Avatar is a new movie about a guy named Jake who gets to play the coolest video game in history. It's the kind a lot of us have dreamt about. You know, you're flying through this awesome terrain? The very first and last things you see in the movie (counting the credits) is Jake having that same dream. That's how you know it's important!
Jake has done bad things and been in bad places. He's seen action with the future-marines in future-Venezuela. He speaks knowingly of what it's like to have the blood of children on your hands. And he's been a paraplegic for a while, too. This is the future, so they could cure that, but Jake's health care doesn't cover it. You might say "But soldiers have government-provided healthcare! Letting down veterans of the future-Venezuelan conflict makes the future-eagles cry!" I'm not sure, but I think that these future-marines are either a trans-national mercenary company, or the "security arm" of a trans-national (and now trans-planetary!) minerals concern. So who knows what kind of cut-rate plan they gave him?
So anyway, Jake killed kids, and had his spine broken, and was too poor to fix it, and had to live like that for an unknown amount of time. It is safe to say that he has had more than a few nights where he wondered whether he should really be alive. But he doesn't kill himself, because he is a good marine, which is to say that he is constitutionally unsuited to make decisions for himself. Instead he suffers.
This is important. White people are, on the whole, pretty bad folks. The only way you can be a good white person is to have seen a genocide your culture has caused, and then sink into a pit of self-loathing as a result. If the movie you are in is an action movie, then you have to have participated in that genocide. It's just like in The Last Samurai.
Jake apparently didn't have any family at all, except for his twin, but smart and not-a-marine, brother, who died before the film starts. We see him rolled into a furnace in a cardboard box, fueling Jake's rise to stardom. James Cameron is there, telling Jake that his brother was going to be playing a video game for them, and it was really expensive to make, and they don't want to waste it, and Jake can play it if he wants, because DNA.
Jake dimly senses this is a chance to die without killing himself, or at least have his life not be the same lonely roll towards death day-in and day-out. Of course, he cannot admit to suicidal thoughts, because those would be weak! Jake hates to admit weakness - he doesn't let people help him into and out of his wheelchair - , perhaps because of a distant father-figure, or maybe his mother liked his smart brother. So he instead projects pathological fearlessness, and he accepts James Cameron's offer.
James Cameron sends Jake to another planet, called Foreign Place. Foreign Place is six years away from Earth (this is a clever reference: if parsecs can be a unit of time, then of course years can be a measure of distance). This is very far away, and very expensive to go to, but the Company (it has an acronym, but who are we kidding?) wants to go there, because it has a lot of a very rare mineral called Money buried in it.
This all takes place in the future, after Terminator 3 but before Aliens: there are spaceships and power armor, but still no robots. Which is a shame! They would come in real handy, because Foreign Place is pretty dangerous.
Foreign Place is the moon of a gas giant, like the forest moon of Endor. It's got lower gravity than earth (Money is very light) so all of the designs of the plants and animals are inspired by underwater species from earth, or by really big versions of species in James Cameron's backyard, or, in one case, by the works of Leonardo da Vinci.
The air is more dense there (Money counteracts the low gravity because Flux), but has less oxygen or something, because people can't breath it right. It's kinda like Total Recall, except it doesn't make your eyes stick out, you just pass out and die.
Most importantly, Foreign Place is full of a bunch of animals that really want to kill you. It's kinda like Skull Island in King Kong, except the animals aren't ancient and degenerate; they're actually quite active and full of life! They pursue their chosen careers with vim and vigor. Many of these careers are predatory, or at least threatening. They are all part of the super-awesome Foreign Place ecosystem.
I'll talk more about all this later, because the video game is pretty much all about this ecosystem stuff, but the most important part to know right now is that there are aliens on Foreign Place. But not like, all the animals and plants and whatever are aliens, these are actual aliens that can learn English and almost could be played by people in makeup, except they have three fingers (plus thumb) and are ten feet tall. They've also got tails, big eyes, long incisors (set in surprisingly clean teeth) and flat noses, so they're pretty much blue furless space-cat-people like Panthro in The Thundercats. Oh, except they all have long hair in braids (poor Panthro!).
The scientists aren't dumb: they know it's pretty awesome how a completely alien world also has DNA-based life, but it's totally crazy that some of the inhabitants would be humanoid. Parallel evolution has its limits! Almost all the other animals you see have six-limbs. I mean sure, you see a type of brachiator and two kinds of winged predators with four appendages, with the fore-arms splitting at the elbow, but what the hell kind of intermediary forms are those? Wouldn't the space-cat ancestors of the space-cat-people just have slightly smaller middle limbs? Wouldn't the space-cat-people themselves have tiny useless ones where their space-cat-breasts would be? And another thing: almost all the animals seem to have separate breathing spiracles on their chests, and a mouth only for feeding. But the cat people have one mouth on their heads for breathing and eating! To say nothing of a nose (not a given on this planet)!
