My thoughts on Avatar, let me show you them
For some reason I didn't feel compelled, finally, to put my reaction to Avatar into a post here until I saw Lee Daniels, director of Precious, being interviewed by Jon Stewart on The Daily Show. Stewart was asking Daniels many questions about casting choices (I can't imagine Helen Mirren playing the Mariah Carey role instead of Carey) and when Stewart, remembering that he is on Comedy Central, asks Daniels, "Did you consider filming it in 3-D?" both Daniels and Stewart can't stop themselves from laughing at the very idea.
That's how I feel about Avatar.
Now, I realize that that may not be very clear. I went to see it in 3-D and found it compelling enough, although I felt rather restless near the end; at a certain point I tend to feel that way when watching almost any war film, which this certainly is, because although I understand that war is an inherently tedious and protracted activity that doesn't necessarily make transferring that tedious and protracted nature to film a good idea. What is even less of a good idea, I feel, is to depict war-atrocities in 3-D, as if we need to experience more realistically what it is like for people--even 10-foot tall blue aliens created by computer programs--to be gruesomely killed by high-tech weapons and/or dinosaur-like creatures also created by computer programs.
The fact that a director like Daniels laughs at the suggestion of his film being done in 3-D should tell us something: making pain and suffering more tangible and yet completely UNreal to an audience (because you still can't really experience what the characters are experiencing) is beside the point when you are telling certain harrowing stories, and is even borderline offensive because the characters' pain is being subsumed to the gods of voyeurism, even beyond the idea of those characters' stories being in a film in the first place. As it is, some reviewers have called Daniels' film "misery porn". Even without 3-D many critics blasted Mel Gibson for the way he dwelled on Jesus' physical suffering on the cross in Passion of the Christ. My father didn't want to see Saving Private Ryan when it was in the theatres because he lived through World War II and felt he'd already seen enough people die. The realism of that film induced PTSD-type reactions in many vets. My uncles who were in some of the very battles depicted in the film also declined to see it.
None of these films needed to be in 3-D in order to be considered a bit too far over the line into an examination of suffering, of pain, of death. Now imagine them in 3-D and consider how willing you'd be to sit through a film that included a graphic, 3-D scene of a father raping his teenaged daughter? Of a man being stabbed to death by a Nazi so close and so realistically you feel like you can reach out and pull the knife from his hand and save that American soldier, only you can't? And I don't even want to consider a crucifixion in 3-D after my seventh-grade history teacher described what this was really like for captured American soldiers in Viet Nam who were tortured in this manner until they suffocated to death (the real cause of death by crucifixion, in which the victim's own weight bearing down crushes his lungs--traditionally, victims had a little platform on the crosses for their feet, to keep pushing themselves up and prolonging the agony, but this is rarely depicted in religious art).
I also feel that the super-success of Avatar presents us all with the very real danger that in the future, studios will be far more driven by whether a story can exploit the technology that created Cameron's film and less concerned about green-lighting a film that would be a very poor partner with 3-D effects. Some poor choices have already been made; I recall reading a review of Avatar that mentioned the fact that in Journey to the Center of the Earth the audience got to see a character's toothpaste spittle going down a sink drain IN 3-D! (If that's not a waste of technology I don't know what is.)
I know that most people are fixated on the fact that the plot of Avatar is a rehash of Dances with Wolves, with a smattering of Ferngully thrown in for good measure; that the White Dude becomes better at native stuff than the natives and saves the day and marries the Pocahontas-equivalent; that the heroic female characters are also the ones to be "fridged", etc. These are valid concerns about the thinly-written script, but I think that such a thin script is exactly what you can expect when it is the technology that is driving the creation of the film and not the writing. For instance, I recently read a commentary that mentioned how much more interesting the film might have been if the protagonist had been of African or Asian descent. While that might have been a good change-up, what I've thought since seeing the film was that it would have been even more interesting for the protagonist to have been of Native American descent, someone whose ancestors were victimized in almost exactly the same way as the natives of Pandora, only this time because the descendent of other oppressed natives joins them and learns their ways they are victorious over their would-be invaders. Do that, along with more backstory for the protag (I'm sorry--just the fact that he's an identical twin, has lost the use of his legs and that his brother had advanced degrees and then died isn't a "backstory") and change around who gets fridged and I think a lot of the criticism of the script wouldn't have existed. *
Except.
