Rest
All these years later I still chuckle at what a fucking moron that guy is.
As the movie Avatar came out 7 years ago spoilers in this text will not be marked or hidden.
First off, I think I should state that on a technical level, and as a movie, Avatar is pretty good. As far as film making goes, James Cameron did well. On a visual front, there's lots of interesting art with bright colors and adroit animation. The movie has well defined bad guys and good guys, all the characters are distinct and play unambiguous roles, and the movie explores reasonably original science fantasy ideas. Even when one examines the often misunderstood concept of pacing (which in most movies means "how much can I afford to cut out because a guy in a suit told me the runtime is too long?") the movie does very well; Even though as a whole I think the movie might have been too drawn out, on a moment to moment basis it never feels like it's taking too long for what it's trying to do. New events come along at a rate that's not so fast that you lose track of what's happening, but not so slow that you've already understood the point of a scene and are just waiting for it to end.
But, when you move past the point of view of observing moviemaking technique, and start to look at the story the movie is trying to tell, things start to fall apart.
The most important issue that this movie has, which is something that as a viewer you can't even see until quite a ways in, is that the storytellers have misattributed the status of hero to several characters. As a viewer, you're supposed to think that these people are there to save the day, but the reason for this is nothing other than that they are the protagonists. One of the reasons this happens, it seems, is that the storytellers failed to acknowledge to themselves what these characters are doing in the world, in the story, or why they are there, and this has happened in spite of the fact that two different characters in the story bluntly state those things.
The worst offending characters are these two:
Both of these characters work for a mining company as part of a division that was established to study and communicate with the locals. Within the first 30 minutes of the movie, the audience it told why they're there through conversations these characters have with their bosses: make the locals understand that mining operations are happening and are not going to be held up. Convince them not to interfere or stand in the way, make sure that they understand that if they do they will be removed, and that any that resist will be killed. Even though the film makers make this abundantly clear by stating it twice in two separate scenes, the viewer is expected to completely forget about this around forty minutes in.
The problem of these two protagonists being framed as heroes isn't immediately clear, but it starts to show at the point when a time limit (which is also stated twice) is coming to a close and neither of these characters has done anything at all to let the people they're there to talk with know that their land has been seized and they're expected to be gone. It is stated, literally said by a character, that these two are part of a diplomatic team meant to attain mineral deposits, but neither of them does the one thing that diplomats are supposed to do: send messages back and forth between groups of people. Not only do they not tell the locals that their land is going to be taken, they don't tell them why it's going to be taken or even that the people that they work for want it. On top of that, they don't tell the mining company that the locals are still in place or that they're not going to move (or, more importantly, that the locals have no idea the miners are moving in to do their job and, you know, mine.)
Next we have Giovanni Ribisi:
His character isn't really an important kind of character. He's just a corporate muckety muck, the guy the mining company sent in to head up the mining. His job description could be summed up this way:
Go to the planet with the magic rocks, dig up the magic rocks, ship them back to Earth.
While the character isn't really a nice guy, the storytellers want the viewer to believe that he's a bad guy because he's doing the job that he's paid to do there. If you've forgotten what that is (since the film makers expect you to) let me remind you: dig up magic rocks and send them back to Earth.
Now, one issue that he's run in to while trying to dig for magic rocks is that there's an indigenous population that doesn't get why he or his miners are digging holes in the ground and strapping the magic rocks they find to rockets and sending them away. The local populace is technologically primitive, so from their point of view there's no reason to be digging up magic rocks and sending them into space. When you add on that they have a religion that is highly reverent of the value of the lives of woodland creatures and plants, they get pissy when guys in space suits start cutting down trees, killing space dogs, and using high explosives to get at these magic rocks that they see no reason to even mess with. So, since they think these invaders are a bunch of disrespectful murderous assholes, they've developed a tendency to kill them on sight. Which brings us to our next character.
Much like mister muckey muck above, the storytellers want to frame this guy as a bad guy because he's doing the job he was hired to do. Now, since you've already forgotten what that is (because the writers etc.) let me remind you: When the miners are digging up magic rocks and strapping them to rockets, don't let the locals kill them. Since the people he's trying to protect the miners from are using lethal force, he's matching them in kind.
