By Haley
Oh Avatar- the bloated idiot corpse of a franchise that never should have existed. But sadly, no matter the quality level of the first one, Avatar 2 is coming up your butt and around the corner soon whether you like it or not. So what better time to become familiarized with the original than before a pack of corporate d-bags starts ragging on you to watch the sequel.
Since this was my first time viewing Avatar, let's start with the good. It shouldn't take long as there is very little good here. Much of the beginning third of this movie is very pretty. Pandora, the blue alien supermodel world, is gorgeous. Even if you are 100% watching an animated cartoon for every second that Pandora is on the screen it is still very attractive. For instance, everything is bio-luminescent so the night scenes are lovely and dreamlike.
But these brief scenes are not enough to sit through the total run time of 2 hr 42 min. of otherwise racist, paternalistic, and insulting garbage that makes up the rest of this mess.
Because yes, it's super racist. I knew this going in- I warned my husband of it. He's sensitive to negative/stereotypical portrayals of Native Americans, so I knew that a movie that amounted to blue space indians was going to be tough for us both. But I had no idea.
The Native American connections are not even subtle in this movie at the onset (there's a dream-catcher in an early scene in the office of one of the EEEEEVIIIILLL dudes). Every stereotype about Native Americans is here: communicating directly with animals, being one with nature, magical spiritualism, the feathers/beads/braids bullshit. Blah blah blah. I guess I just didn't realize it would be handled so poorly, or maybe just so obviously. I noticed these things and thought, not one person said, "Hey, wait a minute, should we take a huge and varied amount of cultures and reduce them all to a handful of hackneyed stereotypes and then apply those stereotypes to our made up aliens that have fucking tails? Also, about that, it's cool to liken real living humans to animals right? No is ever offended by that anymore, right?". UGH.
So here is what you need to know for a basic overview of this movie, besides the overall racism. The writing is bad. Every plot point is easily guessable. If you think to yourself, "Oh no, they aren't setting this thing up to happen are they? That would be so racist and insulting!", the answer is yes, they are, and yes it will be. The movie is filled with rubbery CGI. The dialogue is stilted and unnatural and delivered poorly. It's way too long. It will make you sad and angry.
Now here is the basic plot. An evil corporation wants a mineral (not gonna even dignify its name here) located underneath the sacred tree house home of an alien people, the Pandorans. "Evil Corporation" is the bad guy, Pandorans, good guys. Evil Corporation has a science department that is running a special program. Sigourney Weaver co-stars as the head scientist of this avatar program. Her main character traits are being a scientist who likes to smoke around delicate scientific equipment (that's definitely a thing professional scientists do!) and being Sigourney Weaver.
The avatar program makes human/Pandoran clones (definitely some unexplored morality issues there) that are cloned from specially trained people in this avatar program. Those people then enter a machine that gives them a psychic link to their cloned hybrid allowing them to drive it around and experience things through its eyes. When the person leaves the machine and breaks the psychic link the avatar passes out/is asleep/dead/whatever.
So onto the other characters. First off, I have a problem with the evil corporation in this movie. Real villains don't act like these goons. These are comic book villains, not anything believable as true evil. And to me, that is much much less scary. The company trying to strip Pandora of its resources is evil with a capital E. They are of the nuance-less "muahahahaha" variety of evil, which is simplistic and dull.
They are represented by two main characters. The first is Giovanni Ribisi's character who at least has a motive for his brainless cackling evil: money. Then there's the army general in charge of security, who is a baffling villain in that he takes everything really, really personally. He's like the world's worst touchy boss but he has absolutely no motivation to be that way. He doesn't even seem to really be a part of the company or to have much of an interest in it. His only know motivation seems to be "I really really enjoy killing stuff and getting my feelings hurt by people I barely know".
The arguable main character is Jake Sully, a former marine who no longer has the use of his legs. He is in a wheelchair and we're supposed to feel sorry for him because of this. This character is played by an able bodied actor, Sam
It's very telling that they really play up the wheelchair aspect because the movie desperately doesn't want you to remember that every human we see in this movie is evil. They all work for the evil company and they all know what the companies goals are at the very beginning of the movie. It's spelled out in not unclear terms what those intentions are: to take the mineral they want from Pandora be it any means necessary. There is no plausible deniability here. Everyone is complicit and in my opinion Cameron wrote himself into a corner because of this: there is nothing, NOTHING, any of the human characters can ever do to redeem themselves in this movie. They all should have died at the end- they were all war criminals who actively participated in genocide. All of the human characters, no matter how hunky or sympathetic, should have died at the end to make this movie actually satisfying.
So the avatar program takes our bland white protagonist and put his mind in the body of his giant blue Pandoran avatar and then he weasels his way into the Pandoran tribe through Neytiri, the deeply stupid and gullible Pandoran female romantic lead. Side note: female Pandorans have breasts but no nipples. Males have nipples but no breasts. Misogyny is fucking stupid.
So here is what happens. They slowly falls in love and that magically gives Jake compassion towards the Pandorans. Because obviously one can only gain compassion towards a group of people if they are directly fucking one of them. Otherwise, mow 'em down. He dun care.
So this change of heart in Jake results in . . . what exactly? Nothing really. The Pandorans still get their big magic tree house knocked over so that the company can get the minerals. Hero guy does exactly jack-shit to stop this. (Am I only the only one who thought- hey, maybe this would be an appropriate time for a suicide bombing? Jake straps a bomb to his wheelchair, goes into the main area full of higher-ups where he's been before and blows all the top brass and himself to kingdom come. How would that not have been better? It also would have shaved like forty minutes off of this interminable run time.)
