What you see is what you get.

Avatar is as close to perfect as a movie gets – and certainly one that is oriented, by market forces, for a PG-13 release. Others will do a much better job assessing the movie’s many gifts to our culture (e.g., in terms of technique, it leaves the uncanny valley far, far behind) so I want to just note two things: its possible political impact and, quickly, its most jarring failure.

A few months ago I wondered if movie makers, having rendered so many visions of a mechanical / industrial future, would begin to: “realize a post-industrial reality, using CG to render green where there is currently steel.”

Avatar does. Incredibly.

Kids who grow up watching WALL-E and now Avatar are probably going to have an easier time imagining future scenarios that are not based on industrial-age values – i.e., the externalities that often don’t get considered when deciding whether or not to replace a complex ecosystem with a much simpler, and perhaps, doomed one.

brazil-before-after

(I’m not sure what role Star Wars played in global political culture during the 80s and 90s – the SDI missile defense plan, aside – given that its message of rebels versus empire had already played out in much of the world by the mid 1970s. Roger Ebert has called Avatar a welcome successor to that trilogy and I agree – a hundred times over.)

Earlier this year, I passed along this anecdote about the Iraqi insurgent who loved Titanic: “He recounted watching it seven times and crying every time at the ending, as Kate Winslet lets the dead Leonardo DiCaprio slip into the freezing North Atlantic.” Given Avatar’s complex politics – its celebration of both localism and “miscegenation” – I can’t begin to imagine how this movie will play out across the world.
 
Which is all the more reason to make note of one glaring shortcoming: the scenes of ritual prayer. Considering the sophisticated craftsmanship that went into imaging and populating the hybrid world of Avatar (familiar-alien, present-future, live-cg) the scenes in which the fictional Navi people are shown in prayer are corny and cliched. I don’t have the heart to research who is to blame for that oversight but they were clearly mismatched for the project – and if it was the director’s doing, he should have delegated. Taken out of context, they’re almost offensive.

postscript
Avatar’s environmental agenda is only one part of a broader satire. The plot pivots on a loaded bribe: a military official, acting on behalf of a corporation and its shareholders, offers a wounded veteran access to otherwise unaffordable health care. In exchange, the vet is asked to commit an act of betrayal.