The Wizard
www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2010/
Avatar
a film directed by James Cameron
"But of course, when you see Avatar, what overwhelms you is what the technology accomplishes—not only the battles and robots, to be fair, but all the other marvelous stuff, the often overwhelmingly beautiful images of a place that exists somewhere over the rainbow. "
All this would be well and good enough, in its ecofable, Pocahontas -esque way, but for the fact that Cameron is the wrong man to be making a film celebrating the virtues of pre- technological societies. As, indeed, he has no intention of doing here. For as the admiring scientists—led by a chain-smoking, tough-talking woman called Grace Augustine, played by Sigourney Weaver (the chain-smoking is an in-joke: Ripley had the same bad habit)—protest to the trigger-happy Marines, Na’vi civilization is in fact technologically sophisticated: by means of a pistil-tipped appendage, wittily described by Crain as a kind of USB cable, which plugs into similar appendages on both plants and animals, they can commune not only with other creatures but with what constitutes a planet-wide version of a technology with which we today are very preoccupied. “Don’t you get it?” an exasperated Dr. Augustine shouts at the corporate and military yahoos who clearly intend to blow all the Na’vi to kingdom come. “It’s a network—a global network!”
In its confused treatment of that favorite Cameron preoccupation—the relationship between the natural and the technological worlds—the film, for all its richly imagined and dazzlingly depicted beauties, runs into deep and revealing trouble. As we know by now, Cameron’s real attraction, as a writer and a director, has always been for the technologies that turn humans into superhumans. However “primitive” they have seemed to some critics, the Na’vi—with their uniformly superb, sleekly blue-gleaming physiques, their weirdly infallible surefootedness, their organic connector cables, their ability to upload and download consciousness itself—are the ultimate expression of his career-long striving to make flesh mechanical. The problem here is not a patronizingly clichéd representation of an ostensibly primitive people; the problem is the movie’s intellectually incoherent portrayal of its fictional heroes as both admirably precivilized and admirably hypercivilized, as atechnological and highly technologized. Avatar ‘s desire to have its anthropological cake and eat it too suggests something deeply unself-aware and disturbingly unresolved within Cameron himself.
And how not? He is, after all, a Hollywood giant who insists on seeing himself as a regular Joe—a man with what he called, in the New Yorker interview, a “blue-collar sensibility”; more to the point, he is a director whose hugely successful mass entertainments cost hundreds of millions of dollars obligingly provided by deep-pocketed corporations—a “company” man, whether he knows it or not. And these shows depend for their effects—none more than Avatar—on the most sophisticated technologies available, even as that director tells himself that the technology that is the sine qua non of his technique isn’t as important as people think; that, in fact, what makes Avatar special is the “human interest” story, particularly the love story between Jake and Neytiri:
Too much is being said about the technology of this film. Quite frankly, I don’t give a rat’s ass how a film is made. It’s an emotional story. It’s a love story. They’re not expecting that. The sci-fi/fantasy fans see the trailer and they think, Cool—battles, robots. What you really need to get to is, Oh, it’s that [a love story], too.
MY COMMENTS***************************************************************
Of course I did note the "aggressor verses the natives" plotline, which we all have seen many times before. But the writes Mendelsohn also mentions how critics brought up things such as that, rather than bring up the special effects, the technology and many more images and underlying elements of James Cameron films.
One of the underlying features was a man wanting or becoming like a machine aspect which was brought up. This I did not see or think about, even though in "Terminator 2" it was brought up. The young John Connor emulating the cyborg that protects him was something I thought was cute but did not see into it. Being a science fiction fan, I took that at face value and did not look into it other than being the back plot to the main storyline.
There are always scenes or scripts written that deal with a variety of issues in movies and books. That is a given. I need to pay more attention to why it is being done, and what meaning these things have in our society, in my life, and its meaning in general.. Of course, I am there to enjoys the movie as well. So I must check things out a little more before leaving the theatre. It is always good to learn a little something.
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