So basically, the Pandorans must flee their homes like refugees. We are told beforehand that if the company blows up their tree house that many will die, including children, so that is what happens it seems. It's an awful sequence. Misery porn. And since by that point the Pandorans know Jake the douche was a part of it they leave him behind. Meanwhile, back in his human body, he and the other science people are jailed for, I don't know . . . not being excited enough about killing alien children? So Michelle Rodriguez, who plays a cocky pilot, comes and busts them out and they steal some avatar machines and flee for the mountains.*
Now Jake, back in his avatar body, has to get back in the Pandoran's good graces- but how??
Earlier in the movie Neytiri shows him how to ride these bird/dragon creatures. It involves creating a permanent psychic bond with the creature. Our hero, who has no right to any of this culture or their customs, thinks he is perfectly entitled to bond with one of these creatures. So he does and later he and Neytiri are attacked by a bigger dragon/bird thing. After that, Neytiri tells him that only five people in the history of their tribe have ever successfully bonded with the big version of the bird/dragon monster.
Cut back to he just indirectly helped the company kill dozens of men, woman, and children. But you guuuyssss, how can he prove to the Pandorans that he is not the monster that he definitely is? How about a five second sequence where he tames one of the big bird/dragons. He just jumps on its back from above while riding his other bird/dragon. Duh, stupid natives, why didn't they think of that before? Then he crashes their wake and they are in awe and welcome him back, of course.
As awful as that was, next comes the part where I almost rage vomited. So by now they have welcomed him back into the tribe (because at this point, fuck it, Pandorans are dumb). But back in the human lab, Sigourney Weaver's character gets injured. Jake then brings her to the tribe (both her human body and her own avatar body) and they do a magic ceremony on her to try and save her by putting putting her spirit into her avatar body and letting her human body die (see where this is going?). It fails but this is still so gross.
First off, the Pandorans aren't in the dark at this point They know that Jake isn't a real Pandoran. And as for Sigourney's avatar, they threw her out once when she was acting as a missionary before the events of this movie, and again. she was chucked out with Jake after the tree house burned. So this ceremony is taking place after she has been thrown out twice, Jake once, and the Pandorans know they are both humans. Yet this scene takes place right after their home is blown up BY the humans!
So here is what we are asked to believe: that an entire village of people, who just lost many of their own people, including children and their chief, are going to stop their private mourning and do a sacred ceremony that involves all of them to save a human woman who they have mistrusted in the past and who they now 100% know is connected to the attack that just wiped out their home all because the OTHER human/known liar asked them to. BULL. SHIT. That's not turning the other cheek- that's some white people manifest destiny FANTASY BULLSHIT. I believe more that blue aliens exist than I do that a situation like this would ever, ever occur.
So after this scene it's final- Jake has become white savior Jesus. He addresses the tribespeople (not even bothering to attempt their own language anymore, making someone else translate) and says the Pandorans must fight the company. And since they have lost their homes, their possessions, their leaders, and their family units, all the Pandorans say, "Sure! Let's do it!".
So then there's a bunch of battles. Most of the Pandorans die. The crazy army general is killed and that is supposed to be satisfying. It's not.
Now, at this point, my husband and I had differing theories on how the movie was going to end. He just said they were going to take Jake and put him into his avatar body using their spirit magic. I agreed but I thought specifically that he was going to get mortally injured which would spur them to that action. I was wrong. There is no motivation. He gets put into the avatar Pandoran body permanently as a reward. For what, I don't know.
So there are two ideas that the movie apparently wants you to accept here in regards to the ending. One is the Christian idea that no matter how evil you are, no matter how many people, animals, or plants you destroy, no matter what level of damage you help to rain down upon a world, as long as you're sorry at the end of the day you not only deserve forgiveness, but to be rewarded. And second is the idea that it is acceptable to treat giving Jake a new body with legs that work as some sort of transcendent reward, meaning therefore that if working legs are a reward than non-working legs must be a punishment of some sort? Fuck that moralistic bullshit logic.
So overall it's a supremely unsatisfying ending. Especially given that we know the company will be back- the Pandorans only hurt this one mission and the company seems to have a lot of resources to send another crew over with. Second, this tribe, and the other tribes that helped, are even weaker now after the big battle, which didn't really go that well, tbh. So they will never be able to fend off another onslaught from the company. And third, Jake, who has been welcomed into the Pandoran tribe now as a full Pandoran, is still a person who actively helped the company gather the intelligence they needed to destroy Pandora, intelligence that is surely still going to be used by whatever next wave of assholes the company sends to get the ore. So he remains a huge security risk no matter how much he loves his new blue girlfriend.
My final thoughts on this train wreck of a movie can be summer up pretty quickly. This is anti-Star Trek sci-fi. This is dumb sci-fi. This is sci-fi that assumes every social/power structure that exists now will exist in the future. That nothing will change- that people won't become more responsible or compassionate, that as a society we won't learn from the past or let that knowledge better shape how we do things in the future. I don't believe that that is in the true spirit of sci-fi. Sci-fi is progressive, not at all like this anti-intellectual pessimistic clap trap. This is, for all its "revenge of the natives" style story arc a movie that most strongly identifies with the military and the corporation. James Cameron has seen the future and he has decided that they fucking win. Fuck him.
Fuck anyone who buys into the idea that humanity can't be better than that, that we are doomed to not only make the same mistakes again and again but that we will continue to churn out citizens who have no regard for the lives of others, no respect for life in general, or for the majesty of the world around them. Ultimately, for all the talk of the visuals showcased here this is an ugly, ugly little movie.
*This annoyed me. Rodriquez's character is shown refusing to attack the Pandorans during the tree house massacre and her machine gunner, who is super into it, is like "wtf?". You're telling me that he wouldn't have mentioned to anyone the second they went back to base that she turn-coated? Or that anyone else would have noticed her not attacking? Her character would have 100% been in jail too. Stupid.