A Response to Avatar

First let me say that a large part of why this movie was successful to me is that it wasn’t easily knowable beforehand.  I heard a lot of discussion about the advertising strategy for Avatar—the amount they spent, the choice to show so little about the movie, the typeface, etc.–-but the one thing it most assuredly did was to avoid giving away the story, and that was important.  I’m going to do my best to avoid having any spoilers in what I’m about to write, but if you’re concerned at all (and you should be because you should see the movie and you should do it fresh), you may want to forget reading this and just adhere to the my underlying point: GO.  Go NOW.  Take anyone who might like it and who can sit still for three hours.  Take anyone who can’t and ply them with confections, age permitting.  See it in a theater.  See it in 3D.  If you like sci-fi, if you like love stories, if you like action movies, see it.  If you like any films, or even movies… or if you have a pulse… see it in 3D and do so at a theater. If you don’t you’ll regret it.

Okay.  I loved the original Star Wars trilogy.  I made a feature-length spoof of A New Hope my junior year of high school and I roped my friends into an even more elaborate spoof of Episode V the next year.  When the new trilogy came out, I was the first one in line to get into the theater at the first midnight showing (for all three of them, sadly). Recently, I saw a set of YouTube videos that cherry-pick Episode I apart (should be noted that I’m not endorsing these—I wish he could have stuck to the reviewing and skipped the “I’m a psycho” parts). It was all reasonable criticism, and I’m well aware that I enjoyed Phantom Menace only because I saw it with so many like-minded fans that we skimmed over the failings and cheered together when the sand people took potshots at the pod racers and the Jawas bleated around the first corner.  After high school I studied film because my father said to go into something I enjoyed doing.  I learned to pick apart what I saw on the screen, as this is how they teach you to make films: reverse engineering. It didn’t particularly take, I guess, but with that in hand I can laugh at Espisode I when no one can figure out how to live-act among a fake world and it’s worse than Mark Hamil’s audition tape for Episode IV.  But I’m getting off track…

I went into the theater to see Avatar with my comically-large polarized 3D specs and literally said out loud to my pal “I’m more curious than excited.”  I was.  I was expecting it to feel like Episode I makes me feel now.  I was also preloaded with an inherent inability to accept CG as reality, a distaste for a movie that cost so much money and about which I had heard so much negativity, and a really powerful dislike for the Papyrus typeface (another pedigree standard). When the cat-ball thing from Alice In Wonderland accosted the audience in a goofy display of 3D depth-of-field I thought “I’m going to have a hard time just paying attention to the story if the 3D is this much of a novelty.” When the first voice-over broke the silence I groaned a bit and I remember thinking, “this is going to be more Episode I than Episode IV.”  In fact, I did a lot of thinking… right up until a few minutes in, when my disbelief was suspended, willingly or not, and, aside from a few pinholes where the convergence of my film school training and my love of referential material colluded me, I didn’t start thinking again until I saw a key grip’s name partway through the credits.  At that point, the reality made me smile as much as any part of the story. Avatar is the film I’ve been waiting to see since May 1999, and it’s brilliant.

I love stories. That’s not terribly insightful about me. How about this: when I was young, my sister used to get mad because I would interrupt her singing along to her favorite songs to ask her what the lyrics meant. I like things that have meaning.  I like stories that have something to share, be it superficial, hidden, or, ideally, both.  I loved Mononoke Hime from the moment I saw it, almost two years before it was released in the U.S., subtitled by a fan and bootlegged to a group of true-believers.  When it came to the U.S. I begged the curator-plenipotentiary (can’t believe I remember that) of the local theater to show it. Whether or not I had anything to do with it, when he did I was there opening night and, despite the second-rate dubbing, it was great.  It was as unapologetic as Miyazaki films always are, and bared its thematic soul plainly and powerfully.  In Avatar‘s story there lives the same touch that Miyazaki always brings to his films (and more than a few direct references to his work). The film is understandable because it’s themes are simple; it’s powerful because they are gracefully omnipresent.  Even the love story that threads its way around the film is never out of reach but also never a distraction.  As with all good sci-fi, and to the detriment of an even greater quantity of poorly-executed sci-fi, the thematic archetypes are not at all transparent in this film.  The bad guys and good guys are clearly delineated, the character arcs and transformations aren’t hiding, and the three acts might as well have title screens between them.  But I don’t know how else to say it: I didn’t stumble over those things—the way I stumbled over the glowing, orange, 3D papyrus subtitles D:—I embraced them, and, for me, that’s unusual if not impossible (notable exception: Last Crusade).  In fact, campy or not, I don’t even have any comments about the acting or anything like that; the acting was good… or maybe appropriate is a better term.  I mean, I’m sure if I was pressed I could write a few things but it just seems to incidental to the theme and the story. This film was an unfailing vehicle for those.

