Cameron Roundtable comes to a close this week with
Avatar, a film that positively wowed audiences when it came out in 2009, quickly becoming the highest grossing film of all time. It introduced a us to next level CGI and ushered in the current trend of 3-D films that have helped prop up the movie industry in a time when theater attendance hasn't been so good. Some where so effected by the film that they suffered depression after the film ended because they couldn't handle the fact that Cameron's world was fictional. But three years on the film has suffered a bit of a backlash. Does the film hold up, or was that initial hype the result of good CGI and the novelty of 3-D? Joining me, as always, is Max O'Connell of
The Film Temple.
Max O’Connell: Before
we start on Avatar, do we want to
talk a little bit about what James Cameron was doing between Titanic and Avatar?
Loren Greenblatt:
He took a bit of an absence, you might say: twelve years. That’s a long time
for any filmmaker. He wasn’t sitting in his cave counting money, though. He was doing stuff. Right after Titanic he worked on a Spider-Man movie, which he never made
because he wasn’t happy with the technology available.
MO: It sounded
interesting in theory, at least. He wanted Arnold Schwarzenegger as Doctor
Octopus…I’d watch that.
LG: I love Molina
in Spider-Man 2…but that would have
been interesting. We never got that, but in the meantime Cameron was doing a
few other things.
MO: Right before Titanic’s release, he was developing a
potential third film in the Terminator franchise.
What we got was his supposed warm-up, T2:
Battle Across Time, an attraction at Universal Studios Florida that’s
basically a Terminator 2 reunion and
his first extensive use of 3-D. It’s not as sophisticated as Avatar, obviously. There’s a lot of
sequences of stuff poking out at you. But his use of the environment is still
great, and we get to see everyone come back, so it’s fun.
LG: And it’s
notable for what he did technically. He used 3-D and 70mm cameras, and he used
higher frame rates for the first time, which he says he’ll do with Avatar 2 (and 3 and 4, if we’re to
believe it).
MO: He also co-created
the show Dark Angel.
LG: Another
strong female sci-fi thing which we didn’t have time to get into. He only
directed the finale, and we’re not watching that without having watched the
show. He was also working on a 3-D remake of Fantastic
Voyage, which he may still produce for Real
Steel director Shawn Levy.
MO: Cameron also
went on an underwater documentary kick with three films: Bismarck, his exploration of the Bismarck wreckage; Ghosts of
the Abyss, which is basically Titanic
bonus footage and Aliens of the Deep.
LG: The latter
two are both early explorations with 3-D technology for Cameron. The last one
is more deep water bioluminescent creatures . I understand that they’re all fairly
anonymous. They show his interests, but not his personality.
MO: It shows his
ability to turn his personal pet projects into things people want to see. It’s
almost like a precursor to Avatar 2,
which should explore the oceans of the fictional planet Pandora. Cameron played
around with 3-D technology and developed two projects: Battle Angel, a return to hard-edged sci-fi that would use the same
technology as Avatar…
LG: It’s based on
a manga, and I understand it features a strong female protagonist, so there’s a
return to his 80s work.
MO: It’s a film
that’s ostensibly still on his agenda, but it’s not going to happen anytime
soon, because he’s so preoccupied with Avatar…which
we love, right?
LG: (long
pause)…well, I don’t hate it. The best thing I can say about it is that it’s
the best Star Wars prequel ever made.
MO: In that it’s
not terrible.
LG: Though come
to think it, it’s the second best now that
John
Carter came out.
Avatar made $2
billion, so everyone’s probably seen it. Just in case, though, here’s the
basics: Jake Sully is a paraplegic marine in the distant future who goes to the
planet Pandora to assist with the native culture, the Na’Vi. His twin brother
was a scientist helping out, but he’s been killed, and they need someone with
the same genetic code for his brother’s avatar. Avatars are genetically engineered
Na’Vi bodies with wi-fi brain link-ups.
MO: And
basically, the military comes into conflict with the Na’Vi and the scientists.
LG: Now, Cameron
loves building sci-fi universes, and this is his most intricate one. It’s not
as intricate when it comes to the storyline, unfortunately. This is his
environmental movie. It’s not the first message movie he’s done, but here it’s
the most overt. We have problems with the last ten minutes of
The Abyss. Imagine that scene dragged
out to three hours, and you’ve got
Avatar.