They just figure it's kinda like how there were people in America but no apes: the space-cat-people evolved somewhere else and then spread all over Foreign Place. There's a hole in this theory, and a better answer, but I'll talk about it later. It is true, though, that they are spread out, so the space-cat-people that the Company is dealing with is only one tribe, that happens to live in a huge space-tree on top of a really big deposit of Money.
So since we have these DNA-based life-forms with astounding levels of similarity with human physiology who live on top of a mine of space-gelt, James Cameron had the totally obvious idea of making a video game where you control a hybrid body of human and space-cat-people called...dun dun dun dun...an avatar! They look just like the space-cat-people, except they have a normal number of fingers, and clothing (oh yeah, space-cat-people are basically naked %100 of the time). He got Sigourney Weaver to set it up in Foreign Place and to write what looks like a really long, really boring book about it, which no one reads, because really, Jake can't even walk in real life, but he skips the tutorial and figures out how to play it just fine.
Oh right, so Sigourney Weaver had a bunch of scientists to play the game, including Jake's brother (you remember he died), but now Jake shows up because DNA. There, now you are caught up.
Oh, by the way: if you ever dreamt of seeing Sigourney Weaver as a lithe, ten-foot-tall cat lady, buddy, have I got a film to fit your unusually specific requirements. Even Jake is impressed, and I think he got a lot of action back when he could feel below his waist.
So Jake starts playing the game, and it's really fun, because it lets him breath the air and be really tall, and run and jump and stuff; basically, forget all the problems in his life. At the beginning, it's just a platform action game, because he loses his gun in a cut-scene. Then he jumps off a waterfall to get away from a big predator thing that's after him, kinda like in The Predator, except that it's a space-tiger instead of a real Predator, and then he's spotted by a space-cat-lady who's gonna shoot him with her curare-tipped arrrows (said arrows,by the way, are so awesomely huge they stop being elvish and become metal as heck).
She knows about how scientist humans play the video game and run around studying stuff and building schools for the space-cat-people, but relations have soured between them recently, and the space-cat-people have been shooting their awesome arrows into the even more awesome bulldozers that the humans send out to dig for Money. Because really, you gotta respect the earth. So she figures she'll just shoot him, but the Jellyfish Fairies stop her.
Okay, this part's important. Since Foreign Place is right up next to it's system's gas giant, it's had way, way fewer meteoroid impacts and mass extinctions than Earth, which means that there's a lot more mutualism among the species that evolved there. In fact, there's so much mutualism that there's a standard appendage that almost all fauna on the planet have - a flexible sheath for a bundle of prehensile axon-like fibers - for interfacing with one another, and with the planet-wide neural network, James Cameron. It's kinda like Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri, but instead of just a bunch of angry psychic worms, it's a bunch of trees in the director's imagination. Because the space-cat-people have the biggest brains, they can connect to their mounts and tell them what to do. They can also jack in to James Cameron directly and tell him to grow homes and food, and listen to old songs from him, and the wisdom of their ancestors, because they can upload their brains to him when they die. He's like their Youtube, iTunes and Wikipedia combined, plus that other stuff, which I don't think there are websites for yet.
So, do you remember when I said the scientists' theory that the space-cat-people evolved on some other part of the planet and emigrated to the money tree was flawed? Well, it's obvious, right? If they suddenly showed up in this place where their mounts (six-legged horses) and flying mounts (radical pteranodon-things) were living, there's no way that they would go to the effort of domesticating them when they could just catch and eat them. It would be just like when people crossed the land-bridge to America and found acres of giant animals that didn't know humans could hunt the crap out of them. Sure, it would have been great if some ancient indian had said "megafaunum, it's true that you're made of meat, but I'm so full already from eating the rest of your herd, I wonder if I could teach you to carry my wigwam or something." That way when Europeans arrived, both cultures would have diseases to inflict on each other, and there'd apocalyptic population collapse in Europe and the survivors would start roaming the dispensing justice, or gathering in despotic city-states run by famous historical characters (if there are any Hollywood directors reading this, I have a great script for a movie about this).
And there wasn't some kind of natural barrier nearby that they could only cross with the help of their mounts. So obviously, they didn't evolve somewhere else, domesticate animals in a second place, and then move into their tree as a third place. It is a conundrum! But don't worry, the answer is coming soon, like a prize in the cereal box of my review, which I have to get back to now.