Despite it’s sci-fi trappings, and despite the CG, and even flying directly in the face of my (and apparently so many others’) predisposition against it, the film brought me the same sense that a great novel does, and something that no film I’ve seen in the theater perhaps ever has: it made me believe unreservedly in the world in front of me and experience some raw emotion tied to it.  It wasn’t a film about 22nd century AD human life, it was a film about some foreign experience where the details had an almost Tolkein-esque life of their own.  Okay, there were definitely moments where it took a pause to indulge itself in the local flora and fauna, and to explore the capabilities of CG with regard to realism (and blue skin), but taking that in stride (and even with only a few hours to do it) there existed on the screen a fully-developed world that didn’t fall apart under (even my) scrutiny but, rather, had subtleties waiting to be noticed in the wake of a story that would have stood on its own being read aloud. Not the kind of details that are intended to jump out and say “hey, I’m a detail, look how well I sell this story,” but actual details that just exist because they do. I ate it up.  To me, that’s successful sci-fi and I just haven’t seen it lately.  Actually, I thought I had out-grown and out-learned my ability to just be immersed without picking things apart… or thinking about the quality of the theater seats… or wondering how many takes something required.  I really thought that the awe I utterly failed to explain to my mom after coming home late from middle school because I had stuck around to watch a bootlegged copy of Nausicaä was something I couldn’t experience again with the perception of a (sort of) adult and the jaded filtration associated with having scrutinized the filmmaking process. I was totally wrong.

At this point I have to acknowledge that there were moments where, against my will—as in fact my disbelief was suspended so strongly that it was on house arrest—my mind left the story for a few moments at a time.  I love things that are referential, subtly or even somewhat less so.  I’m well aware that much of what I saw as outwardly referential in Avatar could be, at best, unintentional or generally unnoticed, or, at worst, mis-observed.  But to me it was awesome.  As I’ve alluded, there’s no shortage of thematically and aesthetically similar material out there, but the references I noticed seemed hand-picked for me and from beloved sources.  My jaw literally uncontrollably dropped when the otherwise complementary, though a bit heavy-handed at times, score side-stepped into strains of Philip Glass’ theme to Naqoyqatsi, jarringly evoking thoughts of a certain human future at which Avatar hints throughout. And I couldn’t help but imagine, at one point, a certain debriefing taken in by a young Skywalker which described his bombing target as being of a certain size.  Even nods to Miyazaki’s great works seemed prevalent in the way the forest came together.  I know I keep mentioning him and his works, but I honestly looked for his name in the credits because it felt so much like a live-action work of his—the imagination, the theme… As a side note: with so many people working on so many aspects of Avatar, as one will notice watching the credits for a half minute, I wonder if everyone was of a like mind because of the story, the director, or serendipity… Anyway, the parallels I detected and enjoyed were so pleasing between this film and other works I love that I would want nothing more than to sit and list them to get feedback. Maybe I’ll write a spoiler-alert-laden guide later so others can chime in to correct and continue what I noticed.  In the place of that, for now, let me just say that I have almost certainly never seen a sci-fi flick be put together with, in my immensely humble opinion, such an auteur filmmaker’s care, the likes of which is usually reserved for things that wind up putting a little golden statue in someone’s deserving hands. Whew, I’m out of control.

It’s noteworthy, too, that despite my concern, I found that the 3D didn’t take away from the film at all. At times, driven by the curiosity of someone interested in filmmaking, I wondered about it and peeped at the edges of the frame, trying to see how it influenced depth of field.  In general, though, I wonder if it didn’t achieve two things for me.  Something about the effect definitely creates an almost imperceptible blur as you look deeper into the frame and I have a feeling this went a long way to helping me gloss over my usual faulting of CG: it’s round-peg-to-square-hole, over-sharpened look that fails to really simulate the human eye’s usual modus.  In addition to that, I think it may actually have drawn me more into the story by making the movie world feel at once more new and alien (bear in mind that before tonight I was a modern 3D virgin) and more, yes dang it, immersive.  I feel like I’ve just used the word “proactive” in a sentence or something, but it’s true: I felt more immersed than I think I would have looking at the film in two dimensions, even if it were super-duper-IMAX quality.  It’s for this reason that I really think everyone who’s going to see it (which should probably be everyone, I’m just saying) should see it in the theatre.  I’m pretty sure it’s not going to translate to 2D all that great, let alone 2 feet.

Well, anyway, I’ve found it hard to really describe my reaction to the film without giving anything about it away but, as I’ve stated, I think it’s important to hold back. I still think a lot of Avatar‘s potential power rests on its ability to continually draw you in by essentially surprising you.  And I know that this all seems a little hyperbolic, but that’s honestly how I came away from the film feeling. I’ve wanted a fantasy movie to make me feel that way on the big screen since I read my first novel in the genre as a wee one.  I’ve wanted a cinema-going experience to rekindle my love both of films and of stories and this one has. So maybe what I wrote wasn’t so much a review as a response, and with that in mind maybe I can say what I’ve really been thinking, and what I said on the phone to several people and will probably keep saying and be forced to keep defending for a long time, perhaps even to the next generation of movie goers when they get old enough to listen (or not listen as the case may be):

I think this film is our generation’s Star Wars. It’s the first movie to take a genre and a style and a vision and hitch them to a story the telling—and theme—of which actually make me proud.  I wholeheartedly admit that it might be because I care about the genre and the theme and I like love stories (so there!), but I’m really glad this film was made and I don’t think I’ve been able to say that about a a film, whether I liked it or not, in a long time, and certainly not one that I got to see on the big screen. And, just for posterity (and for the sake of TL;DR) here is my 140-character-limited-and-therefore-culturally-significant, immediate response to the film as I walked out:

“Go. See. It. Now. Stop what you’re doing, find a 3D showing, and GO. If you don’t see Avatar in a theater in 3D you will regret it.”