Avatar – Review # 2

                                        (WARNING: Ending Given Away)

          Living up to what I wrote in my first review, I don’t intend to fill up space just because it’s available, nor try to be bigger than this enormous work. My first viewing was in 2-D, so I could judge the picture’s merits without extra wow’s getting in the way. And now I’ve seen it again, in Imax 3-D.
          As a visual experience, the picture is beyond astounding; it is a near-miracle, the greatest pure visual experience in the history of cinema, and I’m confident in saying that without having seen every film that’s gone before. I flinched once from an object “coming” at me; another time I involuntarily reached out to touch something, I think a leaf, my mind put on hold by the film’s overpowering feel of reality. But more than that, these little instances of rationality’s surrender, was the overwhelming delight and awe at the bioluminescent beauty and lushness of this created world. And though I thought I’d be less interested in the story, having seen it just a few weeks back, I was even more gripped by it, the movie passing in what seemed an instant, and each scene taking on a sense of inevitability and forward momentum. This even included the (relatively) weakest part of the film, the battle at the end, which at times devolves into standard “action” cinema. I was too gripped to even resist this.
          And this second time around, I realized just how good and underrated the acting is, especially Zoe Saldana’s exquisite Neytiri, and the surprising depth in Sam Worthington’s ostensibly laid-back Jake.
          I’d say Cameron succeeded in whatever area he wanted to succeed at in this film. The area he didn’t succeed in is the area that doesn’t interest him– human depth psychology, and, overall, he shows disinterest in the human’s world (in fact, displays flat-out hatred of it). He expended so much energy to bring the Na-vi language to life, for instance– and not an atom of energy to bring the English of 150 years in the future to life: the language, the slang, is completely of the present; indeed, some of it is 1990’s. As are the clothes, the military etiquettes, etc.
          And in the end, what feeling does this amazing film leave us with? Awe at its execution, of course. But, as many have already written on the internet, a strange sense of depression as well. Our species is presented, with a few exceptions, as fundamentally insane, and monstrously evil. Demons, as some of the Na’vi declare. And generally shut off, by our fundamental nature, from a capacity for beauty and oneness. In the end, the Na’vi are saved  not through their own brave efforts, but by their God Eywa’s– against Neytiri’s understanding– taking sides against us. Even God, or a kind of pantheistic near-God, chooses to hate us. There were some cheers in the audience as the humans fell. We the monsters, yet the creators of this vision.