If you go down to the woods today
February 5th, 2010
Engrossed in 3D at IMax
I didn’t want to like Avatar too much. It’s the most expensive movie ever made, costing around $280 million to make and another $150 million to hype, and that’s enough reason to give it a wide berth. Besides Avatar is supposed to be pitched against a much smaller, cheaper British film in the race for the Oscars: An Education. The smaller film is set in the unswinging early-Sixties London and by most accounts a more nuanced effort – less crash bang whallop and much more my sort of thing really. Still, I was curious about this movie-phenomenon.
Part of the attraction of Avatar was finally getting to go to an IMAX cinema and to see a film in 3D. I’d never been to either and had this idea that the IMAX are the cinematic equivalent of the Alps with screens that tower into the clouds and leave the cinema-goer dumbstruck and overwhelmed. Unfortunately the Greenwich Odeon screen didn’t seem very big at all. Perhaps it was an IMIN.
It turns out that the movie is pretty engrossing. The hero, Jake Sully, played by Sam Worthington, is a paraplegic ex-marine who is drafted in to the Avatar programme on the moon Pandora. This involves having his consciousness ported into the body of one of the tall, blue inhabitants of this jungle-covered planet. It’s a sort of a slightly less naff World of Warcraft. The humans are mining the planet for the precious mineral Unobtainium (an amusing name for a mineral that I assumed was original, but according to its wiki page has been around since the fifties). They want Jake to ingratiate himself into a village of blue-skins and persuade its inhabitants to move away so an open-cast mine can be ripped out of paradise.
The contrast between the unspoiled Eden of the handsome Na’vi aliens and the thuggish humans is the key theme of the film. However it has a lot more going on than that, and the movie throws out a relentless barrage of cranky ideas and motifs taken from other films. One of these familiar ideas is of virtual reality, entering another mind or world that has been used in films like Existenz, Total Recall and Strange Days. As in Existenz where players of the Existenz game have to plug in the gaming device into their bodies, the Na’vi connect their pony-tails to plants and animals. This enables them to commune with non-human intelligence – they grok each other – an idea found in Robert Heinlein’s classic Sci-Fi novel Stranger in a Strange Land.
There are bits of Star Wars, fragments of 2001, and possibly even a dollop of Flash Gordon. However, all this isn’t too obvious, it doesn’t weigh the movie down too much. James Cameron handles his sources like a mainstream Quentin Tarantino and creates something fresh and exciting. The 3D takes it into a new realm of cinematic experience and also isn’t too in your face. Before the film started, we were shown a trailer for a film about the Hubble telescope where the satellite was jutting out of the screen, but in Avatar the technology is mostly used to give the characters and landscapes greater depth.
Some of it’s pretty trippy - at night the forest turns into a neon-lit, sub-aquatic day-glo rave. All beings on the planet form a vast intelligent neural network – similar to Terence McKenna and Paul Stamets‘ ideas about mushrooms. Some bloggers have even noticed that the blue Na’vi resemble the elf-people you’re meant to see after taking the hallucinogenic Ayahuasca vine from the Amazon. The natives live in a vast, ancient tree whose branches and roots are seen on the computers at the human’s base looking like the Norse tree at the centre of life Yggdrasil.
The most glaringly obvious thing about this film is its anti-colonialism. You can see Avatar as Zulu in reverse, with the Zulus surrounded by the Brits. Or is that The Emerald Forest, where a young man ‘gone native’ joins a fight to save the rain forest from earth moving equipment using only stone-age weapons. I wonder if this is what has contributed to the film’s international success, now that occupation by foreign powers is on the agenda again. Lawrence of Arabia wrote in a letter: “We are calling them [the arabs] to fight for us on a lie, and I can’t stand it.” Luckily, Jake Sully finds a way out. Although I expect Avatar will win more statues than An Education at the Academy Awards, I don’t suppose Cameron would mind if he was trounced by the little guys.