A lot of my problems begin with the casting of Sam Worthington as the hero.
MO: He is the
least charismatic actor who has ever lived, I swear.
LG: I worry about
Sam Worthington. He looks sleepy or hungover or something. He never looks
awake. He’s not engaging at all. He’s a total lump.
MO: His
Australian accent is always coming through, too, but it’s a secondary problem
compared to his lack of screen presence.
LG: I’ve seen
other actors that are not charismatic. He is the first actor who has negative
charisma.
MO: He is a black
hole for charisma.
LG: He drains charisma
away from any actor he’s standing next to, aside from Zoe Saldana, who’s very
charming as the native princess.
MO: He’s
perfectly OK when the dialogue is minimal in the early going or when he’s the
avatar. But whenever we see his face or hear him give a speech, he’s boring. He’s essentially in a sci-fi coma
throughout the film, since the avatars…it’s sort of a biometric wi-fi he goes
through that leaves his human body asleep. That’s almost symbolic for his performance.
LG: It’s
interesting, though, that we learn late in the film that the whole planet is a
biometric network, because it’s not built up at all. It’s a great idea, but we
need more of it. My other big problem with the film is the Na’Vi. Their culture
is very generic. There’s so much amazing production design in this film. It’s
gorgeous. Cameron spent years making it…
MO: He waited
until the technology was advanced enough to make it.
LG: And you can
tell. He’s thought up the whole ecosystem of this planet…but when you get to
the culture of the natives, it’s a generic mix of native cultures. It’s a
pastiche of natives.
MO: It’s hokey
and it’s nonspecific. They believe in nature, and that’s all I know. It’s this
hokey New Age crap that I neither understand nor am I interested in. We don’t
get to know any of them other than Neytiri, the princess, and even then, I’m
uninterested.
LG: It helps that
Zoe Saldana is very charming in the role. She’s the shining light of the film.
MO: She’s a
presence. She’s got some chops.
LG: Based on this
and her work in Star Trek, she’s got
a lot of potential, and I want to see her in more stuff. Worthington,
meanwhile, keeps getting cast in stuff…
MO: I don’t get
it. He’s been cast as the hero so many times in so many movies, but he’s a
complete non-presence.
LG: This, Terminator Salvation…
MO: The two Clash of the Titans movies and Man on the Ledge, which has the worst
title of any movie ever. It’s like they gave up. “There’s this guy on a ledge,
what do we want to call the movie?” “Well, shit, how about Man on a Ledge?” “Good enough.”
LG: It’s as
forgettable and generic as he is.
MO: Hey-o! But as
for Avatar…it’s kind of a mix and
match of sci-fi films. The big intricate world feels like it’s inspired by Star Wars, the biometric network is like
something out of The Matrix, there’s
some technology that reminds me of what Spielberg did in Minority Report (the touch-screens the scientists used,
specifically), and there’s plenty of stuff from Cameron’s own films. People
made comparisons between John Carter and
Avatar, and they’re both inspired, to
varying degrees, by Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Mars novels, as are Star Wars and Superman (John Carter is
a direct adaptation of Burroughs’ works).
LG: John Carter does it a lot better.
MO: I have a lot
of similar problems, but yes. It’s actually goddamned fun.
LG: It’s not
three hours long, it doesn’t have an environmental message to beat you over the
head with, and it’s funny. There’s a great gag where Carter and his friends run
across the planet to fight the bad guys only to find that they’re at the wrong
camp, and they needed to go the other way. As disappointing as Taylor Kitsch is
in that role, he’s not boring like Sam Worthington.
MO: There’s some
problems with exposition in John Carter,
but there’s a sense of fun and discovery throughout. Avatar has that for a little while: the first fifty minutes are
pretty engaging. It turns into a coma when it gets to the Na’Vi stuff.
LG: My reaction
to it when I saw it on IMAX 3-D was that I didn’t have to see it ever again. It
was gorgeous, and the CGI and 3-D is at a level that it’ll take years to top,
but the story is so draining and boring. Our pre-review screening was the first time since
it came out, and for the first forty minutes I forgot about my criticisms and managed to have some fun. And
then I remembered…
MO: Here’s how it
works for me: I saw it in 2D. I was excited for it, but I grew bored quickly.
