I cracked on Scott Tortorice a bit in the
Invictus thread for being "right wing" and I don't normally have this reaction to films. I think it is great that movies can be used to highlight current social issues. Or past ones - the plight of the Tuskegee airmen, for example. The Holocaust. I don't even mind "heavy-handed" emotional overtones - i.e. the American flag in Saving Private Ryan used to bookend the movie. I'm a sucker for that stuff.
But Avatar is so ridiculously and obviously overblown, I was really embarrassed to be sitting in the theatre, and puzzled at the high reviews. But I shouldn't have been, since they came from what I perceive to be left-leaning writers.
I should note that in the last two days, I sat through Valkyrie three complete times - once on its own, and once for each commentary track; I've now experienced both commentaries at least twice. Valkyrie and Avatar are polar opposites; one is a historical thriller based on fact, the other a fictional fantasy piece. One is almost entirely CGI, the other had limited use of effects shots (every aircraft, for example, was real - a rarity in World War II movies today).
What struck me from the commentary track was that there was only one brief scene in which there was an obvious "villain-moment" in Valkyrie. Hitler wasn't the villain of the piece, either. The writers (who were incredibly knowledgeable and brilliant, which came through in their commentary) noted that there was no overt way to make Hitler look like a villain to anyone that didn't know that fact already. His speeches were almost always about prosperity and peace. He committed no overt acts. He never killed anyone personally. He didn't sign any orders, or visit death camps, or lead execution squads. And so in Valkyrie, you have a quality of which apparently Mr. Cameron is not possessed - subtlety. The only "mustachio-twirling" moment, as the writers called it, was when one of the signal sergeants in Berlin tells his officer he needs to make a choice who to support -Stauffenberg of the Wolf's Lair. He makes his choice to cut off communications from Stauffenberg - and the sergeant smiles. That's it. That's the moment of villainy.
Avatar, of course, has scenery chewing galore, or would have if not for the excellent actors. Stephen Lang is one of my favourites since seeing him in the Civil War movies, and he is certainly no over-actor. But the writing does him no great service, ditto Giovanni Ribisi, another familiar face from SPR.
My biggest beef with all these movies - and I may be channeling Scott here - is that Hollywood almost always dumps on religion because they don't understand it, up until the point it can serve a story in some hokey way. If some half-naked "savages" can be made into sympathetic characters, then religion suddenly becomes real, usually has some scientific grounds made to 'legitimize' it (in this one, it is electromagnetic impulses connecting the trees), and the people using technology are suddenly the stupid ones - who naturally have no religion of their own. I guess the Catholics, Jews and Muslims are stupid because they can't find a "scientific" basis for their religious beliefs. Like faith alone for its own sake is not good enough. According to Cameron, you have to be able to talk to the trees and cute animals, or else religion just doesn't cut it.
But I also don't understand the movies in which we're supposed to root for cultures who reject modernization; the message was so heavy handed it just made me angry more than anything. Connect the dots - technology bad, technology ruin Earth, therefore we need to root for blue people who prefer to live in trees and sleep in hammocks. Personally, I
like living in a house and having a computer, and watching TV, and a spring mattress, and a gas-fired furnace, and a car with internal combustion engine to take me interesting places, and going to the movies and watching far-fetched stuff that people like Cameron dream up. At least the 3D sequences were cool - at least, the indoor stuff; the outdoor sequences still don't seem right.
There might have been a good story in here somewhere if Cameron hadn't decided to beat us over the head with an environmental story, with bad guys with razor thin motivations, no ambiguity whatsoever. Ebert compared the movie to Star Wars and George Lucas; his comparison was to the impact the film will have; I think the real comparison is in how childish their writing is. All they need is for Stephen Lang to wear a black hood and a cape in the inevitable money-grabbing sequel.
Far more interesting themes would have been the notion that Stephen Lang was there to actually help the natives, not blindly murder and steal from them, or perhaps the notion that religion and faith are real and legitimate and meaningful without being able to 'prove' the existence of God through scientific means. Sometimes sworn enemies even believe in the same gods - talk about moral ambiguity. I can't buy into a notion that people who make multi-million dollar technology are always of necessity amoral idiots while people sleeping on rocks and eating raw hand-killed food are somehow geniuses with absolutely perfect moral centres. I guess that's why they call it fantasy. By the end, I was cheering for the guys in the helicopters, not because I approved of what they were doing, but because I wanted it to be over with that much more quickly.