It took a while for me to get around to it, but I finally saw Avatar in 3-D. Everything I had heard or surmised about Avatar was true. The story was paper thin, the characters thinly drawn, there is a none too subtle liberal-humanist critique of imperialism that nonetheless has the distinct, almost overpowering odour of romantic primitivism, sentimental and not genuinely moving but on the other hand it is truly epic, the design of Pandora’s ecosystem is imaginatively realised and the 3-D technology makes that world living and breathing in a way that the bland, static planets of the Star Wars prequels were never able to capture.
Still, my overall assessment on this could have gone either way. I really hate the noble savage narrative and the oppositions that go with it (e.g. nature versus machine) but on the other hand I appreciated the attempt to give a non-theistic account of Pandora, along the lines of Solaris (it is worth remembering that Cameron was a producer of the 2002 Soderbergh adaptation). I was disappointed that although the Na’vi culture is quite intricate, they are represented as politically homogenous. Yes, there is the conflict between Tsu’Tey and Jake but that was pretty effortlessly smoothed over, even in terms of a genre film.
Look at me! Expecting political diversity in a genre film! Once I reach that point, I’m clearly quibbling, disappointed that the film is just a good film, not a masterpiece. Yeah Avatar is a good film, maybe even a great film but James Cameron is no Christopher Nolan or Martin Scorsese. Still, instead of looking at Avatar as a glass half empty maybe I should be thankful that it was James Cameron who directed the film and not an even more sentimental, sanctimonious and impotently liberal director like Steven Spielberg or a right-wing, militaristic douche like Michael Bay.
On the noble savage matter, my friend Jax made a fair point. Considering that the film’s target audience is 15 year olds in the age of a new wave of wars of imperialism isn’t the noble savage narrative better than the righteous war of colonisation (see Bad Boys 2)? Raising the indigenous peoples above the brutish civilised people doesn’t really escape the image of thought that got us into the colonial space in the first place, but I may be over thinking this a little.
I want to close with some tentative thoughts about the title of this post. 3-D technology as it was used in Avatar doesn’t bring us closer to human vision, I couldn’t escape the feeling while watching the film that it is realer than real. It is offering us an experience that is beyond our experience, not just in the content of the image but in the very intensity of the image. This is more than just an academic distinction. People and filmmakers get so caught up on using the cinema to reproduce human perception and vision when the real power of the cinema is to go beyond human perception. I would hate the potential of the 3D to be stifled by such constraints but I guess it is probably inevitable as long as the technology remains too expensive for more experimental filmmakers to work with it.