When we saw it together in 3D, my opinion didn’t change. It’s great looking,
he’s worked out most of the world and technology (although we have complaints),
but I don’t care about anything.
LG: He has
created a great platform to tell interesting stories, he just hasn’t managed to
tell a good story. When Avatar 2 comes
out, he needs to tell a more engaging story and get more specific about the
Na’Vi culture. It’s in him, but he’s been out of the director’s chair for so
long that it hurt him.
MO: But we’ve
seen so many of these things done better. Like I said, I saw a lot of the human
technology in
Minority Report. The
avatar-human connections is like
The Matrix,
only without the stakes. The motion capture is impressive, but we saw great
motion capture with Peter Jackson’s
Lord
of the Rings and
King Kong, which
are better movies. It’s better than what Zemeckis has been doing with it, but
that’s not saying much.
LG: We watched
the extended edition, which we hoped would add some more specificity and stakes
to it. For the first few minutes, I was really hopeful. There’s a new opening
on earth that establishes the Blade
Runner-like corporate-owned world. That’s pretty good. We get to learn more
about who Jake Sully is. That’s pretty good. Sam Worthington isn’t so bad, we
see that earth has been destroyed. We see Worthington, in a wheelchair, take on
a big guy in a bar after the guy starts beating on a girl. The way he
compensates for his disability while picking that bar fight is resourceful and
endearing. I learned more about Jake Sully in those opening minutes than I did
for any of the rest of the movie. There’s one other addition I like that shows
the tensions between the scientists, the corporate world, and the Na’Vi, where
we learn that the military shot up a school Sigourney Weaver was using to teach
the Na’Vi English and stuff. It helps my understanding of the world. But not
much else is added that’s very useful. There’s no specificity to the characters
after that.2
MO: We started
speculating on whether or not it’d be more engaging with a better actor at the
center, since Cameron usually has a charismatic center to his movies. We threw
out a few names: a younger Guy Pearce, Ryan Gosling, Jake Gyllenhaal, James
Franco, Chris Pine…but honestly, probably not. We know nothing about this
character.
LG: He’s driven
to the point of being self-destructive, but that’s not explored enough.
MO: Saldana is
better, but what I know about her is basically that she’s the love interest.
LG: She's kind of
cutely domineering at first but that's about it. Saldana is so good that you can overlook
the blandness of her character.
MO: That worked
better for you than it did for me.
LG: It did, but
my point is that good actors can rescue dire material. Sam Worthington needs
the light-up-in-the-eyes smile, which he just doesn’t have in this film.
MO: Cameron has
been good at casting people in his films until now.
LG: I don’t know
where he found this guy. It’s not like he was a rising star at the time. Terminator Salvation was filmed after Avatar (though it was released before),
and up to this point he was most famous for an Australian version of Macbeth, which is weird. I really want to see a
good performance from this guy.
MO: We really
don’t want to beat up on him. Acting is hard, it honestly is, and I hate
beating up on actors over and over again.
LG: We want to
see him be funny and likable, but he’s just not. Three years later we’re losing
hope.
MO: The supporting
cast isn’t much better. Michelle Rodriguez is brought in as a tough-girl marine
with a conscience, almost like Vasquez, but she has no character.
LG: She is
literally “Not Vasquez”.
MO: I don’t know
anything about her other than the fact that she disobeyed orders.
LG: She
disappears for about an hour of the film. There’s a few people who do that:
they’re established only so they can disappear for a long time and come back
when at the end.
MO: Sigourney
Weaver plays…Sigourney Weaver, basically. She’s good, but she disappears for a
long time, and her character is basically “I am a scientist”.
LG: She’s
basically her character in
Gorillas in
the Mist. She hates the military, loves science, and that’s that. She’s
charming enough to make it work for a little while. I also like Stephen Lang as
the G.I. Joe villain. He’s a Space Racist who wants to kill the “blue monkeys”,
and you know he’s a villain because he has a big scar on his face and he works
out a lot. He has fun in the role, though we don’t see enough of him. Though,
much as I like him, I would have loved to see Arnold Schwarzenegger in that
role. How much fun would that have been?
