The Least Element

Fair warning - I am going to discuss plot elements of Avatar, including the ending.

Frankly, I don't see how it could matter to anyone's enjoyment of the movie, since the plot is a motor for the technological wizardry, rather than the other way around. In 335 BCE, Aristotle summarized the elements of drama: plot; character; thought (ideas); diction (language); song (music); and spectacle. He then stated, "the least of these is spectacle."

I'm not going to deny that the special effects in Avatar were extraordinary, or that James Cameron successfully moved performance capture technology that much further along toward perfection. Yes, the alien world of Pandora is beautifully rendered. It doesn't bother me that the story is one we've all seen before; there are many ways to retell a story, and addressing issues of occupation, war, and the rape of a planet for its natural resources is a worthwhile endeavor in any medium. It's not as though these issues are not still sadly relevant.

But I was bored through much of Avatar, and never fully engaged. I found myself thinking that I had been far more emotionally invested in Hiccup's first triumphant flight on Toothless in How To Train Your Dragon than I was when Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) first bonded with the banshee. The bond between boy and dragon was dramatically earned; the insta-bond via tentacles in Avatar is a narrative shortcut, and a cheat.

Indeed, Jake Sully's entire journey is a cheat - as near as I could tell, one of the floaty jellyfish-like creatures seemed to take a liking to him, so Zoe Saldana's Neytiri (rather easily) convinces her tribe to allow her to teach him the Na'vi way. Jake takes to it like a duck to water. We never get a sense that any of this is alien to him in any significant way. When the Really Bad Army Guy, played by Stephen Lang with absolutely no nuance or variety of inflection, asks Jake, "how does it feel to betray your race?" I thought it was actually a valid question. Not because the goals of the humans are in any way defensible, but because we never see Jake, or any of the few "good" humans, struggle at all with their choice to throw in their lot with an alien race on a planet with an environment that is poisonous to them.

That's not entirely true. We do see the regrettably underdeveloped Trudy, played by the always interesting Michelle Rodriguez, hesitate over whether to fire on the Na'vi home tree, before deciding to leave the battle. Inexplicably, she apparently suffers no repercussions from this blatant act of desertion, and is later able to facilitate the escape of Jake, Grace (Sigourney Weaver) and Norm (Joel Moore). This kind of sloppiness is typical of the movie in general.

In addition to the criminally bad dialogue - can James Cameron accept that he cannot write, and hire a decent screenwriter, please? - none of the characters are ever fully developed. It is unclear, for example, how deeply Grace has bonded with the Na'vi, until suddenly she is willing to lay down her life for them. Initially, Norm's excitement seemed purely academic - I was surprised that his dedication extended to fighting on the ground with the Na'vi. But then, the entire story is laid out in such basic strokes that we are simply expected to take it on faith that the good guys support the Na'vi and the bad guys are the ones who want to destroy the planet just like they destroyed Earth. And just in case we miss any of that, we have Jake's handy dandy ever-present narration to make sure we understand this supremely uncomplicated story. Which for all of its unnecessary detail never explains how the "few" humans who are permitted to stay on Pandora at the end would survive - or what their role would be under such circumstances.

Finally - that ending. Seriously? We are supposed to believe that humans would leave, never to return, because they lost one battle? Since the material they want is underground, I think it far more likely that they would return in full force with a scorched earth approach to the problem of the Na'vi and the rest of the inhospitable planet. But the last time James Cameron gave us a great ending was the first Terminator film - which in my opinion remains his best work.