Action/Adventure



CRITIQUE:


It’s almost a major tenet in Hollywood to respect James Cameron for what he’s worth, after his revolutionary contribution to American blockbuster filmmaking. We have to admit Hollywood would never be the same without the likes of Aliens, Terminator and the behemoth Titanic. He is, by all means, many things at once, a multi-hyphenate multi-tasker – director, screenwriter, producer, innovator, visionary – and now adding to his job description, a digital engineer who fashioned a formidable, groundbreaking high-definition Fusion Camera System, a specialised camera equipment light years ahead of the now rapidly becoming outmoded red-and-blue 3D lens technology.


And by now, almost everyone in the planet of Earth has probably seen Cameron’s latest sci-fi space extravaganza Avatar, and experienced the Pandora terra firma in eye-popping 3D. In less than no time, it’s also set to eclipse Titanic’s all-time box-office haul, also Cameron’s last directorial gig before he had gone AWOL for 12 years. Turns out he’s been tinkering with his filmmaking mechanics to bring us this blue beast, setting to change cinema forever and shunting his detractors to shame. Talks about a new cinematic revolution had been buzzing long before Avatar’s release, with some seismic power comparable to what The Jazz Singer did to the sound era. Apparently, we are on the threshold of the 3D age, and Cameron is the messiah prophesying the goodwill of a Hollywood game-changing event.


That is all very jolly and terribly electrifying news, until, of course, when one sees the film itself. Count me off from licking Cameron’s boots. Avatar, for all its technical, technological ingenuity, is no masterpiece. The visuals may be of grand scale, bleeding the eyes of those who watch it, immersive in detail, especially in glorious IMAX, and often gorgeously realised – but like any other beauty contest, set out to bedazzle its audience whilst overlooking brains and heart. There’s no contention that Pandora is a world to be engrossed with, with Earth-like environs both surreal and photo-real; lush rainforests, skyscraper trees, floating mountains, luminous flora and fauna and enriched with creatures entrancing to the eyes. And the native creatures of this planet, the Na’vi are mesmerising blue-skinned, 8-feet tall, cat-like folks with their tribal culture and deep connection to their Mother Nature, Eywa. It’s a world to revel in and be drawn to. That’s until the narrative cracks.


At the heart of Avatar is actually a postmodernist mélange of many other Hollywood epics, direly assembled together to create a yarn that would fill up a three-hour running-time. If Cameron has promised us that we’ve never seen anything like Avatar before – he’s lying. We have seen this before, if you look closely: Dances with Wolves, Apocalypto, Star Wars, The Lord of the Rings and if considerably Pocahontas and Fern Gully. It’s a hodgepodge of storylines wrapped in a brand-new glossy package delivered to silverscreen. To mention, it also follows a revisionist Western narrative, with cowboys (read: middle-American rednecks) set out to conquer the lands of the native Indians (read: the species of Na’vi), with a reckless ‘white’ hero permeating the tribe’s culture, learning their mores, falling in love with one of its women (predictably someone in the line of authority, oh, perhaps the tribal king’s daughter, I dunno), and a change of vision and heart afterwards, begins fighting for their side and the clan’s survival, despite of betrayal, disloyalty, cheating etc etc. Cue in riding to the West and riding to the East, with some pre-battle elocution of speeches, and amassing a battalion of warriors all screaming for war glory. Really, it’s old hat.


There are even moments in Avatar that creaks with woodenness. Its opening denies its audience of a comprehensive set-up, with Sam Worthington’s voice-over narration feels automatically written by one of Cameron’s tech-gadgets. We are plunged directly to an insensitive death scene of Jake Sully’s brother, his sudden replacement in the Avatar programme, and the introduction of the aquamarine creatures themselves, the surrogates of Na’vi bodies, without bothering to explain how it got there. Worthington presumably has done his best, but his Sully feels like a cardboard-thin character cut from the “How To Make A Hollywood Epic” guidebook. And so are the rest of the characters, a roll call of stereotypes churned from Cameron’s brainbox, from Stephen Lang’s one-dimensional tough-baddie Colonel Miles Quaritch, employing a post-9/11 militarism strategy to exploit the riches of Pandora, fighting “terror with terror”, to Giovanni Ribisi’s corporate-minded simpleton, and even Michelle Rodriguez suffers from clichéd proto-feminist battle-cries of “I didn’t sign up for this shit” or “You’re not the only one with a gun, bitch”. Only Sigourney Weaver gives a compelling presence here, but her unyielding yet compassionate Dr. Grace Augustine remains frustratingly underwritten.


Whilst it’s a fact that mainstream cinema wouldn’t be complete without Cameron and his game-changing visions, there’s no bullshitting that at the essence of Avatar is a revisionist Western-cum-gung-ho version of Fern Gully masquerading as an epitome of cinematic revolution. If there’s something that needs revolutionising in this film, it’s the script and storyline, so lacking with gravitas, originality and most of all, a pulsing, invigorating heart. The videogame-simulated generation will lap it up. But let’s not forget that at the end of the day, it is story, not spectacle, which really counts.



VERDICT:

Avatar’s achievement is technically a visual one, fully realising to microscopic detail the lush world of Pandora and shoring up the boundaries of FX-driven, 3-D cinema to dizzying heights. But for all its staggering technological whizz-bang, peel away the spectacle and we see nothing but a piece of storytelling so staggeringly hackneyed, if not buried in an ancient civilisation of lazy Hollywood pastiche. Cameron has obsessed himself with his three-dimensional technology, whilst leaving his characters one-dimensional and dialogues robotically automated.


RATING: B-