MO: He was too
busy being the Governator. And we don’t want to begrudge Lang the thing people
will remember him for. Here’s my problem: Michael Biehn played the same
reactionary jarhead in The Abyss, and
that character was more interesting. He had a reason he was evil. He’s not the only recycled villain: Giovanni
Ribisi basically plays Paul Reiser in Aliens.
He’s the corporate lackey who’s evil…except Ribisi is terrible in this film. He’s terrible. Ribisi overplays every bit of
this, though it doesn’t help that the script is awful.
LG: Paul Reiser
had a character arc in Aliens. He’s
not so bad at first, until we find out what he’s really like. Ribisi is there
to do bad things from the get-go. He doesn’t care about the Na’Vi, he has kill
trophies from before the events of the film. He has bows and arrows and
dreamcatchers (yes, they’re that generically Native American). He’s there for
unobtanium…now, we don’t know what unobtanium does, we just know it’s valuable
and hard to get. It’s a technical term used in mining, but to actually call a
metal that…
MO: It’s lazy.
It’s like saying…”OK, we have this thing that can solve everything. It’s a
widget!” “What does it do?” “IT’S A WIDGET!”. That’s all the explanation we
get, basically.
LG: That could
work if you committed to being silly, but it’s all done with a straight face.
MO: And there’s
no struggle over it, sense of what it does, or what the Na’Vi feel about it.
LG: We could have
one line! “This metal can save the earth by doing this”, and that’d be at least
something. Now, I understand Cameron using shorthand for the sci-fi stuff going
on in the movie to give the audience something familiar to hold onto. But to go
so far and make them so recognizable is lazy. They’re an alien culture! Make
them a little alien!
MO: They’re
called “Na’Vi”! Like Native, or naïve. It’s so bad. It doesn’t help that the
planet, meanwhile, feels totally underpopulated until we find out that there’s
actually several other tribes (though they seem exactly the same as the one we
saw) that haven’t been referenced before. There’s no dynamic we know about. Oh,
and “Pandora” is the planet name.
LG: Nothing bad
will happen at a place called “Pandora!”
MO: We’re not the
first people to point out that this is basically Dances with Wolves or The
Last Samurai all over again. It’s another painfully reductive noble savage
myth.
LG: Sorry about
imperialism, but the one good white man will lead the natives to victory by
being superior to them!
MO: And there’s
none of the complexity we need.
LG: It’s
condescending and annoying, though less so than The Last Samurai, where there’s a real culture you’re reducing.
MO: Well, yes,
it’s not a terrible movie, just not very good. Another complaint: the dialogue
is terrible and uninteresting. Cameron is known for his one-liners. I can’t
name on. Not a one.
LG: Um…”I see
you”?
MO: Yeah, and
that’s awful…and reused from Titanic. And
the narration is clunky and overly expository, there’s no forward momentum…even
Titanic and The Abyss, which are slower than most Cameron films, have forward
momentum and characters we care about.
LG: Now,
Cameron’s films are usually well-structured. Cameron doesn’t do a lot of lulls.
His films usually have some sort of a timetable in the story to keep them going
but Avatar stops cold a lot. The film
needs momentum especially near the end cause the climax of the film takes
forever. Cameron’s ticking clocks usually get us going (“the ship is sinking”, “T-1000
is after us,” “the planet is going to blow up”). That’s a very good screenwriting
move, but it’s nowhere here. Stephen Lang says “we should go in now, because
it’ll be harder to do later”, or something like that, and it’s vague and not as
effective. It’s not a very hard to invent a “we need to do this in three hours
or we’re all dead” scenario. Instead, Cameron allows the characters way too
much time to do other things, like recruit other tribes from the other side of
the planet that we didn’t know about…we didn’t know there were more Na’Vi
characters until the end of the movie, by the way…
MO: I was
complaining that the planet was so underpopulated, and then there’s more? Why
haven’t we seen them? Why don’t we know anything about them? What’s their stake
in that magic tree I don’t care about?
LG: That
tree…look, we’re environmentalists, but part of me clapped when the tree got
blown up.
MO: Because
something fucking happened. Here’s the thing: I agree with everything he’s
saying about the Native Americans, the Iraq War, and the environment, but it’s
all painfully simplistic.
