Read only if you've seen it.

Not to be misunderstood, our generation's Cecil B. DeMille, working under the Canadian trucker's name James Cameron, carefully combines his five previous sci-fi arcs through the lenses of both The Matrix and the cgi Star Wars Trilogy and comes up with a blatant utopian-eden fantasy named Avatar, more or less a retake of The Abyss's central themes about ecology and technology, now staged across the galaxy (updated from Abyss' salt-water to non-breathable air for humans, a step-up on the movement ladder, but he keeps that bioluminescence vibrating anyway) on a planet not subtly named Pandora (talk about the wrong prophecy from earth mythos).

The most expensive (anti-war) film ever made is about an invasion of little green-obssessed men (us humans) onto a green planet populated by blue-giants, the star-affixed Na'vi who remain somewhat tethered to their planet and its creatures in a manner not unlike a bio-analog version of The Matrix's pulsing digital simulation (plugging into its earthwide broadcast signal). If you're blue, wrap your hair around a local plant and suddenly: who knows what might be under your tannenbaum. We know how wasted the film is when Cameron takes his best actor and has her undersell the miracle of Pandora to her superiors (hint: reweave Earth like this and you can save it and make the bucks). Sigourney Weaver's throwaway key monologue (a scene repeat from the much better Aliens) would have us comprehend the revolutionary aspects of Pandora's biome but it of course falls on deaf ears since the military-industrial complex that's paying for the project, a metaphor for the studio that footed the film's bill, is aiming for the exact same thing the planet achieves by plantlife digging holes and linking botanic and geologic molecular forms, except these military-business types use wiring and encryption and credit card access. People still gotta pay for this stuff to see it yet Pandora the planet is an open source biological wi-fi network waiting for genetic revolution. Is this open source's first massive metaphor? Cameron is so obsessed with the tech-aspects of his film, he shorts our comprehension of his biggest star, the sphere the film is set on. A somewhat 'thinking', living planet operating in unified time-fields, unlike our own Earthly disconnected networks of animal, plant and geosphere. Disney's Pandora, clearly the real name of this film, is a direct opposite to the Death Star. And absurdly, the Na'vi are as dumb as those troopers that inhabit the Death Star (they never use the tree to phone for help-never once try to ride 'the last shadow' themselves, its riding is the sort of legend equated with the discovery of 'The One" in The Matrix), they remain at a consciousness mezzanine within their planet's potential and Cameron suggests their game-changer (the awakener Sully) must be a specifically disabled outsider, with few preconceived notions of their world. The key to Sully is his lack of legs (not his skin color), which gives him an unconscious weightlessness neither the other avatars nor the Na'vi can experience flight through. Cameron shows you his atrophied legs as a taunt, they look pathetic, yet they render his Na'vi unique in many undiscussed ways. 

Earth by this time, 2154, is a dead planet (the film's first shot, travelling over rainforest, seems to be the only one of Earth). And humans, thinkers from the dead-planet, bring the usual suspect archetypes, a working class-hero - Sully, a tough as nails scientist (Grace Augustine, an unsubtle reference to the Christian thinker who wrote the autobiographical The Confessions, about a pleasure seeking sinner redeemed), a colonel with self-esteem issues, Cameron glosses over the usual set-up conflicts and goes right for the meat of the journey: whether or not these humans belong on Pandora's Eden. Like most films about the future it's actually about our past. His film is telling us, our way to eden is by reverse thinking to a near past, the moment we began our colonization and rape of the Americas; humans must become what they once were and change the outcome, even slyly hinting that we can reverse our invention as a reinvention.  