The dreams of Iron Jim
There’s a man who can’t walk, but in his dreams he can stride out into an alien wilderness and run. The man is Jim Cameron, and if he is known to be a tyrant, perhaps it’s only because he’s spent so much of his life stuck in that damn wheelchair. With dreams like these, just beyond the fingertips’ reach, I’d be frustrated too; there’s so much world out there to be touched, and smelled, and felt. In Avatar, James Cameron’s dream finally wakes up.
I strained, and strained hard, against the slow build of this film. Cameron has always been a boy’s writer, and no longer being a boy, it’s a bit rough to sit through nearly half a first act composed of nothing but voiceovers, speeches, briefings, flashbacks, closed eyes opening, and open eyes closing. Plus, there’s those 3-D glasses – who on earth wants to watch a movie through a mullioned window, to achieve an illusion of depth that was there all along?
We’re brought to the alien world of Pandora with our lead, Jake Sully (Sam Worthington, who… hoo boy, this boy’s going somewhere). We’re told that Jake’s crippled; told that he’s come to Pandora to sub in for his deceased twin brother; told that he’s going to drive an Avatar; told that an Avatar is a 12-foot-tall blue alien into whom Jake’s consciousness can be completely downloaded. Jake is the Avatar; we are Jake.
The Avatar is one of the Na’vi, the planet’s indigenous race, who, like indigenous races throughout history and across the galaxy, are between Us and the Thing We Want. In this case, there’s enough MacGuffintonium under the Na’vi’s Life Tree to ensure that the big bad humans have sent George W. Bush’s army to Pandora, for the express purpose of kicking the Na’vi out of their tree.
And after enough of this floating mountain of exposition that I was ready to scream WILL EVERYBODY PLEASE JUST STOP TALKING…. they do. Jake Sully gets waylaid in the Pandoran jungle… and Avatar inhales, and becomes a world.
The jungle in Avatar is not passive. It does not feel safe. It does not feel designed. It is full of flora and fauna that are as diverse, and random, and slobberingly wet and wild, as life itself. It’s so goddamn real – and not the real of motion simulations or rendered crowd-data. It’s life, on that alien world far away. Stinking, rotting, growing, fighting, fucking life. I don’t know how Cameron did that, but he really, really did.
Are the special effects good? How would I know? I stopped noticing them after twenty minutes. If nothing else, Cameron has given us the end of that besotted debate at last. He, and many others, have been screaming at us for years – you dummies, the special effects were never the point. They’re just the gear that gets you into the jungle. Look, Cameron will never be Fellini, but with Avatar‘s disabled human using technology to dream his way into the most amazing world he’s ever seen, this film is as much a meditation on the particulars of Cameron’s art as Fellini’s 8 1/2.
Does the 3-D work? It certainly doesn’t hurt. It doesn’t revolutionize cinema. The Avatar world, with its stunning colour and breathtaking vistas, will reward repeat viewing on a variety of formats from IMAX to Blu-ray. But for now I am willing to be charitable and suggest that the reason I still see those aquamarine fronds every time I close my eyes is that for nearly three hours, I lived among them. Like Titanic before it, Avatar is an immersive experience, regardless of technical gimmickry; it is an “I felt like I was really there” picture. This has become Cameron’s stock in trade.
Back to the jungle. Jake is about to get eaten by all manner of creepy crawlies when a Na’vi woman appears out nowhere and saves his life. Her name is Neytiri, and if there has ever been a sexier 12-foot-tall blue girl, I do not know about it. Neytiri is played by Zoe Saldana, who is having as good a year as Worthington. Her big blue character is the driving, throbbing, verdant life of the film, boiled into a single, crouched tiger-woman. Bare-breasted, passionate, and bright, she’s everything the machinery and networks and BlackBerrys can never be. I imagine James Cameron is somewhat in love with her, given that she represents every single thing he has ever wanted out of a female character. I’m not far behind him.
Neytiri takes Jake back to her tribe and teaches him the ways of her people, which often involve wrestling with dragons, base-jumping off thousand-foot trees, or making out with the alien hottie in the diaphanous pools of bioluminescent wonder that tie the Na’vi into the world-brain that connects all life on Pandora.
And if you’ve ever even heard of Return of the Jedi, you know that sooner or later, Jake and his ewoks are going to have to go up against the techno-menace, to stand up for life’s right to be life in the face of man’s folly. And if you have for any reason tired of life with the Na’vi and climbing those trees, rest assured that James Cameron, the action director, has not lain restless since he smacked Titanic into the ocean on the heads of a thousand drowning peasants. Enlivened by the berserk vertical topography of the world he’s created, electrified by flying dragons and helicopters and giant floating rocks, Cameron pops out a grand finale sky-battle against which grand finales are going to be judged for a long, long time. He runs riot through vertical space with his heroes, across tens of thousands of feet of aerial battlefield. Three dimensions? This feels like six.
And yes, there’s yer message. The big, green, capital-M Message, unabashedly uncynical and bleedingly earnest: All life is connected. Do not fuck with it. Here’s how far Cameron is willing to go with it: as the climax progresses, Jake faces down evil Col. Quaritch for the ultimate smackdown. Jake is a giant blue alien; Quaritch is driving a metal power suit. We’re looking at one of the most enduring images of Cameron’s career, passionately reversed. Suddenly, the alien queen is just protecting her babies, and the big mean human in the armour is no hero. Sigourney Weaver’s morally authoritative supporting role (to say nothing of Michelle Rodriguez’ turbo-hot, stand-up-and-cheer revision of Vasquez) underlines the point: Aliens were never the problem.
Look, Avatar is Dances With Wolves Lite With Blue Guys. The dialogue is wooden, the plot carries not a single surprising movement, and the bad guys are one-dimensional in a way that makes the T-1000 seem complicated. Who fucking cares. Look at this thing – look at the world we get to walk around in, run around in, fly around in. Look at the adventures we get to have, in the dream of Pandora and all the things that live there.
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