LG: His stylistic
tropes also get really silly in places. He does the blue smoke and water like
he always does, but he has this new trick here where he desaturates almost to
black and white. It’s so obvious and cheesy. It’s something you’d see in a bad
videogame.
MO: That can be
done well, obviously. I think of Saving
Private Ryan.
LG: But that’s
made by a director who had been making films consistently rather than taking
time out.
MO: That’s my
point. He seems to have lost touch with everything that made him great. There’s
no kineticism, there’s no momentum, there’s no great characters or memorable
one-liners, there’s no sense of humor, and there’s no fun. There’s nothing to
hang your hat on other than the world of the film and visuals, which doesn’t
interest me that much here.
LG: The eye-candy
kept me going a little longer than it did for you, but after a while the
problems with the film pile up. By the time he becomes a man in the Na’Vi
society, I had pretty much checked out.
MO: There are so
many plot holes in this thing that I was having trouble listing them all (and I
can forgive plot holes). The scientists go off to avoid military
interference…they can just leave? With a corporation and the military having
such high stakes in this, they just let them go? Lang doesn’t do anything about
it? Then there’s the bit where they bring up all the women in the Na’Vi tribe. But
we don’t know any of them! We never see them, other than Neytiri and…Neytiri’s
mother whose name I can’t remember. Who? We haven’t seen anyone.
LG: There aren’t
too many we can remember…
MO: Jesus, Dances with Wolves had more Native
American characters I knew.
LG: We don’t
really get to know any of the other characters. It’s the world through two
characters’ eyes, which can work, but you need to be a lot more specific.
MO: Why don’t we
just start with the Na’Vi? We’ll learn a little bit about them, maybe. I don’t
particularly care about them, but there’s something to work with there. Then
there’s the Na’Vi spiritual network that isn’t explored at all. There’s
Michelle Rodriguez abandoning the military and getting zero punishment for it.
LG: I assumed
they arrested her too and she broke out, and they didn’t show it because she’s
not a main character.
MO: We don’t get
that. There’s the fact that the equipment for the avatar hookup is still there
after they shut it down. They didn’t destroy it? Is their arrogance so great
that they don’t consider Jake and his friends a threat?
LG: Here’s a
problem I have with the technology. Cameron is usually great with showing how
technology in his films works, but there are big questions I have regarding
this avatar wi-fi thing. They go to a place where none where non of the other
tech uplinks work, but their Na’Vi equipment still works. One sentence could
explain it, but we get nothing. Bigger, though, is that they don’t explain the
consequences if your avatar body dies. Basically, we know it was expensive. We
don’t know what, if anything, happens to the person driving the body. Do they
die, or have a schizoid embolism, or go into a coma?
MO: Again, one
line would explain it.
LG: In The Matrix, it’s simple. You die in the
Matrix, you die in real life. With those 10 words we know what’s at stake, and
we worry about Neo getting shot at in the computer world.
MO: Hell, a year
after this, Inception explains what
happens if you die in a dream, and there are more complications later on. Here?
What happens? It’s so vague, there are no stakes, and when we finally get some
explanation it’s late in the film and we don’t understand.
LG: There’s a
sequence where Jake has to claim his flying bird thing, and they’re wrestling
on the edge of a giant cliff. If I knew that if the avatar body died
something would happen to Jake, I might have been a little more invested. You need to set up the stakes of what happens if your body dies out
there. For most of the film, as far as I knew, it’s “your body dies and you’re
out of the game but otherwise unharmed.” That’s it.
MO: How about
Jake’s arc? I don’t believe in any of the changes he goes through. He’s gung ho
and doesn’t care about the Na’Vi until he does. Sam Worthington can’t project
anything anyway, but the script just isn’t there. I’m not invested in his arc,
his conversion is bullshit (it’s via narration), and it doesn’t work.
LG: He changes
because the screenplay gods demand it.
MO: How about when
he’s sent in to learn about the Na’Vi for the colonel? What is he doing for
them? What is he learning that they don’t already know?
LG: They’ve been
out there for at least twenty years. Probably more. Do they not have any other
sort of intelligence? It’s very vague. I’d be more willing to buy it if it were
done well, but it isn’t. His conversion you expect because it’s that kind of
movie, but that’s the only reason it happens: it’s that kind of movie.
