Review: Avatar
Dec. 20th, 2009 10:24 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
charameiIt's been a fun-filled weekend: Avatar on Friday, Team Stealth Rockery on Saturday, and Christmas (#1) on Sunday...
So. Avatar.
First things first: this is a very pretty film. We caught a 3-D showing; the technology is astounding, and all the more so for the subtlety with which it's used. Avatar is beautiful.
The worldbuilding is pretty good, too - fridge logic raised a couple of issues, and nobody bothered to conlang, but overall the world was believable, with some nice ideas thrown in.
What really let Avatar down was the plot and characterisation. It was extremely formulaic; the characters forgettable without exception, the symbolism and themes heavy-handed, the foreshadowing laid on with a trowel and the characters passing the idiot ball around with distressing frequency - except the protagonist, who seemed to have his own personalised one.
A note on my viewing habits: the first time I watch something, I try very hard to turn off my inner critic and just enjoy it. A show has to be quite bad before I'll start trying to analyse why as the plot unfolds (the last time it happened was Planet of the Dead).
Despite this, I knew the entire plot by the end of the first hour. By the time the third act came around, Jo and I were murmuring things like, "Oh, there he goes, knew he was going to die." - "Yeah, need to free up the position," and making budget cut jokes in light of the fact that an arrow punches through the windscreen of a military vehicle at one point - despite said glass having been previously shown to be bullet-proof.
The MacGuffin at the heart of all this is Unobtainium. This is not a joke; that is what it's actually called. At least at the end it remains unobtained, I suppose. Chekhov's gun was not just over the mantel, it was taking up 3/4 of the visible set space with a giant flashing arrow over it that read, "SOMEBODY WILL FIRE THIS." The anti-technology message was possibly even more heavy-handed than Ferngully's. The characters were utterly, utterly flat stereotypes; the main villain so much so that we actually thought he was a comedy character when he first turned up.
Of course, Avatar is scenery porn first, worldbuilding second and plot a very distant third. But pretty pictures can't carry three hours of film, and worldbuilding works so much better if it's tied to an innovative plot or at least some believable characters. If you want me to engage with your world then you need to engage me with the people in it, their struggles and successes and backstories and evolution. That's just how it works, and Avatar really failed to deliver here.
Plus, it's simultaneously racist, speciesist and ablist. It's hard to do 'white man saves native tribe' without ending up racist (another excellent reason to bury that plot for good), and 'your life is only worth something when you can walk' had me cringing even more. The former can, I suppose, be interpreted in other ways - although I'm sceptical of them - the latter really can't.
And lastly: if you require glasses and want to see this film in 3-D, then either wear contacts or expect to spend the first ten minutes fiddling with your 3-D specs to get them on the right way. I recommend balancing your own glasses on top of the 3-D pair: doing it the other way around led to nausea.
Pretty film? Hell yes. Good film? Hell no. You can't just rely on graphics and worldbuilding to carry a tropefest of a plot, and they certainly cannot help you to avoid racism and ablism.
So. Avatar.
First things first: this is a very pretty film. We caught a 3-D showing; the technology is astounding, and all the more so for the subtlety with which it's used. Avatar is beautiful.
The worldbuilding is pretty good, too - fridge logic raised a couple of issues, and nobody bothered to conlang, but overall the world was believable, with some nice ideas thrown in.
What really let Avatar down was the plot and characterisation. It was extremely formulaic; the characters forgettable without exception, the symbolism and themes heavy-handed, the foreshadowing laid on with a trowel and the characters passing the idiot ball around with distressing frequency - except the protagonist, who seemed to have his own personalised one.
A note on my viewing habits: the first time I watch something, I try very hard to turn off my inner critic and just enjoy it. A show has to be quite bad before I'll start trying to analyse why as the plot unfolds (the last time it happened was Planet of the Dead).
Despite this, I knew the entire plot by the end of the first hour. By the time the third act came around, Jo and I were murmuring things like, "Oh, there he goes, knew he was going to die." - "Yeah, need to free up the position," and making budget cut jokes in light of the fact that an arrow punches through the windscreen of a military vehicle at one point - despite said glass having been previously shown to be bullet-proof.
The MacGuffin at the heart of all this is Unobtainium. This is not a joke; that is what it's actually called. At least at the end it remains unobtained, I suppose. Chekhov's gun was not just over the mantel, it was taking up 3/4 of the visible set space with a giant flashing arrow over it that read, "SOMEBODY WILL FIRE THIS." The anti-technology message was possibly even more heavy-handed than Ferngully's. The characters were utterly, utterly flat stereotypes; the main villain so much so that we actually thought he was a comedy character when he first turned up.
Of course, Avatar is scenery porn first, worldbuilding second and plot a very distant third. But pretty pictures can't carry three hours of film, and worldbuilding works so much better if it's tied to an innovative plot or at least some believable characters. If you want me to engage with your world then you need to engage me with the people in it, their struggles and successes and backstories and evolution. That's just how it works, and Avatar really failed to deliver here.
Plus, it's simultaneously racist, speciesist and ablist. It's hard to do 'white man saves native tribe' without ending up racist (another excellent reason to bury that plot for good), and 'your life is only worth something when you can walk' had me cringing even more. The former can, I suppose, be interpreted in other ways - although I'm sceptical of them - the latter really can't.
And lastly: if you require glasses and want to see this film in 3-D, then either wear contacts or expect to spend the first ten minutes fiddling with your 3-D specs to get them on the right way. I recommend balancing your own glasses on top of the 3-D pair: doing it the other way around led to nausea.
Pretty film? Hell yes. Good film? Hell no. You can't just rely on graphics and worldbuilding to carry a tropefest of a plot, and they certainly cannot help you to avoid racism and ablism.