this old anvil

Avatar is a long movie. The clichés and anachronisms emanating from the screen piled up so high and so fast they’d have constituted a safety hazard if we’d had to evacuate the theatre in a hurry. There’s the blood-&-guts commander (Stephen Lang) who makes Robert Duvall’s napalm-loving colonel in Apocalypse Now seem positively benign.  This massacre-minded Marine channels a character out of war movies stretching from To Hell and Back to Full Metal Jacket; and he echoes countless cavalry officers in who-knows-how-many winning-of-the-West epics – calling natives of the planet Pandora “hostiles!"

Then there’s the creaky, coincidence-ridden plot. A scientist slated to participate in a program in which humans, who cannot survive in Pandora’s atmosphere, have their minds linked with artificially created bodies of Na’vi, the planet’s natives who are twice as tall as us, suffers an untimely death. Luckily, there’s a twin brother (Sam Worthington), whose genome fits that of the avatar designed for the deceased.

The twin, a Marine veteran, takes the dangerous but well-paying job because he needs an expensive operation to regain use of his legs. Director James Cameron apparently shares my skepticism about current US foreign and domestic policy. The vet suffered his wounds in a war in Venezuela; and even a hundred years from now, we still don’t have free health care for all – not even for a vet!

In a particularly anachronistic scene, the project’s lead scientist (Sigourney Weaver) wakes from a session in suspended animation grumpily demanding her cigarettes – and gets them handed to her, proceeding to light up. Tell me it ain’t so: people of the future are still hooked on tobacco? And a high-tech lab doesn’t have the health and safety standards of a Dallas restaurant? Talk about dystopia!

 All the above was established in the first ten minutes, leaving me a little grumpy – and not about nicotine. But in the next thirty or so languid minutes, as I watched our hero explore Pandora and become accepted by its people, the absolutely stunning special effects and totally seamless story-telling lulled me into a state of suspended disbelief.

Old wine? Yes – when our hero finds his Na’vi love interest (Zoe Saldana) Brendan thought of Disney’s Pocahontas, which I had taken him to see when he was little. The gung-ho marine brought Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket to Nick’s mind: a movie I made him watch over five years ago as part of my unsuccessful campaign to stop his enlistment. 

But what a great new bottle! Cameron, who directed the first two Terminators and Titanic, is a master of coaxing full-bodied thrills from thin storylines. Don’t go see Avatar just for the spectacle of it (although it could be enjoyed just on that level). See it, and see how the presentation of the spectacle doesn’t simply excuse, but requires, re-telling a story, or stories, we know. 

Pandora is different – too different for someone like me to comprehend. Cliché and anachronism and creaky old plot devices disappear into resonance. And that allows me to identify with the too different Na’vi: blue-toned, feline-featured, El Greco-esque creatures, several removes from Rousseau’s Noble Savage. As the story develops, I anticipate – demand – it be told in my terms. Trust and love; conflict and betrayal; right and wrong; life and death: they all have to be there.

And in Avatar, just when it seems that the invaders will conquer and destroy this most beautiful planet…well, I don’t want to spoil the ending – I’ll just say they find themselves in a war against an entire world. At the end the audience didn’t cheer or clap the way I’ve witnessed at the finales of lesser epics. For my part I was too tired, and not just from the film’s two-and-a-half hour length. No, I’d been through an exhausting journey. It was the good kind of tired.