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2010-03-09 issue:

Review: Avatar lays groundwork for peaceful solutions

A reader reviews James Cameron's latest film

by Allan Rempel

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Avatar is the latest movie from James Cameron, who has made a career out of pushing the envelope in terms of the use of technology in film and the meticulous craftsmanship of the virtual worlds that the characters in his films inhabit.

His previous films such as The Abyss, Terminator 2 and Titanic, show the evolution of the different components of his craft in the areas of technology, storytelling, and attention to detail, respectively. And the film industry has rewarded him for his efforts, in part because his films have come to enjoy huge popularity. Avatar (mostly) brings together these components and is Cameron's best film thus far.

Avatar is a magnificent achievement in terms of the creation and enjoyment of a rich visual world and the suspension of disbelief (of which there is much to suspend in this movie). The planet Pandora is gloriously lush and colourful and exquisitely detailed, and considerable screen time is spent soaking up the ambience and watching the natural activities of its inhabitants. Equally detailed is the world of the humans who arrive there. The computer displays in the aircraft are visually rich and imaginative and may (as has often been the case in previous sci-fi movies) inspire innovations in computer interface technology in our own world. Screen time is also spent on other aircraft details like removing air intake covers before flight, and on human details like the daily realities of life for the main character who is confined to a wheelchair.

At the half-way point, I was satisfied that I was probably watching the very best film of the year. Unfortunately, that is approximately the point at which the script writers ran out of steam and became satisfied with writing a more cliched more ordinary movie. The simple-minded jingoism and preachiness that begins the second half of the movie, coupled with development of the characters into one-dimensional caricatures, is indicative of the Hollywood cliches that dominate much of the second half of the movie. However, even those episodes were still interspersed with new scenes which continued to bring fresh life into the story and refreshed my willing immersion into Cameron's universe.

For its technology, this is nothing less than a landmark in the history of cinema. Having worked on computer animation for both feature films and television, I'm particularly interested in new visual storytelling methods, and the animation in Avatar is a quantum leap beyond anything that has come before. The faces of the humanoid characters seem absolutely real; not just real in a grotesque way like Gollum in Lord of the Rings, but real in a human way. Similarly, the movement of the characters (e.g. walking and other limb movement) has a natural level of realism that vastly exceeds any motion capture animation I have previously seen. Even the faces strongly resemble the actors voicing them, particularly stunningly so for Sigourney Weaver's character. This is not uncommon in conventional 2D Disney-style animation, but I have never seen it done this well in 3D computer animation.

One potential problem with any film like Avatar is the "uncanny valley" concept which suggests that the more human-like you make your artificial character, the more positively people will respond to it, up to a point that is close to but not quite human, at which point the character becomes creepy or evokes horror; and it takes a great deal of additional effort to climb back up out of this valley and achieve a positive response. The previous state of the art in human-looking computer-generated characters in film was Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, which achieved many moments of complete human believability, but also had many uncanny valley moments. Avatar pushes that state of the art forward dramatically, and climbs completely out of the uncanny valley.

What can we say about this film from a Mennonite perspective? Ironically, this film shows a tragic failure of the scriptwriting imagination, in that ordinary violence and military strength are once again seen as the solutions to a problem. This is tragic because so much of the film lays groundwork to suggest that peaceful resolutions are possible and that there is strength to be found in non-military endeavours, but the script shoehorns its characters into one-dimensionality after it has constructed them so richly and with so much complexity. It is ironic in that this film which is so imaginative in so many ways fails to be so in the one most important area of any film-story. However, the tension between the groundwork for peaceful resolution and the use of violence can be a good starting point for fruitful discussion.

From a more general Christian perspective, there is also a great deal of value in this movie. So much of modern secular society is dismissive of the impact that faith can have in our lives, and it is refreshing to see faith, even an alien faith, shown in a constructive and meaningful light. As people of faith, what unites us is more important than what divides us, and sometimes seeing the commitment and meaning that others find in their faiths can help us find commitment and meaning in our own.

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