#1080026
- Sat Aug 22 200912:38 AMJames Cameron's Avatar
thedoctorthedoctor
Timelord. Drunkard.
Registered: Sat Jun 22 2002
Posts: 20650
Loc: In the T.A.R.D.I.S.
whomod said: I generally don't like it when people decide to play by the rules against people who don't play by the rules. It tends to put you immediately at a disadvantage and IMO is a sign of true weakness. This is true both in politics and on the internet."
The phrase “Delgo vs. Avatar” has taken on multiple meanings over the last week, from the uncanny comparisons between Hollywood’s biggest animated flop and its most ambitious film ever, to my inner masochist praying for a big-screen, Alien vs. Predator-style showdown between the two somewhere down the line. But I much prefer the latest interpretation, with Delgo’s downmarket animation studio alluding to legal action against James Cameron and Fox.
A press release headlined “James Cameron’s Big Budget Avatar Compared to Animated Indie Film Produced by Fathom Studios” arrived last night at Movieline HQ, laying out a number of Web sites and critics who had pointed out visual parallels, thematic overlaps, and other odd similarities between the films. Apparently not understanding that Avatar’s connections to Delgo were in fact a criticism of Cameron’s high-tech blockbuster, the Fathom gang commenced saber-rattling anyway
Avatar is the corniest movie ever made about the white man’s need to lose his identity and assuage racial, political, sexual and historical guilt.
Cameron’s superficial B-movie tropes pretend philosophical significance. His story’s rampant imperialism and manifest destiny (Giovanni Ribisi plays the heartless industrialist) recalls Vietnam-era revisionist westerns like Soldier Blue, but it’s essentially a sentimental cartoon with a pacifist, naturalist message. Avatar condemns mankind’s plundering and ruin of a metaphorical planet’s ecology and the aboriginals’ way of life. Cameron fashionably denounces the same economic and military system that make his technological extravaganza possible. It’s like condemning NASA—yet joyriding on the Mars Exploration Rover.
While prattling about man’s threat to environmental harmony, Cameron’s really into the powie-zowie factor: destructive combat and the deployment of technological force. At first, Sully, a “warrior and dreamwalker” like The Matrix’s Neo, is shown as a fierce, sculpted meathead with a wounded look in his wide eyes. Cameron lights Worthington superbly in tremendous, empathetic close-ups, yet when Sully’s involvement with the avatar project increases—as hair and beard grow in—his humanity becomes nondescript and he identifies with the Na’vi. (It’s disappointing that the great Worthington only appears in a quarter of the film; most of the time Sully is a Smurf.) Going native allows Cameron to move on to the violent technology he really loves—though never scrutinizing Sully’s new bond with an angry red dragon or how Sully’s temperament becomes dangerously enflamed.
Here’s the hypocrisy: As Sully helps the beleaguered, virtuous aliens fight back and conquer the human invaders, Avatar puts forth a simple-minded anti-industrial critique. Despite Avatar’s 12-year gestation, Cameron’s obviously commenting on the Iraq War—though not like his hawkish Aliens. Appealing to Iraq War disenchantment, he evokes 9/11 when the military topples the Na’vi’s sacred, towering Tree of Souls. The imagery implies that the World Trade Center was also an altar (of U.S. capitalism), yet this berserk analogy exposes Cameron’s contradictory thinking. It triggers the offensive battle scenes where American soldiers get vengefully decimated—scored to the rousing clichés of Carmina Burana.
The fantasy of Sully giving up the impediment of his (American) humanity is a guilt-ridden 9/11 death wish. References to “fight terror with terror” and “shock-and-awe campaign” don’t belong in this 3-D Rapa Nui with its blather about the Na’vi’s “direct line to their ancestors.” Once again, villainous Americans exhibit no direct communication with ancestors. That’s Cameron’s fanboy zeal turned into fatuous politics. He misrepresents the facts of militarism, capitalism, imperialism—and their comforts.
There’s even a Busby Berkeley-style tribal dance to divert them. Also, Avatar’s techno-exoticism involves blue cartoon creatures, not brown, black, red, yellow real-world people. It’s the easiest, dumbest escapism imaginable.
The fact that “Avatar” is basically “Dances With Wolves in Space” represents the film’s major flaw. For despite being the most expensive film of all time, with a $300 million production cost and another estimated $200 million spent on advertising, “Avatar” is also one of the most derivative films of all time. It’s hard to believe that a man like Cameron (“Terminator 2,” “Titanic”), who is capable of absolute genius in creating the film’s staggering visuals and astonishing breakthroughs in 3D IMAX technology, is unable to come up with a screenplay that isn’t a hamfisted mishmash of countless better films’ plot elements and a heavy-handed bash on modern American foreign policy.
The film is set in 2154, with the earth environmentally ravaged and a governmental outfit called the Resources Development Administration spending mountains of money to mine the distant moon of Pandora for a rare-earth mineral essential to solving the earth’s energy crisis, called Unobtainium (nice subtlety, Cameron). The RDA has been trying for 30 years, but has faced growing conflict with the indigenous master race of the planet, called the Na’vi, and the two sides appear to be heading towards a brutal war over Pandora’s resources.
Cameron is going be putting a hit out on Matt and Trey at this rate.
#1097581
- Thu Dec 17 200909:57 PMRe: James Cameron's Avatar
[Re: the G-man]
PrincessElisaPrincessElisa
The Swizzler....
Registered: Wed May 02 2001
Posts: 6181
Loc: Dallas, Texas
Yeah unlike the rest of the world, I have this fear of smurf like creatures that Glacier boy loves to tease me about. And even though AVATAR is acclaimed as the "greatest technological" movie ever, I vote no on this one and yes for sleeping in on Saturday even if the rest of my family is seeing it on the IMAX screen. That way no scariness or smurf like creatures can attack me!
IT's NOT funny! Glacier, STOP LAUGHING For crying out loud........
For crying out loud........