His symbols are still operant, sometimes even vibrant (Pandora is first seen in an earth-made mirror, a vast field field of solar panels, an earth-like gem framed by a blue-hued Jupiter copy), the creatures that signify promise are Abyss's spindly bi-valves (they suggest the air in Pandora also has properties of water), the beds one accesses an Avatar through are green hued - a shout out to The Matrix) and the list goes on. The compression is impressive, Sully's got his Military father-figure (his speech to the troops is framed by a window that apes the USA's flag - only now in green), a dead twin (never seen), a Scientist Mother figure (that runs slightly Oedipal once she inhabits her Avatar), a harried corporate golf-pro (again, all humans), a rebellious sister-type played by Michelle Rodriguez (she slips out of the tree assault early like a spoiled child) and an entire array of Na'vi - Natives developed around a cauterized First Mother First Father First Daughter and the first heir (Cameron ejects complexity here, there is no threatening Uncle, the son-heir though contentious is easily impresssed, the real question is, why is he using Earth mythology to show-off an altogether different planetary consciouness - is he unconsciously lampooning it? is he making fun of his own projection?) their customs, and animal life that compete for screentime are the secret stars of the film with the orb itself: Pandora. He even blends the bioforms through a bilateral-symmetry that's more ordered than Earth's (connected- the Lucas inflence here is felt, except Cameron is linking the life forms AND the spaceships slightly different than what Star Wars does), Pandora's Nav'i have flattened noses that appear in other lifeforms, watch the flying creature's quick glance into the camera, it looks just like a Na'vi, a subtle mirror in staring. The unspoken visual elements are sometimes, enragingly brilliant: bioluminescent 'stars' they facially possess suggest, wildly, that the 'planet' (and the spirit of the planet Eyva) sees these stars and then projects them genetically (through time via nature, through genetic patterns that emerge through mating-sequencing across eons) into the individual Na'vi patterns. The planet is, however distant as a controlling force, still connected to these creatures, and weirdly, the Na'vi's consciousness disconnects them from the total system's possibilities- sound familiar? As chunky as the material is and as blatantly copied as the third act accomplishments are, his real feat is haunting the planet with a feasible anti-dote to the false simplicities of eco sci-fi. 

Cameron is best when he makes the process of discovery seem intuitive with deadly force (Jake Sully's Avatar Nav'i is told not to look his romantic interest's flying creature in the eyes and then later, as he approaches a herd of them to claim one for himself, he asks her how he will know which one to choose from, she tells him only then the proper choice will try to kill him first). Later on however the brutality of the Nav'i seems to run counterintuitive to the sacred treatment that counterintel agent-Sully's Nav'i avatar receives, when the humans start ripping the Nav'i's forest to shreds (a direct reference to Phantom Menace), they banter about whether Jake is to be trusted. Cameron slides from Flaherty brutalism to DeMilleian cheeseballery when the mood strikes him.  Similar logic-holes surround the half-completed premise of the sleep-wake cycle built into the Avatar program, and Cameron decides to milk it for laughs rather than complexly address what is a crucial, serialized disconnect: the inert Avatar host body 'sleeps' while his human inhabitor is awake.  Imagine what Cameron could have done with a Sully coitus interuptus scene between his Na'vi female and Grace Augustine (Weaver) trying to 'wake' him. Another source of plot-waste is the video-diary Grace forces him to perform, obviously a direct feed to their military and corporate handlers (is Cameron trying to make his audience paranoid of its e-social ties while making mother-figure Grace appear foolish? Cleverly he shows us a reverse of how the computer sees him with its data displayed for the corporate spying.). While aspects of utopian Bio-Genetic structuralism lure the audience with intensive and futurist group eco-therapy, the film seems more concerned plot-wise with our recent past colonizing the Americas and erasing form-connections between native image and knowledge, the Na'vi (Native-Avatars) are dead ringers for the harrassed, evacuated and now nearly erased Indians that now nickname our military's flying hardware. There are enough broken arrows aimed at bullet-proof glass to veer slightly into self parody. The American blockbuster ethos seems like a playground of Native-myths searching for a resurrection in our language (see esp. the Skywalker regime), the way west transformed into third-stage mythmaking (past the scrubby predecessor Europeans). Unfortunately like all unconscious colonizers, Cameron cannot go the extra mile, he's thinking like an American but acting like a King's subject (he's a substrate Lucas, a Kubrick disciple that went backwards), he can't seem to make new myths or new forms beyond those narratives of the early 20th century, he's simply refitting our catastrophe to theirs, he's