Avatar: Some Personal Comments

AVATAR

The film Avatar has finally been released this month after being in development since 1994. I have not seen it yet, but I have read about it and discussed it with several people who have. This prose-poem tries to encapsulate some of my initial thoughts on this blockbuster, its initial reception and some of its meaning.

James Cameron, who wrote, produced and directed the film, stated in an interview that an avatar is: “an incarnation of one of the Hindu gods taking a flesh form." In this film, though, avatar has more to do with human technology in the future being capable of injecting a human's intelligence into a remotely located body, a biological body. "It's not an avatar in the sense of just existing as ones and zeroes in cyberspace,” said Cameron; “it's actually a physical body." The great student of myth, Joseph Campbell(1), should have been at the premier in London on 10 December 2009. I wonder what he would have said.

Composer James Horner scored the film, his third collaboration with Cameron after Aliens and Titanic. A field guide of 224 pages for the film's fictional setting of the planet of Pandora was released by Harper Entertainment just five weeks ago. The guide was entitled Avatar: A Confidential Report on the Biological and Social History of Pandora. With an estimated $310 million to produce and $150 million for marketing, the film has already generated positive reviews from film critics. Roger Ebert, one of the more prestigious of film critics, wrote: “An extraordinary film: Avatar is not simply sensational entertainment, although it is that. It's a technical breakthrough."-Ron Price with thanks to Wikipedia, 30 December 2009.

Like viewing Star Wars back in ’77
some said/an obvious script with an
earnestness & corniness/part of what
makes it absorbing/said another/Gives
you a world, a place/worth visiting/eh?
Alive with action and a soundtrack that
pops with robust sci-fi shoot-'em-ups...

A mild critique of American militarism
and industrialism.....yes the military are
pure evil........the Pandoran tribespeople
are nature-loving, eco-harmonious, wise
Braveheart smurf warriors. Received....
nominations for the Critics' Choice Awards
of the Broadcast Film Critics Association &
on and on go the recommendations for the..
best this and that and everything else. What
do you think of all this Joseph Campbell???
You said we all have to work our own myth(1)
in our pentapolar, multicultural-dimensional
world with endless phantoms of our wrongly
informed imagination, with our tangled fears,
our pundits of error, ill-equipped to interpret
the social commotion tearing our world apart
and at play on planetizing-globalizing Earth.(2)

(1)Google Joseph Campbell for some contemporary insights into the individualized myth we all have to work out in our postmodern world.
(2)The Prophet-Founder of the Bahá'í Faith, Bahá'u'lláh, has been presented as an avatar in India beginning, arguably, in the 1960s. With only 1000 Baha’is in India in 1960 to more than 2 million by the year 2010. Baha’u’llah has been associated with the kalkin avatar who, according to a major Hindu holy text, will appear at the end of the kali yuga, one of the four main stages of history, for the purpose of reestablishing an era of righteousness. There are many examples of what one might call a quasi-cross-cultural messianistic approach to Bahá'í teaching in India.

This approach has included: (a) emphasizing the figures of Buddha and Krishna as past Manifestations of God or avatars; (b) making references to Hindu scriptures such as the Bhagavad Gita, (c) the substitution of Sanskrit-based terminology for Arabic and Persian where possible; for example, Bhagavan Baha for Bahá'u'lláh, (d) the incorporation in both song and literature of Hindu holy spots, hero-figures and poetic images and (e) using heavily Sanskritized-Hindi translations of Baha'i scriptures and prayers.

Ron Price
30 December 2009

 

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"I have not seen yet.."

So maybe you should see it first before you write a lengthy essey about it...You can watch it online for free, if it is a hassle to go out to the movies...

 

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Take out the special effects, and it's a typical action movie. Nothing special.

 

My favourite review of Avatar went simply: Avatar = ‘Dances with Wolves’ with tall Smurfs.

The amazing 3D special effects were spectacular but they couldn’t compensate for the fact that the plot is strictly 2D. It’s so formulaic and clichéd that I came away being far from impressed with Avatar as a movie experience. With the $300M budget and the four years it took to make it, surely Cameron could have invested a bit of time, money and effort into developing a decent script.

And then there are the plot holes. Here’s a few (taken from here):

--- Why use avatars if they're not to be kept secret?

--- If the Na'vi know from the get-go that these ''Dreamwalkers'' are biological shells remotely controlled by humans, why do they trust them?

