Reviews you can't use: Avatar
I can't possibly say anything really novel about Avatar, perhaps the most over-discussed movie of the past decade, so I'll keep this short.
First, I liked it, in its way. Yes. It is very, very pretty, although I'm not so sure about its Midnight Barbie palette. And more involving than and no more stupid than other examples of its genre, about which more later. And although it may dismay a lot of people, I think it's energetic and arresting enough that it will drag the conventions of fantasy around to its own alignment. D&D 5e elves, I see you.
More than that, in Grognardian terms I think it's largely successful as a John Carter/Flash Gordon story, and I don't doubt that it's given Andrew Stanton many sleepless nights. It replays all those colonial tropes of ca. 1900 (hey, noble savages, anything you can do we can do better! You guys are just waiting for a leader to turn you into a proper nation!) and pulls all the same guilty, vicarious thrills out of them. And there's something exhilarating about how it just doesn't know where to stop - other films are content with horseclans or dragon riders or nightmarish squid-dogs, and wouldn't necessarily have to marry them with giant helicopter capital ships and powered armour, but this is a James Cameron movie...
...and that's where it really gets interesting. Because it's really a replay of his Aliens, only this time we're rooting for the other side. So when the marines, with their nifty colourful bioscanners, get snatched by leprous black-and-white fangs from both sides of the shot at once it's the same scene he already showed us, but with a completely different meaning. And that meaning is...
...well, sadly, that if you want to write an environmental action flick then the biome has to roll up its sleeves and start throwing haymakers like all the other people in tights. Because even though, like all SF, Avatar is about anxieties, and the anxieties are systemic ones about the incompatibility of industrial Capital and th biosphere, in the end it's also a superhero movie, and that's its tragedy. Everything is decided with fisticuffs... and just like that, Capital's bad old minions, the fire-bearing humans, pack up and go home, leaving the field to Nature's Bold But Thoughtful Warriors. And just like that all the interesting issues and meditations of the film are reduced to set-dressing around the Big Fight, and it turns out Avatar is a remake of Godzilla vs. the Smog Monster after all.
Because a Noble Savage Warrior is fundamentally different from an industrialised death-dealer, somehow. And the Bororo-elves Don't Want Your Destructive Technology, even when you're beating them down with it, and they want to beat you down. And it turns out that maybe Cameron isn't so savvy, either about his 19th century colonial playbook or his environmentalism, or his rhetoric of terrorism. It's something about the Balance of Life (tm), but Cameron's not ready to tell you what, exactly.
At least the movie's not about the writer coming out to his dad.
Oh but hey - on the topic of anxieties, I was really struck by the ones that are missing. The Matrix? It's how we interact, thanks. The Network? It's not only natural, it's crucial - it is the golden fleece that we threaten to destroy. In fact the only way we can understand it as something other than woo-woo voodoo is to cast it in computer terms. And there's a whole other interesting movie to be had there. But not this one. The Herzogian Jungle, the Heart of Darkness? You just have to make friends with it. And ride over it on a dragon. Facebook? Be careful what you say on it, kids.
The inexorable machines of Capitalism, grinding up everything before them until the ultimate futile death of all? Ummm... NIMBY? We got something special here now go play next door? Hope they don't come back with actual daisycutters and/or Agent Orange? It's no biggie. The important thing is, our protagonist Learned a Lesson. And so there's hope for us all. And its name is FIST.
What I wasn't looking for when I wrote this: second life fashions.
First, I liked it, in its way. Yes. It is very, very pretty, although I'm not so sure about its Midnight Barbie palette. And more involving than and no more stupid than other examples of its genre, about which more later. And although it may dismay a lot of people, I think it's energetic and arresting enough that it will drag the conventions of fantasy around to its own alignment. D&D 5e elves, I see you.
More than that, in Grognardian terms I think it's largely successful as a John Carter/Flash Gordon story, and I don't doubt that it's given Andrew Stanton many sleepless nights. It replays all those colonial tropes of ca. 1900 (hey, noble savages, anything you can do we can do better! You guys are just waiting for a leader to turn you into a proper nation!) and pulls all the same guilty, vicarious thrills out of them. And there's something exhilarating about how it just doesn't know where to stop - other films are content with horseclans or dragon riders or nightmarish squid-dogs, and wouldn't necessarily have to marry them with giant helicopter capital ships and powered armour, but this is a James Cameron movie...
...and that's where it really gets interesting. Because it's really a replay of his Aliens, only this time we're rooting for the other side. So when the marines, with their nifty colourful bioscanners, get snatched by leprous black-and-white fangs from both sides of the shot at once it's the same scene he already showed us, but with a completely different meaning. And that meaning is...
...well, sadly, that if you want to write an environmental action flick then the biome has to roll up its sleeves and start throwing haymakers like all the other people in tights. Because even though, like all SF, Avatar is about anxieties, and the anxieties are systemic ones about the incompatibility of industrial Capital and th biosphere, in the end it's also a superhero movie, and that's its tragedy. Everything is decided with fisticuffs... and just like that, Capital's bad old minions, the fire-bearing humans, pack up and go home, leaving the field to Nature's Bold But Thoughtful Warriors. And just like that all the interesting issues and meditations of the film are reduced to set-dressing around the Big Fight, and it turns out Avatar is a remake of Godzilla vs. the Smog Monster after all.
Because a Noble Savage Warrior is fundamentally different from an industrialised death-dealer, somehow. And the Bororo-elves Don't Want Your Destructive Technology, even when you're beating them down with it, and they want to beat you down. And it turns out that maybe Cameron isn't so savvy, either about his 19th century colonial playbook or his environmentalism, or his rhetoric of terrorism. It's something about the Balance of Life (tm), but Cameron's not ready to tell you what, exactly.
At least the movie's not about the writer coming out to his dad.
Oh but hey - on the topic of anxieties, I was really struck by the ones that are missing. The Matrix? It's how we interact, thanks. The Network? It's not only natural, it's crucial - it is the golden fleece that we threaten to destroy. In fact the only way we can understand it as something other than woo-woo voodoo is to cast it in computer terms. And there's a whole other interesting movie to be had there. But not this one. The Herzogian Jungle, the Heart of Darkness? You just have to make friends with it. And ride over it on a dragon. Facebook? Be careful what you say on it, kids.
The inexorable machines of Capitalism, grinding up everything before them until the ultimate futile death of all? Ummm... NIMBY? We got something special here now go play next door? Hope they don't come back with actual daisycutters and/or Agent Orange? It's no biggie. The important thing is, our protagonist Learned a Lesson. And so there's hope for us all. And its name is FIST.
What I wasn't looking for when I wrote this: second life fashions.