let's talk about avatar, shall we?
Because I so very rarely go see hip and happening movies (is this one? I guess so) when they're actually hip and happening.
In short, I liked it as I was watching it but had questions and complaints even as I was watching it, and the more I processed it afterwards, the more complaints I had. Coupled with a massive 3D headache which lasted all night and was pretty nasty. I guess you could say that despite myself I bought into the narrative, which was good because otherwise it would've been a pretty dull ~3 hours. And I have to give it props for that. But otherwise?
The hero was annoying as fuck to begin with - I'm hardly going to relate to a grumpy soldier kid who lives and breathes American militarist ideology. Ugh. naroona, who I saw this with, pointed out the ablism, which I didn't really notice before she did. Life in a wheelchair is never once considered as a life worth living, and Jake disregards his non-abled body for the avatar that can run around. The thing is, I sort of tie this with the racefail of the movie as well because I keep thinking, if his body was abled, would he have any reason to disregard it and "go native" so fully? Probably not. A functioning Na'vi body is better than a disabled human body, but what if the human body was not in a wheelchair? Anyway, now that I think about it, this aspect of the movie bugs me a ton, on top of all the other stuff.
I read that somewhere out there is a Pandora Guidebook that explains everything the movie didn't. Well, I haven't read it, because the movie should give me what I need to know, and should make sense without a read-along guide. But I can understand why such a thing exists because SO MUCH went unexplained about the motives of the humans and the culture of the Na'vi.
Why were the humans there? I couldn't piece it together. They wanted the damn metal, okay, but was that all? Did they need the metal? Jake says the Earth is no longer green, nothing grows there. So ..why do you need expensive metal? What good does that do? EXPLANATIONS, plz. The humans just came off as dicks, especially at the beginning. Though I guess that's what it's like to be slapped in the face with colonialist ideology so blatantly on-screen. Like I kept thinking, "not your land, natives trying to kill you? tough luck, girls and boys, gtfo!".
I have to say, though, I kind of adored Giovanni Ribisi's utter asshole of a boss character. What a weasel-y fuck. ♥ :D
As an anthropology student all kinds of culture-related stuff was going through my head. Like, okay, so the Na'vi hunt - and like a lot of cultures where hunting is an essential part of survival, the respect for animals is great. In ancient Finland, the funerals for slayed bears would be very elaborate, and respect for the creatures themselves very essential to the culture. The idea of course being, if you don't respect what the forest gives, the forest will stop giving it to you. So I kind of liked that, it seemed they'd done their homework, at least partly.
Na'vi physiology was messed up, though, and I was constantly wondering why they looked as they looked. Why the extremely narrow hips? Why the tails (they never seemed to use them)? I know why the females had breasts (fail, Cameron, fail), but I don't know, I believed in them but the way they looked never seemed fully considered. I thought Neytiri was animated beautifully, Jake's avatar a little less so. We discussed why this was and I suggested maybe the actor just didn't have good expressions for the animators to work with, whereas Zoe Saldana gave them good stuff.
Which kind of brings me to the "love story". Like one of my lj friends noted on Facebook (who I won't identify unless it's cool by them but what they said was so spot on I have to quote it), "please stop asking me if i want to see/have seen avatar, i have zero interest in yet another "white dude goes native, bangs an exotic chick, saves the noble savages" picture and i hate the fake perfection of the cgi".
There are numerous problems with "going native" in itself, but how the love story is tangled with it, is a problem if only how unbelievable it seems. Why does Neytiri fall for Jake? He is a bland, idiotic dude, who eventually learns that her culture is actually pretty cool, but that doesn't really .. speak for anything. He's still a bland, partly idiotic dude. You can see why Jake falls for her - she's pretty badass and his fascination with the culture is coupled with fascination and admiration for her because she's his guide to it.
Gah, whatever. And of course, one can never really truly "go native", and the fantasy of such a situation in the movie has been discussed by others better than me so I'll just link to this piece which pretty much covers it.
Before I saw this film, I met up with a friend who also hadn't seen it but we discussed what we had read about the movie, and during this conversation I wondered, why - when making this supposedly revolutionary film with revolutionary new technical aspects - they didn't decide to also make the story a gamechanger. Why not actually portray the whole damn thing from the perspective of the Na'vi? They end up being the heroes of the film ..oh but wait, only because Jake becomes their leader, in the most obnoxious manner. Sure, he is respectful of their culture and respects the leadership of Tsu'tey. But at the same time, it's clear that he's doing Tsu'tey a favor by being so - he wouldn't need to, as he the supposed outsider is more native and better than the Na'vi themselves and could easily snatch the power as he is so amazing and savior-like. Ugh ugh ugh ugh.