Anyway, the Jellyfish Fairies stop the princess (we find out later, she's the kid of the chief and the other lady chief), because James Cameron doesn't want Jake to get killed, because he knows that Jake is special. Some of the other reviewers of this movie are all like "Shuh, cuz he's white," but that's dumb. All the humans on the planet are white, except for one Indian (from India) scientist and Michelle Rodriguez. But only a few people are playing the avatar video game and actually walking around with the space-cat-people. Now you may say "Yeah, smarty pants well what about all the other genius peace-loving scientists that are trying to learn from one another and have a heart warming after-school wigwam special with the space-cat-people? How come James Cameron thinks that Jake the crippled child-killer is such a good bet for keeping alive?" The short answer is: he's a dumb marine who's had a terrible life that he wouldn't mind losing.
See, scientists have trained all their lives to discover stuff and publish it in papers, but they know that the other way to get famous (as a scientist, I mean, so I guess just to other scientists) is to find mistakes in papers. So they're always really afraid of someday writing or thinking something that other scientists won't like, or will mark them out as science-losers. They call this fear "objectivity," or sometimes "proper distance."
But Jake has no objectivity: he's honestly just happy to be playing the game, running around in a cool jungle and everything. When the natives are like, okay, learn our ways now, he's not gonna be all "Oh man, I have to video tape everything, but still respect the culture of the wigwam, but still make sure none of my science buddies will laugh at me for being dumb and un-sciencey." No way! Instead he's gonna be all "You guys live in trees and ride psychic pteranodons. That is the greatest thing. I think I had a dream about it once." James Cameron knows that if you give a guy with a crappy meaningless life an awesome action-packed life by comparison, that guy is gonna dive in, and then he's not going to want to give it up. Just look at how people still won't shut up about Terminator and Aliens.
So give James Cameron some credit: he's thinking ahead to when the humans are going to come after all the rest of the Money, and how they may mess up the ecology of Foreign Place just like how they did on future-Earth. Think about it: Jake is the first person playing the avatar game who actually knows stuff about how the Company's industrialized military works! He would make a great ally for inevitable war for survival (and he does, and it's totally sweet).
But wait (okay, I'm finally revealing the big secret), how is it that there are space-cat-people that we can make avatars with and who have a culture recognizably like those of hunter-gatherers on Earth? Duh! James Cameron made them evolve that way! He knew about humans (possibly using planet-telepathy) and that they would eventually show up on Foreign Place to take all his Money, so he made the space-cat-people to be awesome and naked all the time. Simple! Bet you feel silly for not guessing that.
So it's not like Jake is being The Prophesised One Who Will Bring Peace or anything: he's just being used by James Cameron! And really, that's a trend for Jake. When the space-cat-people listen to the Jellyfish Fairies - oh, I forgot to explain:: Jellyfish Fairies are exactly what they sound like - and let him chill in their tree and learn how they do their thing, Sigourney Weaver starts using him just so she can get back in the village and start studying their wigwams again. And also, Sam Worthington (who, in a movie full of flying mountains and six-legged space-tigers, might just be the coolest thing there is) is all like "Hey, while you're at the We're All The Same In Here Store, could you pick me up some Plans To Best Kill These Natives and Take their Land?" And Jake's all like "check and double check," because like I said, he's used to rolling with what comes, and lifting up his legs with his arms. I mean, he probably would have been happy to have one job, and now boom, he's got three. What a poor b-word.
Oh, and that's not all! So I said the space-cat-people listen to the James Cameron's will as conveyed by the Jellyfish Fairies, but what actually happens is the princess is all "Hey, this guy is an idiot, but he may be able to get us." And then her mom is all like "Really. Well, in that case, you should teach him everything about being one of us. This will require you to feel responsible for him, and for him to depend on you. You will spend almost all your time together, frequently in close physical proximity. Any romance that develops from this, especially one that allows us to have a strategic marriage with the tiny space-gibbon-people encroaching on our land, will of course be completely unexpected." So he gets used by the princess' mom too!
I should mention, the princess' mom is the priest of the tree-tribe, called "the Lorax," who interprets the will of James Cameron. She's played by Cch "I'm not sure how to write her first name" Pounder (what I said before about Sigourney Weaver as a space-cat-person goes double here). Oh, and I know I joked about Panthro before, but that was kinda insensitive, because just like with the Thundercats, some of the space-cat-people are black. I know I said they were all blue, but you can still tell, because the C.C.H. "Seriously, I'm not trying to be insulting, but it's always written in allcaps fonts in TV show credits" Pounder cat-person has an even broader nose than usual (it covers up parts of her eyes!) and also, when she takes over the tribe (long story, hard fight, just war), suddenly they're much less Native American (whooping, jumping around, shooting arrows) and much more Native African (singing, rhythmically swaying, marching en masse to murder the white people).
