michael murray

On Tuesday night I went to see James Cameron’s 3D film Avatar.

Like everybody else, I’d heard that it was the next great leap forward in movie making, and that the director had successfully created an intricate and nuanced world that existed wholly unto itself.

Everybody I spoke to seemed to have been gobsmacked by the experience.

Well, I can’t say that I much liked Avatar.

A number of criticisms of the movie are well known by now. For instance, the story is straightforward to the point of being simple-minded. Avatar is little more than a mash-up of Braveheart, Dance With Wolves, Lord of the Rings, Aliens etcetera etcetera…And of course, that ultimately this was once again a story about how white people rescued an indigenous population from colonial predation. (This is typical of Hollywood “message” movies, in which the self-satisfied and paternal voice of white liberalism delivers a stirring sermon on harmony and morality, when the reality is the closest they’ve come to penetrating an alien culture is their yoga class.)

But honestly, I don’t think that these criticisms are all that interesting, and surely, with Avatar, the medium is the message, right?

Yes, when they hand you special glasses to wear for a movie, you know it’s going to be a spectacle, or at the very least they’ve successfully predisposed you to the idea of spectacle, and let me tell you, I was a world of excited and keen.

However, I have to say that never once while watching Avatar did I have the sense that I was seeing something brand new. I could see the antecedents of the film in the 2005 remake of King Kong, and I just didn’t experience the great leap forward Avatar had promised. It was more of the same, just delivered with a little more attention and polish, and was really nothing new. For me, the animated Japanese classic Spirited Away (2000) was far more successful at constructing an evocative and utterly transfixing world. Avatar just sat there, and never once did I find myself slipping out of the theatre and into the landscape of the movie.

Essentially, Avatar is a filmic interpretation of a comic book. It’s flat and one-dimensional, with campy dialogue delivered without a trace of irony, and a belligerent and manipulative soundtrack (either mystic, Enya-like warbling, or the overwrought hysterics of Spielberg orchestration), to position the audience in whatever emotional stance we were supposed to assume. It lacks subtlety, allowing no room for ambiguity or complexity. We were told what to feel, and then commanded to feel it.

In the end, Avatar felt like a video game-- like watching a video game-- only in order to be taken seriously, Cameron removed all sense of fun and replaced it with a “message.” It made me wish I saw Piranha, the 3-D movie that was advertised in a string of trailers before Avatar began, in which “unstoppable killing machines acting blindly out of primeval impulse, hunt down anything that moves and strips it to the raw, bleeding bone,” instead.

When you put on 3-D glasses, you’re supposed to have fun.