We'd still be subjected to arrows suddenly pointed right at our faces, to gratuitously vertiginous, swooping shots of humanoids in flight on alien dragons, and to even more gratuitously close-up views of violence and mayhem that really doesn't need to be quite that graphic for us all to get the point.
Now, it's possible that by avoiding the vast majority of 3-D films in the future I may miss out on some good films, or get only a limited experience of them if I wait until they come out on DVD in a 2-D format. I still think there will be enough films that don't make me worry that hands are actually reaching out of the screen for me or guns or arrows are pointed right at me, films driven by the stories and not the available technology, to occupy my time and entertain me. But not as many as before, because I do expect that more and more studios will dedicate a lot of their money to films they hope will be the next Avatar.
And that's sad. Something is being destroyed, and it's not a grove of trees on an idyllic alien world, it's something that will be far harder to save. And perhaps it's been coming for a while as special-effects technology gets more and more sophisticated, but I will still seek out the story-driven film, the quiet story that isn't overwhelmed by tech, even if it's a science-fiction or fantasy story (which films are, I think, much better when the tech doesn't overwhelm them, like Joss Whedon's Serenity).
Give me Lee Daniels, give me Joss Whedon, give me other directors whose vision is more about storytelling than spectacle. Avatar was okay, but in the end I think that I enjoyed it slightly less than the much-briefer Jimmy Neutron ride at Universal in Orlando; for just a few minutes I got to feel like I was whipping through space and over a magical landscape with Jimmy and his friends and that was just fine. It was fun and furious and over quickly. It had the virtue of brevity and not taking itself too seriously. Would that Avatar had had the same virtues--or at least a good enough story that I wouldn't have been squirming by the end, just waiting for the final credits and the chance to escape into my real 3-D world.
* Okay, except that that doesn't fix the problem of the stupid name of "unobtainium" for the McGuffin serving as the "reason" that the sacred trees had to be exploded. I mean--seriously? Unobtainium? That's the best they could do? And they couldn't at least make up an excuse for needing it like it's supposed to cure some epidemic killing off everyone back on earth? They just want it because they want it? If there was anything thinner than the backstory for the good guys it was the backstory for the bad guys, who were only technically 3-D because they looked like they could reach into the audience.
That's how I feel about Avatar.
Now, I realize that that may not be very clear. I went to see it in 3-D and found it compelling enough, although I felt rather restless near the end; at a certain point I tend to feel that way when watching almost any war film, which this certainly is, because although I understand that war is an inherently tedious and protracted activity that doesn't necessarily make transferring that tedious and protracted nature to film a good idea. What is even less of a good idea, I feel, is to depict war-atrocities in 3-D, as if we need to experience more realistically what it is like for people--even 10-foot tall blue aliens created by computer programs--to be gruesomely killed by high-tech weapons and/or dinosaur-like creatures also created by computer programs.
The fact that a director like Daniels laughs at the suggestion of his film being done in 3-D should tell us something: making pain and suffering more tangible and yet completely UNreal to an audience (because you still can't really experience what the characters are experiencing) is beside the point when you are telling certain harrowing stories, and is even borderline offensive because the characters' pain is being subsumed to the gods of voyeurism, even beyond the idea of those characters' stories being in a film in the first place. As it is, some reviewers have called Daniels' film "misery porn". Even without 3-D many critics blasted Mel Gibson for the way he dwelled on Jesus' physical suffering on the cross in Passion of the Christ. My father didn't want to see Saving Private Ryan when it was in the theatres because he lived through World War II and felt he'd already seen enough people die. The realism of that film induced PTSD-type reactions in many vets. My uncles who were in some of the very battles depicted in the film also declined to see it.