MO: By the end I
was drained and disengaged, and I’ve been beaten over the head with this
heavy-handed allegory. The death scenes for characters I don’t care about (who
were barely introduced) go on forever…
LG: The horse has
a death scene! The horse! I half
expected Jake to have a flashback to all those great times he had riding that
horse!
 |
| "Oh space-horse, how will I go on without you?" |
MO: It looks
great, but I don’t care, and by the end I’m ready to leave. And the song
doesn’t help. You commented that you’ve never seen a theatre clear out as fast
as during the “I See You” song. People think “My Heart Will Go On” is bad? This
thing is just…the corniest...
LG: We got about
four seconds into it this time. When we walked out of the theatre, I said that
it was losing half-a-star for this.
MO: It’s just so
bland. It doesn’t help that the melody provided by the score isn’t good. This
is James Horner’s weakest score for Cameron. I couldn’t hum this if I tried.
LG: Well there’s
bum-bubububum…no, you really can’t. It’s very generic. Horner has a lot of
detractors, but he’s done some great work. And it’s not age. Howard Shore still
does excellent work.
MO: As does John
Williams, whenever Spielberg has something for him to do.
LG: I don’t think
he was passionate about this.
MO: If he was, it
didn’t come through.
LG: Now, we don’t
hate this film. It’s still better than the Star
Wars prequels.
MO: The
storytelling is lazy, but the creation of the world and integration of the
actors and characters in it isn’t. Whereas the Star Wars prequels are lazy all around, except for some of the
creations, which feel like they were made to be toys.
LG: I really
don’t need to see this again. I’m giving it a C.
MO: I’m giving it
a C as well. This is easily Cameron’s weakest film, since Piranha II doesn’t count, nor do the underwater documentaries.
LG: I’m going to
get on my John Carter soapbox because
that film was a huge flop. It’s way better than Avatar. Whatever problems it had, I had fun, and I walked out with
a huge smile on my face. I gave it an A- when I reviewed it because despite all
it’s flaws, I still had fun.
MO: I gave it a
B. I found it more problematic than you did in the storytelling, there were
things in the world I didn’t understand, and I didn’t remember very many of the
characters. But there’s a sense of discovery and fun to it that’s missing from Avatar. This thing just clatters and
clangs. I compared Ridley Scott’s Legend to
being the Avatar of the day: looks
fantastic, well-realized world, but it’s hokey and clunky, and it moves at a
snail’s pace. But even Legend was
more engaging than this.
LG: I’m also
worried. This film has suffered a huge backlash after being such a monster hit.
I think a lot of the goodwill towards it was due to the novelty of the 3-D,
which has worn off now. If Cameron wants Avatar
2 to be a hit, he’s going to have to either come back with a better, more
involving story, or come up with an even more audacious world, which I’m not
sure is possible.
MO: If he
promises to kill off Sam Worthington’s character he’ll clinch a C+ from me.
LG: Or at least
recast him. It’s sad that we have to end this on a down note, but the last
twelve years has not been kind to his talent. One interesting anecdote I read
is that he showed the film to a Native tribe in South America, who hated the
film because they felt the answer of fighting these people with violence was
wrong. Cameron said that this was interesting, and that maybe he’d incorporate
that into the next film.
MO: Well it’s
also the noble savage fallacy, where they’re all pure.
LG: They’re pure,
the military is evil, and the scientists are science-y. There’s no shades of
grey. You look at the history of Native American culture, they’re not all
peaceful. There’s a lot of grey in there, and I would have loved to have had that,
minus the condescending “white man has to save everything” plotline we see too
often. It’s very lazy and played out and outdated.
MO: I would love
to have seen more investment in the spirituality beyond the generic Native
beliefs. Cameron is an atheist, but there’s some sort of New Age-y connection
there, maybe. But it needs to be more specific.
LG: That’s the
end of the James Cameron Roundtable.
Hope you enjoyed our collaboration. I’m Loren Greenblatt of G-Blatt’s Dreams.
MO: I’m Max
O’Connell of The Film Temple.
LG: And to borrow
from Arnold, “WE’LL BE BACK!”
MO: We certainly
shall.
Loren’s Grade: C
