For a moment let’s set aside the “titanic” hype, the abundant CGI, the trendy 3D, the record-breaking budget and the narrative comparisons to other films like Dances With Wolves. There is only one thing you need to know when deciding whether to pluck down your hard earned cash for James Cameron’s Avatar and its 3D surcharge in theaters.
You may recognize Avatar’s themes, but you have never seen them like this before. Ever.
The symphony of visual delight Cameron has orchestrated makes Michael Bay’s Transformers look like a Woody Woodpecker cartoon. No offense to Industrial Light and Magic and their phenomenally intricate otherworldly robots, but the work by Weta and other effects houses to breathe life into the fictional planet of Pandora, its inhabitants and its landscapes is meticulously created from the ground up under Cameron’s watchful eye with detail so vast no single viewing can soak it all in. And it all started with a Cameron pencil sketch of a tall skinny blue alien.
Cameron wrote the story from scratch about a planet called Pandora that is home to a rare mineral, Unobtanium, which fetches astronomical prices back on a (presumably if you connect the dots) dying Earth. Humans have been on the planet for close to three decades using special masks to breathe but have run into a roadblock while trying to tap into the largest known deposit of Unobtanium. A giant tree the size of a skyscraper sits on top of it, and a tribe of natives called the Na’vi call the tree home.
Diplomatically moving the Na’vi is the preferred method of procedure and in order to gain their trust the humans inhabit the body of Avatars; genetically engineered Na’vi skins in which a human can control remotely while laying in a contraption resembling a high-tech tanning bed. Jake Sully (Sam Worthington), a disabled former grunt, is sent to Pandora to take over the Avatar of his deceased scientist twin brother because of the genetic match and explore the Pandoran world and the Na’vi. Only he is unexpectedly taken into the tribe immediately by sexy yet deadly female princess Neytiri (Zoe Saldana) which catches the eye of Quaritch (Stephen Lang), a colonel so ripped and fearless that he sips coffee during combat and braves the toxic air without a mask. A military mole on the inside can provide Quaritch the necessary tactical advantage to launch a strike and remove the Na’vi by force, a job that suits Jake perfectly until he begins to fall for Neytiri and finds his loyalties tested.
Avatar’s story follows a relatively straight and previously travelled path heavily influenced by the settling of Europeans in the Americas. The Na’vi share attributes with Native American Indians including their attire, body paint and accent while the outsider humans come in armed with bravado and advanced military technology. Cameron also plays off the attacks of 9/11 with the imagery of the Twin Towers falling eerily similar to a sequence in the film, with Quaritch using dialogue ripped straight from George Bush’s vocabulary like “Shock and Awe,” “Pre-emptive Strike” and “Fight Terror with Terror.” For environmentalists, an overarching story about “saving the trees” and nature being a life worth saving, too, plays heavily into the third and final act.
Holding these varying familiar themes together is a signature Cameron love story between unlikely mates from different “worlds,” Jake and Neytiri. The Na’vi have a saying used often, “I see you,” that speaks to knowing a person through their heart, not their skin. Through this saying the Na’vi are able to “know” Jake despite his skin being false, and Jake is able to “know” the Na’vi despite him being an alien to their race.
Unlike Titantic and its equally predictable love story with Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet, Jake and Neytiri’s connection relies on believing the performance captured animation of two CGI creations. Your mind knows the Na’vi are fictional. Nine-foot tall blue aliens with cat-like faces and exaggerated yellow eyes do not exist. Yet Cameron’s eye for detail and his persistence to achieve his vast vision has pushed the animation to a point unlike seen in any performance capture or artificially created world before.
After the initial shock of adjusting to the image of Jake awakening as an Avatar and sprinting around to test his legs, the line between what is real and what is not begins to blur. Pandora’s beauty with its bioluminescent glow inspired by Cameron’s trips to the ocean’s depths, floating mountains with waterfalls that cascade into thin air, large deadly dinosaur-like creatures, and small critters resembling frogs that sprout a glowing white sail to use as a propeller for flight feel omnipresent in the company of the Na’vi. Their presence in our world would stick out like a sore thumb. On Pandora, the Na’vi come across as natural as the air you breathe.
Avatar in 2D would be enough of a visual treat, but the inclusion of Cameron’s new 3D technology puts its immersion effectiveness in a league of its own. I have been fairly harsh on 3D being used to “sell” a film as the benefits have been, in my mind, outweighed by losing some of the colors and clarity a 2D image offers. Throw that logic out the window with Avatar. Not only do all the brilliant colors of Pandora look spot on in 3D, the depth of the image is far beyond any previously released 3D film. Jake’s awakening from hyper-sleep aboard a giant spaceship stretches the image into a black hole that you could reach out and never touch the end. The effect is amazing; a tease if you will, of what the rest of the film holds.
In the third act, Quaritch throws all his military might at the Na’vi in what will go down as, to date, one of the most amazing battle sequences ever put to film… even if it was pieced together in a computer. Not only is the density and detail of the combatants off the chart and always recognizable, but the 3D effect of most of it taking place in the air makes you feel like you “dropped” in on top of it. Again, it is the depth Cameron’s camera technology has achieved that makes it feel more like an asset and less like a gimmick. Once seen and witnessed, anything less will be intolerable.
I never thought I would admit this, but I actually cared what would happen to Neytiri, Jake and the Na’vi people despite them not being “real” far more so than any of the humans save for Sigourney Weaver’s scientist character Grace Augustine. And she spends a chunk of her time as an Avatar.
Pandora is an amazing place; alive and brimming with otherworldly life real enough to reach out and touch. It has to be seen in 3D as Cameron intended with your own eyes to be believed. I am already counting down the days until I can visit it again.
– Dan Bradley