Now, for a moment we need to go back to mister muckety muck. He doesn't really give a flying fart about the locals, all he's there for is magic rocks and a paycheck. But, being a reasonable person, he doesn't want them to die if it's unnecessary. Life is valuable, even if you're a muckety muck. Since he doesn't want people to die needlessly (and the mercenaries that have been sent to pretect his miners are killing any natives they see) he decides to hire an anthopologist to reach out to the locals and get them them to
A) Stop killing miners
B) Vacate lands that have mineral deposits so that the miners don't scuffle with them
When he sends out the job notice he really hits paydirt when he stubles on Sigourney Weaver, because not only is she an anthropologist, she's also a genius bioligist, neurologist, electrophysicist and all around scientific polymath wonderkind. She gets on site and starts getting shit done: She learns the local language, develops incredible insight into the local culture, starts figuiring out crazy facts about the local flora and fauna and how they function, starts cataloging local life forms of all types, and sets up a whole science team to keep all of these facets of research progressing.
It must be that one day, when the issue of the actual job she's there to do (remember, since you're supposed to have forgotten: stop miners from getting killed, secure rich land) she suggested a Trojan Horse. With her skills in biology, neurology, and electro engineering, she has come up with an idea: splice the genes of the natives with those of capable members of her science team and create hybrid clones which can be controlled by the human side genetic donor through a neural-telepathic link. This would make diplomatic relations much easier, she says, because they wouln't have to deal with xenophobic reactions by the natives; these clones would look and sound just like them. Imagine how mister muckety muck must have reacted to this; he must have had spontaneos ejaculative orgasms until his genitals burst. "Fuck the cost" he must have said to the bigwigs, "we'll get these natives to stop attacking us and give up any land we want within a year!"
But when the movie starts it's obvious this hasn't worked. Not only have relations with the natives not improved, we're told that it's been several years (at least) since this program started, and Sigourney Weaver not only hasn't gotten the natives to stop attacking the miners, she's gotten herself barred from their lands. Now, the implication from the storytellers is that this is due to the miners aggressivly pushing onto the lands of the natives, and mercenaries killing natives indescriminately, but I don't think that's really the case.
One thing that's very clear throughout the movie is that during no part of the story that we directly see does Weaver or any member of her team make any attempt to communicate with the locals, tell them what the miners are going to do, or ask them to leave the miners alone. What's more, when she finds out that the mercenaries, tired of skirmishes with locals, have reached out the newest member of her team and asked him to do those things after he shows an uncanny ability to get along with the natives, she not only discourages him from doing them (which is his job,) she picks her whole team up and moves them to a different physical location so that corporate and the mercenaries have less influence over him. She doesn't even hide that that's why she's doing this, she says directly to this team member that she doesn't want her team being micromanaged by the other parts of the outfit.
In fact, any time we see her doing anything, it has to do with secondary and tertiary functions of her role there; she's always catalogging native wild life and running studies on it, never reaching out to the local people and trying to build relations. The only historical instance of her interacting with the locals has less to do with easing tensions with them and more with her own identity as an itellectual: in the past, she set up a school for the children of the nearest local tribe, something it seems that neither the company nor the natives asked her to do. It seems that her only real desire, her only driving motivation, is to do things which build up her reputation as a scientist. It seems like she wants to write papers and send back studies which make it look like she's a trailblazer in this new, exotic frontier, but anything that doesn't directly help her stroke her own anthropologist/ecologist boner is something she will not do.
So, when we look back on the idea that miners are carelessly stomping all over the natives important, holy, sacred, or even just heavily used places, and the mercenaries are blatantly murdering any natives they find to make room for the miners, I do have to ask if that would be the case if there was any communication going back and forth between the mining company and the locals. And since the person the company hired to communicate with the locals never does any communicating with the locals, it's impossible to know.
Next I'll discuss the Australian guy. I'd explain his origin, but it's insubstantial. He exists because the story needs a main protagonist, and that's his entire function. Anyway, after it's explained to him that the purpose of the team he's on is to keep open diplomatic channels with the local populace and improve relations with them, he goes out with the rest of the team and Sigourney Weaver makes sure they do absolutely no diplomacy. Blah blah blah, he gets separated andPocahontas Zoë Saldana stumbles upon him. She has snuck up on him, has an arrow knocked and is about to murder him for no reason whatsoever when some hippy bullshit happens and she changes her mind. Segue to more hippy bullshit and now she has to take him to meet her parents. What a meetcute!