blindingly conservative in his approach (that's the disconnect, the planet is sure damn weird but the play he's having performed on it is strictly routine), war is war to him, its outcome looks no different than an Iraqi War exodus of technocrats leaving the Green Zone (and they my friend, are doing what everyone does when the film is over, they're our mirror, we ALL have to leave Pandora behind), he still thinks innovation lies in the hybridization between 'freethinkers' like Sully and the static-continuity of local wisdom (a cheesy trope taken from James Fenimore Cooper or worse, Kipling); it's Sully after all who does what the Na'vi themselves did not know how to do: he calls in the biological ground and airstrike via the fiber-optic tree (he prays to the econet) AND conquers the forbidden legend and flame-painted 'last-shadow' (he has no fear of what the Nav'i fear), all within 25 minutes of screentime. And watch the menial back-and-forth, we think Sully can't decide if he's human or acting Na'vi as a ruse, but OF COURSE he's going native, Cameron thinks he can sustain tension based on this level of the plot, when really the conflict lay in the HOW, not the WHY of it, this is a common failure of recent blockbuster narratives, it's becoming a regressive genre faster than it can evolve, directors like Cameron haven't gotten scientific about how emotional the product has to be (the lack of proof is in the videogame: Cameron doesn't make the mediums foldable, he farms out a knock-off from Ubisoft simply because the economics require it - Cameron's alter-ego is really the steroided Colonel not the paripelegic Sully). He crassly uses ancient markers of film-sentimentalism to get us to well-up on cue (he engages James Horner for this unexotic task). Sully's not employing particularly earth-based innovations but Cameron wants us to think this, maybe he assumes the final, only worthwhile earth-export is 'thinking outside the box'. Cameron is still a masterful technician despite his considerable conservatism (the action sequences are more riveting than Lucas, the optical detailing, gaseous distortions, exhaust streams, and the machinery are staggering in execution, they are not to be missed; and follow-through: the final battle between his G.I. Joe colonel and Neytiri is a brilliant upgrade of Ripley's loader-assisted battle with the Queen Mother Alien). And his product is carefully visually crafted (he gets the scale shift between human and Na'vi dead-on, an inventive digital lens that captures forest floor alternating with a new eye-popping armageddon scale fluidly, a movie-first outside of Lucas and Spielberg, something Emmerich's Godzilla didn't, Spielberg's War of the Worlds did carefully, and Transformers does intermittently) though his storytelling isn't pantheonic anymore, or maybe it never was. The pairings between technology and bioform are crucial, the Na'vi's flying horses and the "last shadow" euqate with the two scales of airframes, Cameron even forms his cockpits as frozen rasterized versions of these creature's heads, and to square the point he applies a decal of a yellow dragon to the giant gunship of Quadritch's.  Some subtle techniques developed in 2-D (in early silents) remerge finally in the 3-D, when Sully and Neytiri are exploring their languages and the meaning of seeing early in the film, Cameron has her look at the audience for a second after she spends the majority of shot looking down at Sully, this is the first 3-D film to weave parallax and character's eyeframes carefully (he knows the medium's technique flourishes with audience-character eye-contact: imagine flashes of Donnie Darko in 3-D). Cameron's first two shots, a travelling shot over the forest canopy of, what is guessed is, a real image of earth's fauna and a screen filling cloud (a flash of memory for all of us and the only special effect-free shot in the film), and a zero-g close-up of beads of water merging under purple light (a sly SFX nightmare version of that natural cloud), indicates at-least that he's got the nuances in play, it has the feeling of being visionary. Is it visionary? Only at its petri stage, what Cameron could have grown as a narrative, not what happens here. In a film that continuously references the idea of seeing both in English and Nav'i (and unspoken: film's own visual definition), he ends the film with more than a nod to 2001, it's a direct copy, a now 'unified' Sully (unified by another tree) opens his eyes looking directly at the audience, if only for a split second. Cameron, who thinks he may be the heir to sci-fi's baton is just its current placeholder for the next visionary; the one film that seems to have evaded influencing Avatar is the only one that really mattered, Apocalypse Now.