{"id":1245,"date":"2009-12-21T20:00:41","date_gmt":"2009-12-22T01:00:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.starshipnivan.com\/blog\/?p=1245"},"modified":"2014-06-20T01:11:28","modified_gmt":"2014-06-20T05:11:28","slug":"jar-jar-binks-meets-pocahontas","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/starshipnivan.com\/blog\/?p=1245","title":{"rendered":"Cameron’s Avatar: Jar Jar Binks Meets Pocahontas"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201c\u2026full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

\u2013 Shakespeare, MacBeth<\/em>, Act V, Scene V<\/p>\n

\"SarahJames Cameron made two films that are high on my list of favorites: Terminator 2<\/em> and Aliens<\/em> \u2013 not least because powerful women are central to the stories (even though he gave them the most conservative and clich\u00e9d motivation for heroism: maternal protectiveness).\u00a0 He was a taut, visually inventive storyteller once.\u00a0 But all his films after The Abyss<\/em> increasingly resemble the Hindenburg: bloated, self-indulgent, lacking originality and subtlety in all but F\/X.<\/p>\n

The latest iteration, Avatar<\/em>, is the culmination of these traits and a poster boy of the industry\u2019s tendency to let CGI spectacle be the sole concern.\u00a0 A quarter of a billion dollars went into the film, the GNP of a small country, yet they couldn\u2019t pay a decent SF writer a paltry sum to give even a whiff of freshness to the story. The characters are stale broad stereotypes, the plot reheated canned slurry, the dialogue rusty nails scratching a cement slab. The borrowings are endless, starting with the ersatz Campbellian mythology that failed so abysmally<\/a> to add resonance to Star Wars<\/em>.\u00a0 But the definitive stamp of hackery is that many elements are frank rip-offs of older Cameron creations.\u00a0 The vaunted 3-D effects are devoid of unique payoff and the Pandoran life forms look like shiny hood ornaments.<\/p>\n

The worldbuilding is equally shoddy.\u00a0 As I said in SF Goes McDonald\u2019s<\/em><\/a>, scientific accuracy is not crucial in SF.\u00a0 However, consistency and informed imagination are.\u00a0 A moon as close to a gas giant as Pandora is would be awash in radiation and wracked by earthquakes and volcanoes like Jupiter’s Io.\u00a0 Also, its independent biogenesis would give rise to life forms that would not remotely resemble us.\u00a0 But let\u2019s concede that point for the sake of audience identification.\u00a0 Since all Pandoran animals are six-limbed and four-eyed, the Na\u2019vi would share these evolutionary attributes.\u00a0 This would actually make them far more interesting.<\/p>\n

\"oceancover\"The clunky clich\u00e9s and logic gaps of Avatar<\/em> are wince-inducing even if you accept the film\u2019s premises.\u00a0 Here’s a species that’s essentially the “neocortex” of a sentient planet \u2013 yet they have… nuclear families and hereditary chiefs.\u00a0 The conceptualizations of the avatars and of the Na\u2019vi neural links to the Pandoran flora and fauna are too silly to dissect.\u00a0 If the link worked as advertised, they wouldn\u2019t need to hunt (or, conversely, killing an animal would have concrete physiological repercussions).\u00a0 I discussed mind uploading in Ghost in the Shell<\/a><\/em>. If you want to see a linked, communing ecosphere done right, read Joan Slonczewski\u2019s A Door into Ocean<\/em><\/a> or follow Odo’s individuation struggles in Deep Space 9<\/em><\/a>. And if you want action with stunning animation, elegiac depth and heartbreaking stakes<\/a>, watch Hayao Miyazaki’s Mononoke Hime<\/a><\/em>.<\/p>\n

The Na’vi are sexed-up Ewoks and Pandora is a prelapsarian Eden where they can live dilemma-free with Stone Age technology.\u00a0 Yet like all Others, they\u2019re helpless until a White Alpha Male steps down literally from on high to rally them to battle, while in turn they enable him to reconnect with his inner Mother Earth anima.\u00a0 Soft-focus imperialism and New Age fuzziness mix queasily with post-genocidal sentimentality about Noble Savages — a pernicious mindset that I described in And Ain\u2019t I a Human?<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

It\u2019s bad enough that films since the maturation of F\/X have been aimed at 15-year-old boys.\u00a0 Far worse is the fact that the most lavish Hollywood films have been made by their directors\u2019 15-year-old inner boys \u2013 tightly conjoined with plans for lunch boxes and video games whose complexity far exceeds that of the films.\u00a0 Welcome to Infantileland, where crudity, banality and sloppiness rule, where clouds of sycophants allow directors to call themselves Emperor of the Universe or Master Jedi without a trace of irony.\u00a0 In one of my visions of hell, I\u2019m forced to endlessly watch Lucas\u2019 Star Wars<\/em> (except, perhaps, episode V), Jackson\u2019s King Kong<\/em>, all of Spielberg\u2019s SF\/F and Cameron\u2019s Avatar.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"Q'OriankaThere\u2019s nothing wrong with adults enjoying Disney-level spectacle, as long as they don\u2019t make it their moral, intellectual or esthetic measuring stick.\u00a0 An artist with Cameron’s credibility and clout should undertake real challenges that inspire our innate desire to explore instead of recycling militaristic violence porn and preachy feel-good platitudes.\u00a0 He did it incredibly well before, he can do it again.\u00a0 And some childish dreams should remain dreams.\u00a0 They work far better as beckoning beacons.<\/p>\n

Images:<\/em> top, Linda Hamilton as Sarah Connor in James Cameron’s Terminator 2<\/em>; middle, David Switzer’s cover for Joan Slonczewski’s A Door into Ocean<\/em>; bottom, Q’Orianka Kilcher as Pocahontas in Terence Malick’s New World<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Update:<\/strong> The Huffington Post just re-printed<\/a> this article. I’m donning my asbestos space suit!<\/p>\n

Related articles:<\/strong>
\nLab Rat Cinema: Monetizing the Rat Brain<\/a>
\nThe Andreadis Unibrow Theory of Art<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201c\u2026full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.\u201d \u2013 Shakespeare, MacBeth, Act V, Scene V James Cameron made two films that are high on my list of favorites: Terminator 2 and Aliens \u2013 not least because powerful women are central to the stories (even though he gave them the most conservative and clich\u00e9d motivation for heroism: […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,10,13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1245","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-biology-and-culture","category-science","category-science-fiction"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/starshipnivan.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1245","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/starshipnivan.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/starshipnivan.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starshipnivan.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starshipnivan.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1245"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/starshipnivan.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1245\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/starshipnivan.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1245"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starshipnivan.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1245"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starshipnivan.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1245"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}