None of these films needed to be in 3-D in order to be considered a bit too far over the line into an examination of suffering, of pain, of death. Now imagine them in 3-D and consider how willing you'd be to sit through a film that included a graphic, 3-D scene of a father raping his teenaged daughter? Of a man being stabbed to death by a Nazi so close and so realistically you feel like you can reach out and pull the knife from his hand and save that American soldier, only you can't? And I don't even want to consider a crucifixion in 3-D after my seventh-grade history teacher described what this was really like for captured American soldiers in Viet Nam who were tortured in this manner until they suffocated to death (the real cause of death by crucifixion, in which the victim's own weight bearing down crushes his lungs--traditionally, victims had a little platform on the crosses for their feet, to keep pushing themselves up and prolonging the agony, but this is rarely depicted in religious art).
I also feel that the super-success of Avatar presents us all with the very real danger that in the future, studios will be far more driven by whether a story can exploit the technology that created Cameron's film and less concerned about green-lighting a film that would be a very poor partner with 3-D effects. Some poor choices have already been made; I recall reading a review of Avatar that mentioned the fact that in Journey to the Center of the Earth the audience got to see a character's toothpaste spittle going down a sink drain IN 3-D! (If that's not a waste of technology I don't know what is.)
I know that most people are fixated on the fact that the plot of Avatar is a rehash of Dances with Wolves, with a smattering of Ferngully thrown in for good measure; that the White Dude becomes better at native stuff than the natives and saves the day and marries the Pocahontas-equivalent; that the heroic female characters are also the ones to be "fridged", etc. These are valid concerns about the thinly-written script, but I think that such a thin script is exactly what you can expect when it is the technology that is driving the creation of the film and not the writing. For instance, I recently read a commentary that mentioned how much more interesting the film might have been if the protagonist had been of African or Asian descent. While that might have been a good change-up, what I've thought since seeing the film was that it would have been even more interesting for the protagonist to have been of Native American descent, someone whose ancestors were victimized in almost exactly the same way as the natives of Pandora, only this time because the descendent of other oppressed natives joins them and learns their ways they are victorious over their would-be invaders. Do that, along with more backstory for the protag (I'm sorry--just the fact that he's an identical twin, has lost the use of his legs and that his brother had advanced degrees and then died isn't a "backstory") and change around who gets fridged and I think a lot of the criticism of the script wouldn't have existed. *
Except.
We'd still be subjected to arrows suddenly pointed right at our faces, to gratuitously vertiginous, swooping shots of humanoids in flight on alien dragons, and to even more gratuitously close-up views of violence and mayhem that really doesn't need to be quite that graphic for us all to get the point.
Now, it's possible that by avoiding the vast majority of 3-D films in the future I may miss out on some good films, or get only a limited experience of them if I wait until they come out on DVD in a 2-D format. I still think there will be enough films that don't make me worry that hands are actually reaching out of the screen for me or guns or arrows are pointed right at me, films driven by the stories and not the available technology, to occupy my time and entertain me. But not as many as before, because I do expect that more and more studios will dedicate a lot of their money to films they hope will be the next Avatar.
And that's sad. Something is being destroyed, and it's not a grove of trees on an idyllic alien world, it's something that will be far harder to save. And perhaps it's been coming for a while as special-effects technology gets more and more sophisticated, but I will still seek out the story-driven film, the quiet story that isn't overwhelmed by tech, even if it's a science-fiction or fantasy story (which films are, I think, much better when the tech doesn't overwhelm them, like Joss Whedon's Serenity).
Give me Lee Daniels, give me Joss Whedon, give me other directors whose vision is more about storytelling than spectacle. Avatar was okay, but in the end I think that I enjoyed it slightly less than the much-briefer Jimmy Neutron ride at Universal in Orlando; for just a few minutes I got to feel like I was whipping through space and over a magical landscape with Jimmy and his friends and that was just fine. It was fun and furious and over quickly. It had the virtue of brevity and not taking itself too seriously. Would that Avatar had had the same virtues--or at least a good enough story that I wouldn't have been squirming by the end, just waiting for the final credits and the chance to escape into my real 3-D world.
* Okay, except that that doesn't fix the problem of the stupid name of "unobtainium" for the McGuffin serving as the "reason" that the sacred trees had to be exploded. I mean--seriously? Unobtainium? That's the best they could do? And they couldn't at least make up an excuse for needing it like it's supposed to cure some epidemic killing off everyone back on earth? They just want it because they want it? If there was anything thinner than the backstory for the good guys it was the backstory for the bad guys, who were only technically 3-D because they looked like they could reach into the audience.