I'm not sure what the reverse Avatar would've been like, actually portraying the conflict from the Na'vi perspective, but I feel like it would've been tons more interesting. In the end, the human side of things was boring, both in terms of visuals and storyline.
I'm kind of running out of things to rant about, because in the end there's not that much to say about the film, like the film itself which doesn't have a whole lot to say, either. Oh, but I have to point out how annoying the biological connection of the Na'vi to their surroundings was. I mean, it's all well and good but so much of it goes completely unexplained and it's kind of exaggerated. Because living with respect towards nature and having those superstitions is not understandable or acceptable to the human science folk, it has to boil down to actual biological functions, because then is it okay and worth respect. A lot of indigenous peoples don't necessarily live according to nature's benefit, but of course, the environmental damage they've done has been on a smaller scale than our current industrialist society.
Anyway, this was less a review and more a "everything that bugged me" post. I'm struggling to think of positives, aside from the fact that *as* I was watching, I actually quite enjoyed it. And I liked Ribisi, and Sigorney Weaver. And that's about it.
I do want to read that thick book on the Na'vi that was shown in the movie, though. :D [/geek]
Edit: Though it also hit me that the book probably wouldn't be interesting considering how mind-bendingly simplistic the movie is and how uncreative the terminology regarding the culture is. I mean, Na'vi (native without T and E) and Eywa (a lot like Eva, the first woman according to the Bible) as the female Mother Earth deity.
Edit2: My evolution of thoughts continues, because I just went through Mike Russell's write up which focuses on the film as an example of Cameron's filmography. He talks about the film's earlier script-version from the 90's, which has more of a focus on the humans and very interesting background for them and more personality in the variety of human characters (most of them cut out of the film). The excitement of playing with CGI is probably what hurt the film - it moved the focus into the lush forests and away from the humans, so the humans became dull and mostly, simplistically evil. But at the same time, the story in Na'vi camp was also pretty uniform, with not much variety or interest, or thought put into the culture. The simplicity hurts both sides, and the film suffers.
I think he might've been better off playing more in the human camp, and keeping the variety of characters in there OR just telling everything from the Na'vi perspective and giving those characters more flavor and variety. But he does neither.
In short, I liked it as I was watching it but had questions and complaints even as I was watching it, and the more I processed it afterwards, the more complaints I had. Coupled with a massive 3D headache which lasted all night and was pretty nasty. I guess you could say that despite myself I bought into the narrative, which was good because otherwise it would've been a pretty dull ~3 hours. And I have to give it props for that. But otherwise?
The hero was annoying as fuck to begin with - I'm hardly going to relate to a grumpy soldier kid who lives and breathes American militarist ideology. Ugh. naroona, who I saw this with, pointed out the ablism, which I didn't really notice before she did. Life in a wheelchair is never once considered as a life worth living, and Jake disregards his non-abled body for the avatar that can run around. The thing is, I sort of tie this with the racefail of the movie as well because I keep thinking, if his body was abled, would he have any reason to disregard it and "go native" so fully? Probably not. A functioning Na'vi body is better than a disabled human body, but what if the human body was not in a wheelchair? Anyway, now that I think about it, this aspect of the movie bugs me a ton, on top of all the other stuff.
I read that somewhere out there is a Pandora Guidebook that explains everything the movie didn't. Well, I haven't read it, because the movie should give me what I need to know, and should make sense without a read-along guide. But I can understand why such a thing exists because SO MUCH went unexplained about the motives of the humans and the culture of the Na'vi.
Why were the humans there? I couldn't piece it together. They wanted the damn metal, okay, but was that all? Did they need the metal? Jake says the Earth is no longer green, nothing grows there. So ..why do you need expensive metal? What good does that do? EXPLANATIONS, plz. The humans just came off as dicks, especially at the beginning. Though I guess that's what it's like to be slapped in the face with colonialist ideology so blatantly on-screen. Like I kept thinking, "not your land, natives trying to kill you? tough luck, girls and boys, gtfo!".
I have to say, though, I kind of adored Giovanni Ribisi's utter asshole of a boss character. What a weasel-y fuck. ♥ :D
As an anthropology student all kinds of culture-related stuff was going through my head. Like, okay, so the Na'vi hunt - and like a lot of cultures where hunting is an essential part of survival, the respect for animals is great. In ancient Finland, the funerals for slayed bears would be very elaborate, and respect for the creatures themselves very essential to the culture. The idea of course being, if you don't respect what the forest gives, the forest will stop giving it to you. So I kind of liked that, it seemed they'd done their homework, at least partly.