--- What is the deal with Eywa? Shortly after Sully (Sam Worthington) and Na'vi girl Neytiri (Zoe Saldana) meet, the seeds of Eywa float down and determine that Sully, despite being human, is pure of heart. Then he tells his commander (Stephen Lang) about how to destroy the sacred Hometree, thus proving Eywa is a lousy judge of character. Yet the Na'vi, knowing all this, stick to their beliefs.

--- Why is Unobtainium so valuable?

--- Why send in avatar ambassadors to negotiate and ''make friends'' with the Na'vi if you're just going to go ahead and bulldoze their forest anyway?

--- During the Hometree attack, chopper pilot Trudy (Michelle Rodriguez) opts out and flies off. Why doesn't her crew object? Why doesn't anybody give chase? And why doesn't the commander, who has just lectured us about how highly he values loyalty, tear Trudy a new one? This makes her appearance in the brig to free Sully and co implausible.

--- And when she steals the helicopter, why doesn't anybody chase her?

--- Though central command can tell when she turns the helicopter on, they somehow can't track where she goes or determine the location of the portable lab she picks up.

--- After Sully is put into his avatar he runs out into the compound, where we see a whole lot of other avatars. What happened to them?

--- Why does the company maintain no control over the avatar program, even though it owns it?

--- If Dr Augustine (Sigourney Weaver) is so intent on preserving Na'vi culture, why doesn't she tell her boss (Giovanni Ribisi) about the money-printing healing properties of Na'vi medicine?

 

I assume you never downloaded a song for free.Good for you....Probably you haven't heard, but illegal copies and downloads are really hurting Avatar's box office, so much so, that it is now the biggest moneymaker, EVER.

My point was, making a mind up AFTER viewing the material...

 

The same with Titanic, take out the love story and it is a typical catastrophe movie.

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Secret how? The natives would recognize when suddenly an Avatar out of nowhere trying to blend in...

Because people are paying for it a lot? Because you have to go to another planets to get it? Seruously, is that a plothole for you???

 

Probably, I never saw it.

 

And there's a sequel on the way!!! [with a bottomless budget. . . so it'll suck]

~String

 

To answer some of your queries (not all of which constitute plot holes):

Unobtainium is so valuable because it doesn't exist on Earth, and apparently works as a superconductor.

The film answers the Avatar question, it was an effort to make it seem as though the company were trying to find a way of extracting the mineral without having to commit genocide (investors don't like that kind of bad publicity).

Trudy could have claimed a malfunction in her vehicle or any other similar excuse for not firing, and in the end her departure made no difference to that battle.

Trudy and co are chased up until they fly off, in fact since the end battle has already been decided upon it really makes no sense sending choppers out prior to the main offensive.

The other Avatars in the compound could be 'pilots' in training, or they might leave on the next rotation. Hardly important.

The company finance the Avatars, so it has complete control. They even pull the plug on the program, remember?

If by medicine you mean the attempt to save Augustine's life then she didn't know of this is until the point she was shot. And it didn't work for her.

Ok movie, not great by any means.

 

There could have been more clever ways of getting that mineral. They could have faked an accident and crashed an enormous ship loaded with Agent Orange into the sacred tree. Whoops.

 

Close to zero. And jungle creatures are generally smaller, just look at the Pygmies.

 

Ha! So true.

~String

 

Hehe, unless you can show a bunch of alien forms NOT looking humanoid, maybe there is a logical, evolutional answer why every intelligent lifeform at the top of the foodpyramid is humanoid.

Opposable thumbs and such....

 

But it is not. Half of his objections are easily answered... Like this:

--- Though central command can tell when she turns the helicopter on, they somehow can't track where she goes or determine the location of the portable lab she picks up.

They said that around the floating mountains radar and other devices don't work. There you have it...

--- If Dr Augustine (Sigourney Weaver) is so intent on preserving Na'vi culture, why doesn't she tell her boss (Giovanni Ribisi) about the money-printing healing properties of Na'vi medicine?

Because she is not an idiot, she is a scientist and she doesn't want to give more reasons for the company to try to harvest technology/resource/nature of the natives.

--- Why send in avatar ambassadors to negotiate and ''make friends'' with the Na'vi if you're just going to go ahead and bulldoze their forest anyway?

Because originally they wanted them to move peacefully. Holly fuck, did you actually watch the movie Hercules???

 

Any objection can be answered, the question is: can it be reasonably answered?

Look. I loved the movie. But that doesn't stop me from picking it apart!

~String

 

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