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Avatar: Eco Fable on Steroids
Avatar, James Cameron's latest moviemaking extravaganza, is a romantic hymn to an anti-corporate, anti-colonial insurgency on a green planet, Pandora, that's about to be strip-mined for greed and profit.
It's set in a time when the same corporations have finished off all the mountaintops in West Virginia.
The story is a showdown between the denizens of Pandora - called the Na'vi, they have their own language and religion and odd animal species - aided by enlightened visitors from Earth, and the usual alliance of US companies and soldiers - what we like to call the military-industrial complex. Here it is the Resources Development Administration, or RDA.
Guess who wins? Yes, it's a Hollywood movie and the good guys win; in case you haven't figured that one out. The Na'vi and their friends, fighting with sticks-and-stones and the occasional machine gun and flying beast, turn back the corporations, folks like General Electric, who "bring good things to life."
Avatar is a motivational movie. Yet the well-meaning earnest eco-epic is a behemoth in itself, dazzling in its textures but heavy with the weight of ambition and techno-pretension. Watching it, I couldn't help thinking of the economist Joseph Stiglitz's characterization of the US misadventure in Iraq, the $3 trillion war. Not satisfied with being the king of the world, Cameron seems to have wanted to be the monarch of cinematic outer space. He's already spent a mega-budget trying to get himself crowned. Just wait for the Academy campaign.
And this planet, Pandora, is nothing if not Planet Hollywood - minus the obese customers. In thickly vegetated Pandora, everyone is not only naked, but thinner than thin, and tall, as if it had been populated by women beach volleyball players and their progeny.
Of course, there's trouble in paradise. An American expedition to extract the valuable anti-gravitational mineral, unobtainium, has some scientists in tow - sort of like the missionaries that trailed along various conquest troops on earth. Grace Augustine (Sigourney Weaver) is a committed researcher; Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) is a fighter in a wheelchair ("there's no such thing as an ex-marine"); Col. Miles Quaritch (Stephen Lang) is this film's Nazi, the firebrand commander who never met a place that he couldn't bomb back into the Stone Age.
There are so many allusions to everything here that you feel as if you're watching an anthology: Vietnam, Apocalypse Now, Iraq, Afghanistan, Mel Gibson. And to American cartoons. Does anyone remember the Rocky and Bullwinkle Show, in which the moose and flying squirrel fought Russian agents for control of a mine that belonged to Bullwinkle's uncle from which they extracted something called upsidaisium. What's the difference between that wonderfully clever Cold War satire and Avatar? A sense of humor.
Cameron has been on this project for 15 years, more years than the US has been in Iraq. It's long enough to build a movie cosmology with a clash of cultures at its core.
Avatar, literally a manifestation of a Hindu deity (ex. Buddha as a manifestation of the god Vishnu), is here a variation on the human form. The Americans have developed a machine that creates second Na'vi selves for humans, enabling them to breathe in the toxic Pandora atmosphere. Jake's avatar can walk, and finds himself in thick jungle, about to be torn about by wild dogs and drolling snarling beasts that could only have been created by a Hollywood studio. He's saved by Neytiri (Zoe Saldana) - did I mention that Walt Disney's Pocahantas was an influence? - and a friendship turns to romance, and turns then to an alliance against the usurpers of Na'vi territory.
Eventually we have an insurgency of nature against technology, complete with Jake and company riding winged dinosaurs into combat against fortress-sized helicopters and huge AMP suits that turn RDA soldiers into metal goliaths. Note that Goliath is the word here. Cameron is drawing on the Bible, too.
Note also that Jake and company have gone to the other side to fight a corporate mercenary force from earth. It's the militarized private sector, please. Think Blackwater. If it were Americans turning against their own military to support a local insurgency, Cameron would have a problematic case of treason to defend. It's particularly hard to defend when the US is fighting two real insurgencies in the energy-rich Middle East, where Eden once was.
Avatar's tale of a planet saved by sheer determination and guerrilla warfare brings another film to mind: Inglorious Basterds. In Tarantino's film, we're celebrating an approach to fighting the Nazis that we're told should have happened, although it didn't. In Avatar, the fable on steroids, we're given a sci-fi triumph over the attempted rape of another planet's environment.
The pulpy unreal wish fulfillment of Inglorious Basterds, set against the defining events of the 20th century, made you wonder, "if he's throwing away the historical facts, why doesn't he just do this on Mars?"
That's what James Cameron has done, except he calls it Pandora.
Pandora is a Fool's Paradise. So is cinema, especially when it's done this way.
Or could I be wrong? Is this just Little Big Horn, the prologue before the apocalypse? For that, you'll have to wait for Avatar II.
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