I hear from a colleague (for I did not watch the Academy Awards) that Hurt Locker and not Avatar won Best Picture of 2009.  For someone who places little stock in these awards, I find I’m surprisingly jubilant.  My ambivalence about Avatar has been well expressed on a previous blog posting, but I’ve had enough people take exception to my criticism that I feel compelled to explain a bit more.

Avatar was not bad.  Technically, it was fantastic, though I found it a more logical step up from LOTR than an unanticipated one-movie revolution of film.  Narratively, it wasn’t distinctive in any way other than its complete predictability of premise, character, plot, and just about everything but the look of the film.  The celebration it has garnered I find sad, because it is indicative of the substantial appetite there is for style without much substance.  What bothers me the most is that style can readily be used in service of substance, as could well have been the case with Avatar.  Here are a few specifics that bothered me about the film as well as an idea of what would have made it more interesting, which may help you better understand my opinion of the film.

1) Alien Love: Two complete different species experience attraction and romance so predictably that Jake and Neytiri develop an intimate relationship in a very familiar, human way.  Not only is this a boring approach, it isn’t particularly genuine.  The Na’vi are descended from felines and have carbon filaments strengthening their bones.  Their passions would likely be expressed, at least at times, far less tenderly than human intimacy.  Even the Klingons had more complexity with their snarling and biting and amorous adventures into dominance.  A lot could have been done with the complexities of inter-species romance, so big opportunity missed.  Every love story is about individuals, which means that they are at some level alien to one other.  By taking advantage of the significant differences between two individuals of literally different species, an interesting commentary could have been made on the nature of romance and love.   

2) Angelic Science: There are some quirks about Sigourney Weaver’s character that make her more interesting than any other character in the film, but even that is window dressing.  Weaver’s Dr. Augustine is driven by curiosity just hard enough to never compromise anything in the film.  Science is as pure as the Na’Vi faith, this perfect oneness with everything.  What a crock.  Science as a method is pretty trustworthy and impartial, but as a practice it’s cutthroat.  It’s intertwined with economics and prestige and the substantial fallibility of humans, and people who are driven to be the best in their fields aren’t ever self-sacrificing altruists.  Dr. Augustine would have been much more interesting if she was shown to be benefiting materially in some way from her study of the Na’Vi.  Would this make her evil?  Of course not.  Would it have made her a genuine scientist?  Certainly.  Real scientists confront tough calls frequently, crises of ethics and competition, and seeing how Augustine handled such situations would have helped the film immensely.  Instead, science serves as the perfect mechanism to verify the perfect system inherent to Pandora, and as any storyteller should know, few things are as boring as perfect.  Which brings me to the next point…

3) The Circle of Life!  Works well for an animated Disney show meant primarily for kids; for adults of a more examining nature, not so much.  The assumption that unadapted nature is the perfect environment for a sentient species is illogical.  The very emergence of sentience is tied to the ability to manipulate.  If I am aware of my my self then I critique my self, and as I separate my self from other things, I make use of them as best I can.  A sentient species will—even must—prioritize itself over other life by the simple fact of direct experience.  The simplistic conservationist message of the film was so trite as to be painful.  Now, if the Na’Vi’s god truly had not taken sides and let them all die, that would have been an authentic presentation.  Not a great film, but at least authentic.  What would have been far more interesting is a presentation of an evolved Na’Vi culture, better off in some ways and harmed in others, after interaction with humans.  If there’s a single great truth about nature, it’s change or die.  If the Na’Vi had been forced to adapt to the new situation, changing their culture in some way irrevocably, that would have been interesting to see.  Instead, we get a message not quite complex enough to deserve an Elton John song.

4) Evil, Stupid, and Cowardly Business:  The suit behind all the nastiness on Pandora is possibly the most irritating and one dimensional character in Avatar.  Believe it or not, even lowlifes usually don’t see themselves as lowlifes.  Most of them even have good points, such as sound understanding of market forces or even the yearnings and appetites of their market.  Some have even heard of a concept called “business ethics.”  They may not always follow these, but it does play a role in their decision making.  Ribisi’s character would have been so much more interesting if he’d genuinely represented the corporate world: human, perhaps even likable, but driven to do something that really bothers him.  He could have been charming, truly invested in finding a peaceful solution and bothered by their inability to do so—and he still could have ordered the attack on the Na’Vi.  That’s what makes excessive capitalism frightening: it can recognize other values, such as diversity, ethics, or interpersonal relationships, and consciousness relegate them to lesser value than profit.   It would have been even more interesting if the Na’Vi had genuinely benefited from the “Sky People,” making the corporation a great yet dangerous catalyst forcing the Na’Vi to decide how much of their own future would stay in their hands.  Instead, it was like Wal-mart with missile turrets bristling from every store.  Yeah, most realistic.

5) The Great Satan (the American military): This one makes me genuinely angry.  I find the assertion that soldiers are evil to be extremely offensive.  Most soldiers, including American soldiers, don’t demonize their opponents.  Their training is designed specifically to prevent that.  Soldiers are trained to focus on what they do, and to do it as perfectly as possible under the worst of conditions.  The enemy is a variable that you do not allow enough influence to dictate the outcome of engagement.  You don’t have to belittle or hate someone to fight them, even to kill them.  That’s one of the fascinating things about soldiers and war.  Col. Quaritch is every stereotype of the evil military commander.  He is a conscienceless killer, doesn’t know or respect his enemy, and is driven by no particular affection or defense of anything in which he’s invested.  He’s violent for the sake of violence.  At the very least they could have shown his viciousness arising from camaraderie with his men, which is true of almost every single combat vet I’ve ever met.  The dynamics of war are fascinating in their difficulty.  Soldiers are both people and weapons, and those aspects frequently fight against each other.  That’s what PTSD is, the human portion lashing out at things the weapon disregards as being no longer consequential.  Col. Quaritch isn’t human, just weapon.  If that happened in real life, and I expect it can, the result is a type of monstrous victim, someone who has had the humanity literally bleed and burned out of him.  There is no husk of a human soul in Avatar’s archvillain; he’s no person, just function.  That, ultimately, is the common fatal flaw throughout nearly every section of this movie: every character has a why for their existence, but almost never is there a why behind their why.  It is a film full of sparkly things, which, unfortunately, includes every character in the movie.