Na'vi physiology was messed up, though, and I was constantly wondering why they looked as they looked. Why the extremely narrow hips? Why the tails (they never seemed to use them)? I know why the females had breasts (fail, Cameron, fail), but I don't know, I believed in them but the way they looked never seemed fully considered. I thought Neytiri was animated beautifully, Jake's avatar a little less so. We discussed why this was and I suggested maybe the actor just didn't have good expressions for the animators to work with, whereas Zoe Saldana gave them good stuff.
Which kind of brings me to the "love story". Like one of my lj friends noted on Facebook (who I won't identify unless it's cool by them but what they said was so spot on I have to quote it), "please stop asking me if i want to see/have seen avatar, i have zero interest in yet another "white dude goes native, bangs an exotic chick, saves the noble savages" picture and i hate the fake perfection of the cgi".
There are numerous problems with "going native" in itself, but how the love story is tangled with it, is a problem if only how unbelievable it seems. Why does Neytiri fall for Jake? He is a bland, idiotic dude, who eventually learns that her culture is actually pretty cool, but that doesn't really .. speak for anything. He's still a bland, partly idiotic dude. You can see why Jake falls for her - she's pretty badass and his fascination with the culture is coupled with fascination and admiration for her because she's his guide to it.
Gah, whatever. And of course, one can never really truly "go native", and the fantasy of such a situation in the movie has been discussed by others better than me so I'll just link to this piece which pretty much covers it.
Before I saw this film, I met up with a friend who also hadn't seen it but we discussed what we had read about the movie, and during this conversation I wondered, why - when making this supposedly revolutionary film with revolutionary new technical aspects - they didn't decide to also make the story a gamechanger. Why not actually portray the whole damn thing from the perspective of the Na'vi? They end up being the heroes of the film ..oh but wait, only because Jake becomes their leader, in the most obnoxious manner. Sure, he is respectful of their culture and respects the leadership of Tsu'tey. But at the same time, it's clear that he's doing Tsu'tey a favor by being so - he wouldn't need to, as he the supposed outsider is more native and better than the Na'vi themselves and could easily snatch the power as he is so amazing and savior-like. Ugh ugh ugh ugh.
I'm not sure what the reverse Avatar would've been like, actually portraying the conflict from the Na'vi perspective, but I feel like it would've been tons more interesting. In the end, the human side of things was boring, both in terms of visuals and storyline.
I'm kind of running out of things to rant about, because in the end there's not that much to say about the film, like the film itself which doesn't have a whole lot to say, either. Oh, but I have to point out how annoying the biological connection of the Na'vi to their surroundings was. I mean, it's all well and good but so much of it goes completely unexplained and it's kind of exaggerated. Because living with respect towards nature and having those superstitions is not understandable or acceptable to the human science folk, it has to boil down to actual biological functions, because then is it okay and worth respect. A lot of indigenous peoples don't necessarily live according to nature's benefit, but of course, the environmental damage they've done has been on a smaller scale than our current industrialist society.
Anyway, this was less a review and more a "everything that bugged me" post. I'm struggling to think of positives, aside from the fact that *as* I was watching, I actually quite enjoyed it. And I liked Ribisi, and Sigorney Weaver. And that's about it.
I do want to read that thick book on the Na'vi that was shown in the movie, though. :D [/geek]
Edit: Though it also hit me that the book probably wouldn't be interesting considering how mind-bendingly simplistic the movie is and how uncreative the terminology regarding the culture is. I mean, Na'vi (native without T and E) and Eywa (a lot like Eva, the first woman according to the Bible) as the female Mother Earth deity.
Edit2: My evolution of thoughts continues, because I just went through Mike Russell's write up which focuses on the film as an example of Cameron's filmography. He talks about the film's earlier script-version from the 90's, which has more of a focus on the humans and very interesting background for them and more personality in the variety of human characters (most of them cut out of the film). The excitement of playing with CGI is probably what hurt the film - it moved the focus into the lush forests and away from the humans, so the humans became dull and mostly, simplistically evil. But at the same time, the story in Na'vi camp was also pretty uniform, with not much variety or interest, or thought put into the culture. The simplicity hurts both sides, and the film suffers.
I think he might've been better off playing more in the human camp, and keeping the variety of characters in there OR just telling everything from the Na'vi perspective and giving those characters more flavor and variety. But he does neither.