Why I Didn't Like Avatar

Spoilers and opinions ahead.

I've spent the last couple of months being told that Avatar is the most groundbreaking and wondrous visual feast of 2009. It's been called the new Star Wars, or the new standard for special effects spectaculars.

That's some pretty wild praise. And that praise seems to always come with the caveat that the movie has an overly familiar story that, from a narrative standpoint, is nothing new.

So again, what I'm hearing basically boils down to: "Avatar is stunning cinema, the greatest film made in years, the most spectacular experience you could ever have, but the story sucks!"

What?

How is that praise? Isn't the reverse side of that really just "Avatar has a shitty story, but it looks pretty." Like Jay says in Clerks, what's a pretty plate with nothing on it?

I wasn't exactly looking forward to Avatar, because I do tend to be suspicious of something that people have gotten so attached to. How attached? I've heard reports about how someone died of a heart attack during a screening because they were too excited by the wonder of it. I've read about how there are people religiously devoted to the movie. I've seen stories online about counselors dealing with people who are finding it hard to adjust to real life again.

But, ultimately, I figured I'd like the movie. I like James Cameron. I like all of his movies, including Titanic.

Instead, I experienced the most tedious three hours I've had with a blockbuster for a couple of years. Probably since the awful Transformers. I didn't just dislike Avatar. I hated it.

The people who say the story is "nothing new" are being extremely kind. It's not just "nothing new"--it's hackneyed. It's tin-eared and completely obvious. It's so obvious that one wonders exactly what the point of even making this movie was. Was it to tell a story, or to showcase special effects? I've never asked that question in a James Cameron movie before, and it's pretty disappointing to ask it now. But when the story is as besides the point as this one feels, it comes bubbling right to the surface.

Lots of things come bubbling to the surface with Avatar. It's not a matter of being nitpicky and finding things implausible, it's a matter of being so unentertained that I have time to notice things to be nitpicky about. If the movie had been working for me, I wouldn't have been annoyed noticing that the movie takes place in a 2149 that hasn't felt the need to improve wheelchair technology at all, or that people speak with the exact same idioms and stupid movie cliches that they do in 2009. James Cameron's imagination of the future apparently only extends to bigger guns and his borderline-homoerotic fetishizing of the same military he nearly always feels compelled to demonize.

Here are some other nitpicks with James Cameron's vision.

:: There's not enough oxygen to breathe, but there's enough oxygen for huge explosions?

:: Why does the constantly-mentioned low gravity never affect anyone?

:: How do the avatars, combined with human and Na'vi DNA, come out looking exactly like Na'vi?

:: When Jake Sully's avatar is separated from the others, Sigourney Weaver says they have no way to find him? What? They make watches and sneakers with a GPS now. In 2149 they're going to spend billions of dollars on a project and not stick a GPS in it. And really, if there's no way to locate the avatars, how do they actually work?

:: I could probably buy floating mountains, but where do the waterfalls come in on a floating piece of rock?

:: "Unobtainium?" Really? You couldn't have put in one throwaway line in there about some wag scientist naming it that because it's so difficult to get? No, instead it's said with bald-faced seriousness: unobtainium. Luckily, Sully can defeat the bad guys with his more powerful stock of makebelievium.

:: When Michelle Rodriguez flies the avatar link station into the jungle to hide it, how does it keep working without a power source?

:: Why is it that dazzling alien worlds always look like some place in the Amazon with a couple of giant yellow flowers stuck in the frame? The creatures look good, but they're so poorly imagined. They don't seem truly alien; they're just like weird redesigns of any other animals. Weird, Wayne Barlowe-esque versions of rhinos, monkeys, hyenas, panthers, and the requisite pterodactyl-dragons.

(Actually, I take part of that back. Wayne Barlowe would've designed something mind-blowing. Have you ever seen his creatures for Alien Planet? They're truly alien.)

But those are the scientific nitpicks. The larger problem is with the story itself and how badly it's told. The story is almost an afterthought to justify a lot of computer animation.

The fact is, I find the story kind of disgusting.

Besides my usual annoyance with a movie using millions of dollars in sophisticated technology to tell a story where the big message is that technology is bad, Cameron can't even be consistent with his message. Technology is bad, except of course for the technology that allows Sully to become an avatar.

Besides that, the Na'vi are portrayed as the stereotypical noble savages: bold, athletic, fearless, endlessly spiritual, but totally naive. The movie praises communion with nature, but the Na'vi's use of animals through their braids really seems to amount to mind control to me.

