Avatar in a Glowy Nutshell

Just a quick take on Avatar. For the sake of the entry I'm going to talk about this from a strictly screenplay angle. Visually, the movie was fantastic, riveting, and groundbreaking. One gets used to the blue people and they take on a very realistic stance in the movie. Likewise, the CG there is unbelievable. This represents one step closer to the time when CG humans will actually come off as other than wooden and creepy.

Okay, to the screenplay. The antithesis of the visuals, largely it lacked anything original or riveting. It was a frankensteinian pastiche of ideas come and gone before. But even that aside, it relied on additional moments and themes that were unexcusably horrid in conception and execution. The movie really was Dances with Wolves in space, or as a friend of mine likes to call it, Dances with Smurfs.

The white man (earthling) saving the day from the savages that just can't get it together without him is a bit tired. (Dances with Wolves, The Last Samurai, numerous slave narratives). It seems to me an outgrowth of white-man guilt at the unabashed slaughter of natives the world over. Now, it is THOSE white people that are bad, and we're better than that now. Why an evolved and advance native culture can't have their own heroes that kick ass on the invading forces is a mystery to me. Perhaps it's because the reigning audiences aren't native cultures themselves--an outgrowth of the very real domination of those cultures by the ancestors of the very people making the movies today.  And those people are out for one thing--to sell tickets.  I guess dark heroes just aren't selling these days.  Perhaps if native peoples had invented gun-powder before Eurpoeans, it would be they that were the heroes in the movies, and us, the cowering idiots casting about for a saviour.

But that's not all, as bad as it is. The most offensive part of the narrative is the reliance on a rusted and dusty convention widely knows as the Deus ex Machina. It is only at the beseechment of the white saviour that God comes down and does the actual ass-kicking. When all is lost, God descends from the sky, and cascades over the ground, to bring reckoning to the dastardly invaders. Why the great Earth Mother didn't decide to do this earlier is a mystery. Perhaps she only comes out when the white man asks--either that, or her own people are too stupid to figure this one out for themselves. Natives: "Why didn't you save us?" God: "You never asked."

That being said, I'm sure it'll be a great success, and white people the world over will feel all fuzzy about themselves. And the gnawing little gnat in their heads reminding them that this is going on right now, in this world, to real people, will go unlistened to--again: "Hey that CG was great! Let's go get a Big Mac."