So, Avatar

[malsperanza]

I can't begin to count the ways I hate this movie.

I don't think I've hated a movie quite this much, or in quite this visceral way, since Schindler's List. It's not just bad; it's corrupt: dishonest at every level. It makes me feel soiled, in a peculiarly American way.

Sure, go see it for the 3D CGI and Teh Pretteh, which is all fairly groovy (and in spots very pretteh indeed), though in the end it adds absolutely nothing to the movie. IMAX is fun, 3D is fun, CGI is fun, yadda yadda.

In short: blech.

ETA: Some interesting discussion on BoingBoing: http://www.boingboing.net/2009/12/29/five-storytelling-ri.html

Comments

[idlerat.livejournal.com]

Me too. Except that I found it extremely ugly and shockingly devoid of wow, even in IMAX 3-D. One of the most boring, as well as icky, 3 hours I've ever spent.

[malsperanza.livejournal.com]

I mean, yeah, right? I liked all the flora and the giant trees and waterfalls and whatnot for a while, but it was endlessly repetitious and after a while seemed as bankrupt visually as morally. Though maybe I was hating on everything else so much that I can't give it even minimal tech credit, I dunno.

Among the things that made me ill was that the filmmakers clearly used archive footage from the Vietnam war to reproduce the way plants in a jungle landing zone flatten when a helicopter gunship lands through the tree canopy. How many kinds of obscene is that?

Not to mention the Natives with bones in their noses. Oh god, what a pukefest. I'm gobsmacked that this bullshit still flies. The nitwit in the NY Times review actually called it "Emersonian." I can only think she had Emerson Lake and Palmer in mind, because the alternative just makes me want to go up on the roof with an uzi.

[idlerat.livejournal.com]

I have a long rant on the awful coming to my journal later today.

As to Vietnam and the helicopters - not that this makes it better, but from the perspective of Hollywood, and for that matter America, Vietnam has long since become a movie. It was a bit of a movie to begin with, or TV show rather. And then the endless movies about it that are staples, classics, things everyone has seen again & again, models of American filmmaking from the 70s revolution on. It would hardly be necessary to look at actual footage, though I'm sure you're right that they did.

Loved the Book Arts shots, btw

[malsperanza.livejournal.com]

I'm only resisting the urge to write a full rant of my own by the fact that the article I linked to nails the movie so thoroughly. If you haven't read it, take a look--it's very well done.

OK, a mini-rant, just on the Vietnam thing. Not in response to you, since we're on the same page, but to try to clarify it for myself.

Maybe it's just that I'm particularly sensitized to Vietnam exploitation because I worked with VN vets for many years. The Hollywood nadir was when Rambo went back and won the war single-handed, reifying every white American fantasy of retroactive self-justification through violence.

As many have observed, Avatar is the same movie as Rambo, and Dances with Wolves, and innumerable Pocahontas flicks, and The Lone Ranger, and a long list of other surrogate-war movies in which America converts itself retrospectively from the perp to the savior, while still managing to reduce the people involved to props. What stunned me in Avatar was James Cameron's sheer blind arrogance. This movie is his vision; if ever there was an auteur flick, this is it. And so he turns out to be the poster child for American hubris. It's like a hydra's head; after every Vietnam we vow to have learned from our mistakes. And then the people who claim to have learned inflict the next wound. So I tremble for Obama in Afghanistan, recalling that it was Johnson the liberal who started Vietnam.

Lord knows there's been enough Hollywood exploitation of that miserable, wretched little war--that's certainly nothing new, but it's not exactly the thing I'm grossed out by in Avatar. I'm objecting to something more specific: the confluence of a white hegemonic war-savior message with a white hegemonic environmental message, so that the two mask each other's dishonesty. And the use of real, known misery and real, known culpability as the tools of a new effort to erase that reality, replacing it with a more palatable fantasy. (At least Rambo wasn't deliberately aimed at an audience of 10-year-olds.)

And that's why the citation of Vietnam stings here: if Avatar had actually meant what it purported to mean, it would have acknowledged the actual destruction of Vietnam rather than merely coopting it for decorative effect. Someday someone may make a fabulous, decorative, entertaining 3D blockbuster movie about the ravages of Agent Orange on the Vietnamese rain forests, and the generation of children born with birth defects and cancer because of it. (Not to mention whatever crap we're dumping on the poppy fields of Afghanistan today. Salt the earth, that no thing may in future grow there.)

Meanwhile, a cohort of Americans weaned on these movies (and similar video games) is sitting in bunkers in Colorado, directing drone strikes on Afghans and Pakistanis from the safety of a console. Avatar might have been trying to make an analogy between that reality and the corporate bunker directing the Avatars in the bush. But instead it displaces responsibility from government to Some Evil Corporation (the ever-convenient, generic enemy that replaced the USSR), and thus reminds them, and their bosses, that as long as we can rewrite the story later, we can continue to do and think exactly as our forebears did in 1800, when they wiped out the Indians.

Put in a nutshell: both literally and figuratively, Avatar replaces the mosquitoes, leaches, adders, and foot rot of the Vietnam rain forest with sparkly shiny floating flowers.

And the weirdest twist of all is that the Nameless Evil Corporation is actually running our latest war. Or rather, not nameless, but named in such a way as to be impossible to speak: Xe.

Leaving the theater after seeing Avatar, I stepped out into the splendid fantasmagoria of Times Square at 10:00 on a Saturday night, with a glittering rainfall lighting up the air like fireflies, and all around me the swirl of holiday revelers, and the hawkers selling late-night comedy shows and bus tours, and the signs touting Buy! Buy! Buy! while the news zippers reported on the latest terrorist attempt on an airplane, mixed with the sports scores. Blade Runner could not begin to match it.