I managed to see Avatar in 3-D last week, and influenced by the consensus of reviewers who concluded that the film looked good but was ultimately hurt by a terrible story, I entered the theater ready to dismiss the graphics as merely a step beyond what we’ve come to expect from Pixar and to be on the look out for the most egregious defects in the script. Yes, there were a few lines of dialogue that made me cringe, and the use of Bush-era rhetoric about war and terror was a bit heavy-handed for my taste, and constantly referring to the soldiers as ex-marines was a mistake (Cameron could’ve portrayed the soldiers anyway he wanted in his version of the future, so why lead us to believe that the army of mercenaries on Pandora is made up of former U.S. marines? Everyone knows at least one person who’s served in the military, and it just makes more sense for a storyteller to avoid anything that might cause your audience to side with your antagonists). But on the whole I enjoyed the film more than anything I’ve seen in a long time, and so I come before you today to praise Avatar, not bury it.
As Tony Kornheiser says, I don’t root for or against any one person or team, I only root for excellence. And the diligence and attention to detail that Cameron gave to the appearance of Avatar (which is, after all, the most important aspect of a movie) was enough to overcome the failings of the script.
Now, before anyone starts screaming about the familiar plot and the story holes and so on, I would like to make three points:
(1) I have an almost complete indifference towards plot; I don’t care what a story is about, only that it’s delivered in a compelling way. For example, it’s not the plot of Ulysses (which, someone once said, is not about anything, but is the thing itself) or War and Peace (which is about the Napoleon’s war with Russia) that make these books great, it’s the depth and richness of the writing. Film is a visual medium, and in that context, the concepts of ‘depth’ and ‘richness’ are applied to the images appearing on the screen, which is Avatar’s strength. Yes, the dialogue is important (see my posts on Tarantino, for instance), but as with fiction, it plays only a supporting role, and if you don’t believe that, then I suggest you go watch one of Chaplin’s films, which are better than most of the junk currently showing in theaters.
(2) When evaluating the plot of Avatar, many reviewers are losing sight of what the film accomplishes given the limitations of the medium. If we want to compare film to literature, a movie is more like a short story than a novel: each is severely limited in the amount of action, the amount of characterization, and the amount of linear time that can be portrayed. The reason A Rose For Emily is an impressive short story, for example, is that Faulkner is able to so fully depict the life of one character in so few pages. Cameron accomplishes a similar feat in Avatar (yes, I did just compare James Cameron to a Nobel Prize winning writer). The focus of Avatar is not a human or an alien, it’s the world that Cameron has created, and in that regard the plot is very successful in providing a complete and thoroughly rendered character.
(3) Who really cares about the plot? Cameron invented the technology needed to shoot Avatar, was able to blend animation and live action in a way that serves as a harbinger of the direction movies are headed, and utilized 3-D in such a way that the technology is now having the same affect on conventional film and television that color had on black and white programs fifty years ago. And yet, this is not enough. To me, it’s like complaining about the color of paint used on The Flyer.