(By the way, I will say that the use of a braid as a sort of personal USB was the only thing in the movie that I thought really felt like a new and interesting idea. At the same time, though, using it to control animals just feels uncomfortably like some kind of rape to me.)

Like I said before, the people who call this movie "nothing new" are being kind. It's not that the story is nothing new, let's get that out of the way right now. Too often, I see people excusing--even praising--this movie for not being original. "What story's original?!" they use as an excuse, resting on the old saw that every story's already been told to justify someone's lack of creativity. To those of us who didn't like the movie, the issue is not that it's not original. We knew it wouldn't be; originality is not James Cameron's strong suit. The issue is that it's poorly executed, and that just makes the lifts, thefts, and retreads that much more obvious. A story retold can be one of the greatest stories ever told if executed well--I mean, Hamlet is based on an earlier work, but it's still one of the greatest things ever written. But for God's sake, if you're not going to be original, you need to be entertaining.

But my disgust with the story is that it's a parade of stereotypes in service to yet another white man's burden tale of the enlightened white man against the imperialist, close-minded whites in order to save the noble savage. And it's important that I use the word "save" and not "protect." Because never at any times in these stories is there thought of leaving the noble savage alone to his own world; no, they must be either destroyed or made better by white men. And, as always, this story is hidden behind a veneer of environmental sensitivity.

The shorthands here are ridiculously simplistic. The Marines must be evil to a man because they represent the military-industrial complex and corporate interests. The Na'vi must be tranquil and in perfect harmony with the world because they're not corrupted by the evils of civilization.

Now look at the racial shorthands. The villains are all white, led by Stephen Lang, a fine actor wasted here on spouting cliches and playing a role so utterly without character and culled from hundreds of repetitions that anyone could have been plugged in here. The only good characters among the whites are the savior-hero, a woman, a nerd (the infodump characters that Cameron always thinks is quirky fun), a Latina pilot, and an Indian scientist.

The Na'vi (the name obviously meant to invoke the Navajo, with an apostrophe thrown in to make them also seem African, or something) are all played by black, Latin, and Native American actors. Multicultural both in actors and in the simplistic amalgamation of various aboriginal people from across the globe. There's no distinct flavor to the Na'vi, other than being big blue catlike Manga characters. And yet they're lacking the one thing they need that will apparently make them a great people: the white savior-hero.

It also means something in shorthand that Jake Sully has crippled legs. It's that break from being like the other Marines that apparently raises his consciousness enough to make him a Na'vi-human hybrid, somehow better than the other whites and better than the other Na'vi as well. Because, of course, he doesn't just become one of the Na'vi; he becomes better than them. He has more guts, is more athletic, can tame that red pterodactyl like no one in generations. The chief's daughter falls in love with him. He's not just a Na'vi; he's the best Na'vi. But no one's offended by this because the Na'vi are thinly fictional instead of just being Africans or Native Americans or something.

But really, it's an offensive sort of fable. It's utterly condescending not just because of the stereotypes, but because of the affirmation of those stereotypes. It's the idea that those who aren't white or "cultured" or "civilized" need a white savior-hero to lead them into the light, lest they be tainted by other whites with literacy and clothing and iPods. But it doesn't once consider the possibility that these nonwhites might not actually need anything from white people, and that being left to shape their own destinies is even a possibility. Now that the white king has arrived, the future can begin.

Ridiculous.

But not many people seem to see the story in those bleedingly obvious terms. A lot of the people I run into love the story because it basically goes like this: Dude doesn't fit in anywhere; he logs onto the internet in order to play a military RPG; he instead ends up playing a Furry RPG, meets a female Furry, and has chatroom sex with her; he discovers he plays the RPG and unlocks achievements faster than anyone else online; he reaches the highest level no one's ever reached before and wins the game by riding the red pterodactyl; then he becomes champion of the Furries and leads a flamewar against the military RPG. And, of course, he attains the ultimate prize, which is to get to live inside the internet and his fake online life forever after. And this is why they love it.

And this is not to say that you're wrong to like it, or that if you liked it, it must be because you're some kind of weirdo who spends too much time on the internet. But I have met way too many nuts online who cannot get over this movie, take every criticism of the movie as an attack on their religion, and really give the impression of someone clicking their heels over and over hoping that one day they'll wake up on Pandora and escape the mundane of daily routine and responsibility. It offers people a powerful fantasy, and it uses 3D to immerse them in it. It's uncomfortably as though James Cameron is hugging you with his mind, letting you share in his self-admiration by making it your self-admiration, too.

But I am not there with those people. I'm not even there with people who thought the movie looked great but had an unoriginal story. I just flat out hated this movie. A lot.