Anyway, he gets back to the mining base, explains everything that happened, and this is when the mercenaries make their overture to him about actually getting done what Sigourney Weaver is supposed to have been doing but refuses to do. He says "hey, that's a great idea" and then proceeds to also refuse to communicate with the locals for no apparent reason.
I would like to go on about other issues the story has, but it would mostly amount to me transcribing large segments of the plot. The story really never gets past the fundamental issue that there are characters who could be making things better for everyone involved, but they just won't do it. Now, that's not a bad thing per se, if the filmmakers had taken a closer look at why those characters were making the decisions they were, and told the story in a more honest light and shown much of the bloodshed to be a result of the failures of a few people to fulfil the function they've been hired for. This could have been a really interesting, gritty look at the breakdown of relations between two societies that have recently met, set in a new, intersting scifan setting. But that's not the story they told; they took a common scenario and made a really cliched story out of it, while trying to push the blame for all the problems onto characters who are easy to villainize, but weren't actually the reason so much of what occured happened.
After the credits rolled, I couldn't shake the feeling that Sigourney Weaver and the Australian guy were the real villains of this movie. They kept acting like (and Weaver kept saying) that they had the interests of the Navi in mind, but they never gave the Navi any headsup about the mining company, and never advocated to the mining company on behalf of the Navi. When they knew (because once again they were litterally told) that the Navi would be displaced, and it would be violent and lethal if necessary, they never did anything to keep it from happening. They never asked for more time, they never searched for alternate solutions, they never warned the Navi that they should leave.
In fact, the Australian guy implores the Navi to fight back in one scene, to stand their ground using bows and arrows against enemies who have machine guns, airplanes, and bombs. What kind of person claims to care about a group of people, but tells them to fight a battle that they are technologically incapable of winning, knowing full well that the only outcome is that all of them would die? From that moment forward, I could only see the Australian guy as some kind of mustache twirling psychopath, hellbent on getting his supposed friends murdered while he watched. The only reason the Navi won that battle is because James Cameron very conveniently pulled a victory for them out of his ass.
First off, I think I should state that on a technical level, and as a movie, Avatar is pretty good. As far as film making goes, James Cameron did well. On a visual front, there's lots of interesting art with bright colors and adroit animation. The movie has well defined bad guys and good guys, all the characters are distinct and play unambiguous roles, and the movie explores reasonably original science fantasy ideas. Even when one examines the often misunderstood concept of pacing (which in most movies means "how much can I afford to cut out because a guy in a suit told me the runtime is too long?") the movie does very well; Even though as a whole I think the movie might have been too drawn out, on a moment to moment basis it never feels like it's taking too long for what it's trying to do. New events come along at a rate that's not so fast that you lose track of what's happening, but not so slow that you've already understood the point of a scene and are just waiting for it to end.
But, when you move past the point of view of observing moviemaking technique, and start to look at the story the movie is trying to tell, things start to fall apart.
The most important issue that this movie has, which is something that as a viewer you can't even see until quite a ways in, is that the storytellers have misattributed the status of hero to several characters. As a viewer, you're supposed to think that these people are there to save the day, but the reason for this is nothing other than that they are the protagonists. One of the reasons this happens, it seems, is that the storytellers failed to acknowledge to themselves what these characters are doing in the world, in the story, or why they are there, and this has happened in spite of the fact that two different characters in the story bluntly state those things.
The worst offending characters are these two:
Both of these characters work for a mining company as part of a division that was established to study and communicate with the locals. Within the first 30 minutes of the movie, the audience it told why they're there through conversations these characters have with their bosses: make the locals understand that mining operations are happening and are not going to be held up. Convince them not to interfere or stand in the way, make sure that they understand that if they do they will be removed, and that any that resist will be killed. Even though the film makers make this abundantly clear by stating it twice in two separate scenes, the viewer is expected to completely forget about this around forty minutes in.
The problem of these two protagonists being framed as heroes isn't immediately clear, but it starts to show at the point when a time limit (which is also stated twice) is coming to a close and neither of these characters has done anything at all to let the people they're there to talk with know that their land has been seized and they're expected to be gone. It is stated, literally said by a character, that these two are part of a diplomatic team meant to attain mineral deposits, but neither of them does the one thing that diplomats are supposed to do: send messages back and forth between groups of people. Not only do they not tell the locals that their land is going to be taken, they don't tell them why it's going to be taken or even that the people that they work for want it. On top of that, they don't tell the mining company that the locals are still in place or that they're not going to move (or, more importantly, that the locals have no idea the miners are moving in to do their job and, you know, mine.)
