by Roger Bourke White Jr., copyright December 2009
Avatar is a giant leap forward in visuals and a small step nowhere in story telling. It follows the widely honored entertainment policy of the 2000's of using impressive new visual delights to tell the same old stories.
Personally, I find this so frustrating as an entertainment consumer. But, I did go see the movie twice, and enjoyed it both times.
Avatar tells the tale of a group of humans dealing with a distant planet-size moon, Pandora, that is richly filled with life, but not quite human-compatible in atmosphere -- humans can walk around Pandora, but they need to wear breathing masks to do so. The humans we see on Pandora are a mix of scientists and soldiers. We don't see them, but presumably there are some miners there, too, because the only profit center talked about is mining a valuable mineral with the punny name of Unobtainium.
And, the story mapping is straight-forward: Pandoran natives = Plains Indians, Humans on the planet = cavalry, Unobtainum = Gold, Avatar story = Dances with Wolves story. The only slight twists on this mapping are that there are scientists on Pandora and they aren't happy to see the natives getting displaced by massacre, and the role of good cavalry guy who learns about the Indians and ultimately goes native is played by a soldier inhabiting an avatar that the scientists use to mix with the natives.
Ho hum... No... Worse than ho-hum! Such a waste!
First, a few technofiction flaws that I saw as I watched. Following that, a bit more editorializing on why telling the same stories with neat new graphics is so dominatingly popular this decade.
Now the flaws:
o Unobtainium, the mineral they are mining, is pure plot contrivance. There are, after all, only 92 common elements in the universe, and those same elements are available in every star system. Once you research the structure of an interesting material, such as Unobtainium, you send back a description of the material structure, not the material, and then make it elsewhere. I can't think of a space commerce system where hauling bulk raw materials from one star system to another is going to be a profitable way to use starships. Only if Unobtainium is magic fairy dust is it going to be valuable to haul it from one star system to another. This is because if humans have starships, they have already thoroughly colonized the Solar System, which means the energy crisis is no longer an issue and nanotechnology is well developed. When I say Unobtainium has to be magic fairy dust, I mean it literally.
o There are floating mountains on this planet, and The Company can't figure any way to make money on those? This is a world of wonder, and any half-awake company man would see that wonder is this world's product, not fairy dust. What's holding those mountains up? Who's researching that? If the company in this story was even half real, they would have Company Man Parker Selfridge's head on a platter for not exploiting the real values of this planet -- such as its real and virtual tourist trade. Unobtainium is penny ante compared to these other wonders.
These first two flaws alone undermine the whole premise for the good-bad conflict that is the heart of this story, and this is why this kind of story gets so old for me. It's unreal. It doesn't fit the situation.
Hey!
Story designing folks! Wake UP!
There are other stories in life besides good and bad with bad being evil corporations!
In the setting of Pandora this story structure is such a contrivance. <sigh>
o Dr. Augustine, lead scientist, declares that all these plants on Pandora are connected, as in, processing information. Now this has some interesting story possibility, but that possibility is quickly tossed. With all this processing power, the most notable things this planetary brain does is have animals join in the attack on the bad humans, and move a human conciousnesses permanently into an avatar body? That's it?
o Two thirds of the way through the movie, Neytiri, the native daughter, is shocked, shocked to learn that Jake Sully, the hero protagonist, is working with the humans! This is after she has worked closely with him for months, knows he sleeps in a most peculiar way, and after he hasn't been particularly sneaky about who he is?
o When the human mining machines are grinding down upon Jake's unconscious avatar, Neytiri isn't strong enough to simply pick it up and carry it somewhere else?
o If you control space above a planet's surface and you want to blow something up on the surface, why not just drop a meteor on what you want to blow up? Death from Above is cheap and fool-proof.
o Early in the movie Miles Quaritch, Security Chief, goes on about how dangerous Pandora is, but the way he describes it, the danger sounds as if it comes from being ignorant of native flora and fauna and getting ambushed in various ways. That's OK, but after that he just gets more and more hard-as-nails psycho. What's he doing running Security in a place like Pandora?
The story would have been richer if in that early monolog he had said that the humans on the planet were a small fish in a big pond, and that they had to tread carefully because if the tribes united they could wipe out the humans. This would have given us a setting more like the British as they took over India. Instead, we fall back on the Dances with Wolves contrivance of the heavy-handed civilized humans with overwhelming firepower getting beaten by native heroics and trickery.
When the shooting starts, the story consistency is the first casualty, so I won't bother to outline anything about the second half.
Now, on to why did this movie come out this way?
Why is there this strong relation in movies and computer games that says, "The more gee-whiz the visual effects, the more ho-hum the story line."? This is an oddity. When you add gee-whiz effects to computers, and other tools that help humans, the result is many new and surprising ways to use the tools. Yes, you can do the same old things with the new gee-whiz stuff, but if that's all you do with it, it's sure a waste of gee-whizness.
I suspect there are two reasons: the first reason is the limited processing power of human brains -- if too much strange is going on, a viewer will get only part of the picture. This is why eyewitnesses can often misinterpret what they see if what they are looking at is unexpected and strange. So if the visuals are strange, and the story is strange, viewers are going to miss so much they will get confused and uncomfortable.
The second reason is financial risk. The producers put up lots of money to make big budget films, so they view anything but a sure-thing story as adding too much risk.
That's my guess as to the reason for this phenomenon. Still... <sigh> ...what a waste of gee-whizness!
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