Next we have Giovanni Ribisi:
His character isn't really an important kind of character. He's just a corporate muckety muck, the guy the mining company sent in to head up the mining. His job description could be summed up this way:
Go to the planet with the magic rocks, dig up the magic rocks, ship them back to Earth.
While the character isn't really a nice guy, the storytellers want the viewer to believe that he's a bad guy because he's doing the job that he's paid to do there. If you've forgotten what that is (since the film makers expect you to) let me remind you: dig up magic rocks and send them back to Earth.
Now, one issue that he's run in to while trying to dig for magic rocks is that there's an indigenous population that doesn't get why he or his miners are digging holes in the ground and strapping the magic rocks they find to rockets and sending them away. The local populace is technologically primitive, so from their point of view there's no reason to be digging up magic rocks and sending them into space. When you add on that they have a religion that is highly reverent of the value of the lives of woodland creatures and plants, they get pissy when guys in space suits start cutting down trees, killing space dogs, and using high explosives to get at these magic rocks that they see no reason to even mess with. So, since they think these invaders are a bunch of disrespectful murderous assholes, they've developed a tendency to kill them on sight. Which brings us to our next character.
Now, if you're the kind of corporate stooge that's surpassed the level of muckety muck and moved on to being a bigwig (and you have dreams of becoming a fatcat,) you'll hear about the guys you've hired to dig up magic rocks (which you sell for lots and lots and lots of money) getting killed by locals and think "holy shit! My cashflow!" You don't want locals messing with your cashflow, and since they're doing that by killing your miners, you're going to want to protect your miners. So you hire scarface up there to head up a mercenary team to keep the locals from killing your miners.
Much like mister muckey muck above, the storytellers want to frame this guy as a bad guy because he's doing the job he was hired to do. Now, since you've already forgotten what that is (because the writers etc.) let me remind you: When the miners are digging up magic rocks and strapping them to rockets, don't let the locals kill them. Since the people he's trying to protect the miners from are using lethal force, he's matching them in kind.
Now, for a moment we need to go back to mister muckety muck. He doesn't really give a flying fart about the locals, all he's there for is magic rocks and a paycheck. But, being a reasonable person, he doesn't want them to die if it's unnecessary. Life is valuable, even if you're a muckety muck. Since he doesn't want people to die needlessly (and the mercenaries that have been sent to pretect his miners are killing any natives they see) he decides to hire an anthopologist to reach out to the locals and get them them to
A) Stop killing miners
B) Vacate lands that have mineral deposits so that the miners don't scuffle with them
When he sends out the job notice he really hits paydirt when he stubles on Sigourney Weaver, because not only is she an anthropologist, she's also a genius bioligist, neurologist, electrophysicist and all around scientific polymath wonderkind. She gets on site and starts getting shit done: She learns the local language, develops incredible insight into the local culture, starts figuiring out crazy facts about the local flora and fauna and how they function, starts cataloging local life forms of all types, and sets up a whole science team to keep all of these facets of research progressing.
It must be that one day, when the issue of the actual job she's there to do (remember, since you're supposed to have forgotten: stop miners from getting killed, secure rich land) she suggested a Trojan Horse. With her skills in biology, neurology, and electro engineering, she has come up with an idea: splice the genes of the natives with those of capable members of her science team and create hybrid clones which can be controlled by the human side genetic donor through a neural-telepathic link. This would make diplomatic relations much easier, she says, because they wouln't have to deal with xenophobic reactions by the natives; these clones would look and sound just like them. Imagine how mister muckety muck must have reacted to this; he must have had spontaneos ejaculative orgasms until his genitals burst. "Fuck the cost" he must have said to the bigwigs, "we'll get these natives to stop attacking us and give up any land we want within a year!"
But when the movie starts it's obvious this hasn't worked. Not only have relations with the natives not improved, we're told that it's been several years (at least) since this program started, and Sigourney Weaver not only hasn't gotten the natives to stop attacking the miners, she's gotten herself barred from their lands. Now, the implication from the storytellers is that this is due to the miners aggressivly pushing onto the lands of the natives, and mercenaries killing natives indescriminately, but I don't think that's really the case.
One thing that's very clear throughout the movie is that during no part of the story that we directly see does Weaver or any member of her team make any attempt to communicate with the locals, tell them what the miners are going to do, or ask them to leave the miners alone. What's more, when she finds out that the mercenaries, tired of skirmishes with locals, have reached out the newest member of her team and asked him to do those things after he shows an uncanny ability to get along with the natives, she not only discourages him from doing them (which is his job,) she picks her whole team up and moves them to a different physical location so that corporate and the mercenaries have less influence over him. She doesn't even hide that that's why she's doing this, she says directly to this team member that she doesn't want her team being micromanaged by the other parts of the outfit.
In fact, any time we see her doing anything, it has to do with secondary and tertiary functions of her role there; she's always catalogging native wild life and running studies on it, never reaching out to the local people and trying to build relations. The only historical instance of her interacting with the locals has less to do with easing tensions with them and more with her own identity as an itellectual: in the past, she set up a school for the children of the nearest local tribe, something it seems that neither the company nor the natives asked her to do. It seems that her only real desire, her only driving motivation, is to do things which build up her reputation as a scientist. It seems like she wants to write papers and send back studies which make it look like she's a trailblazer in this new, exotic frontier, but anything that doesn't directly help her stroke her own anthropologist/ecologist boner is something she will not do.
So, when we look back on the idea that miners are carelessly stomping all over the natives important, holy, sacred, or even just heavily used places, and the mercenaries are blatantly murdering any natives they find to make room for the miners, I do have to ask if that would be the case if there was any communication going back and forth between the mining company and the locals. And since the person the company hired to communicate with the locals never does any communicating with the locals, it's impossible to know.
Next I'll discuss the Australian guy. I'd explain his origin, but it's insubstantial. He exists because the story needs a main protagonist, and that's his entire function. Anyway, after it's explained to him that the purpose of the team he's on is to keep open diplomatic channels with the local populace and improve relations with them, he goes out with the rest of the team and Sigourney Weaver makes sure they do absolutely no diplomacy. Blah blah blah, he gets separated and
Anyway, he gets back to the mining base, explains everything that happened, and this is when the mercenaries make their overture to him about actually getting done what Sigourney Weaver is supposed to have been doing but refuses to do. He says "hey, that's a great idea" and then proceeds to also refuse to communicate with the locals for no apparent reason.
I would like to go on about other issues the story has, but it would mostly amount to me transcribing large segments of the plot. The story really never gets past the fundamental issue that there are characters who could be making things better for everyone involved, but they just won't do it. Now, that's not a bad thing per se, if the filmmakers had taken a closer look at why those characters were making the decisions they were, and told the story in a more honest light and shown much of the bloodshed to be a result of the failures of a few people to fulfil the function they've been hired for. This could have been a really interesting, gritty look at the breakdown of relations between two societies that have recently met, set in a new, intersting scifan setting. But that's not the story they told; they took a common scenario and made a really cliched story out of it, while trying to push the blame for all the problems onto characters who are easy to villainize, but weren't actually the reason so much of what occured happened.
After the credits rolled, I couldn't shake the feeling that Sigourney Weaver and the Australian guy were the real villains of this movie. They kept acting like (and Weaver kept saying) that they had the interests of the Navi in mind, but they never gave the Navi any headsup about the mining company, and never advocated to the mining company on behalf of the Navi. When they knew (because once again they were litterally told) that the Navi would be displaced, and it would be violent and lethal if necessary, they never did anything to keep it from happening. They never asked for more time, they never searched for alternate solutions, they never warned the Navi that they should leave.
In fact, the Australian guy implores the Navi to fight back in one scene, to stand their ground using bows and arrows against enemies who have machine guns, airplanes, and bombs. What kind of person claims to care about a group of people, but tells them to fight a battle that they are technologically incapable of winning, knowing full well that the only outcome is that all of them would die? From that moment forward, I could only see the Australian guy as some kind of mustache twirling psychopath, hellbent on getting his supposed friends murdered while he watched. The only reason the Navi won that battle is because James Cameron very conveniently pulled a victory for them out of his ass.
(One of the science fantasy elements of the world of this story is the ability of the natives to brain fuck each other, their magic horses, their flying magic horses, and dragon horses. This particular ass pull was achieved when the Australian guy brain fucked with a tree and told it that everybody was gonna die if all the animals didn't help with the battle. It was much stupider than it sounds, considering he didn't even know it would work.)