Okay, so Jake is hanging out with the space-cat-people, doing quests, levelling up. Eventually, he finishes the quest chain for the flying mount, and gets to finally be an official space-cat-person. Things are going great! He even gets to sleep with the princess, whose feelings match his own. They do it in one of the tribe's sacred areas. It's very tasteful. But when she wakes up the next day, she is thrown out of Eden because the bulldozers are there knocking all the trees down! Jake tries to stop them, because it never really occurred to him before that telling Sam Worthington about all this cool stuff about pteranodons could possibly have any negative consequences.
The space cat people are pissed. Jake tries to share his expertise on how to fight tanks and gunships with guerrilla warfare (mostly, "don't"), but they think he's full of it. They are non-industrial hunter gatherers, so as far as "war" goes, they are used to raids, threatening displays, and showing no fear. So they do that, and Sam Worthington is all like "easy money," and blows up their tree.
Things are bad for a while. Jake and Sigourney Weaver and another guy (oh man I forgot about him, well, whatever, there's a lot of people in this movie) are logged out of the game and thrown in a very clean jail, and they have to get rescued by Michelle Rodriguez, who flies them away to the mountains where they can start playing again.
Oh, that's right, Michelle Rodriguez (!!) is in this movie! She doesn't become a cat-person, but that is Okay in my book, I'll tell you that for free.
When Jake's logged in again, he knows that if he can't help the space-cat-people fight Sam Worthington, it's not worth living anymore. So he gets his epic-level flying mount (it's like the regular, but bigger and red) by doing something completely crazy with an utter disregard for his own life. He gets lucky. The princess says that not a lot of space-cat-people have ever managed to get one (they're called Toraks, I remember because it sounds like Turok, like Turok: Dinosaur Hunter which is funny because they are dinosaurs and Jake hunts them). But that's because Jake had nothing left to lose, and also he could think outside the box (the box is being sane).
I forgot, Jake is partly like this because he has lost his rock: Sigourney Weaver uploaded herself to the James Cameron hivemind earlier.
So now that the space-cat-people can see that Jake is really serious about helping them, and he says very politely "can I please join your war-party new chief (princess' father died) because I think I could help," then they let him come back, and he lets himself be used as a symbol for recruitment purposes, because Toraks are a big deal. So soon the get all the other two tribes to join them in a huge fight against the Company. Jake even prays to James Cameron, "yo, that lady you've got in there now can tell you that humans are a real big problem so you should probably send all the badass animals from your imagination to eat them," and he does!
Some people said about this part "OMG, how come Jake can do all this stuff that the space-cat-people can't do themselves?!" But as is obvious, Jake has expertise that he applies to the situation, and he helps them as a brother. It's not like he ever becomes Chief. That'd be ridiculous, and not like how these games always work: "Thanks a lot wandering hero for slaying the dragon and vanquishing the necromancer's horde and proving the mayor was a zombie and doing my laundry and delivering all those delicious meat pies, here's ten gold and plate boots you can't use." I'd accept your vote in the election for new mayor, dummy! But that's just how the world turns.
So up to this point, the game's been all action-explorer, kinda like Legend of Zelda with the occasional gun, but for this last sequence, it's a timed mass battle, almost like Dynasty Warriors but with spaceships and guns and dinosaurs. It's awesome. I won't spoil it; it's totally worth seeing.
Okay, I'll say this: I actually thought the future-marines were kinda lame, until they started gearing up and rolling out to put the kibosh on the space-cat-people's rebel alliance. And Sam Worthington, wow! He stays so cool under such pressure, he is joining Forest Whitaker in Panic Room and the Gruber Brothers from Die Hard for my Top 3 (Grubers count as one, as I see it) Movie Villains That Could Have Won And I'd Be Totally Okay With It.
In the very end, the princess has to save Jake's real body, which he's been neglecting. He hasn't shaved or showered, and of course he has those tiny little useless legs hanging down, and for a second you're sure that after having lived with him in the video game for so long, and having just killed Sam Worthington with huge arrows, she's gonna be repulsed just a little, or at least hesitate. But no, she recognizes him by his nature and tortured soul, and she cradles him in her enormous three-fingered hands, and she cries.
This is the point where I thought about how James Cameron forced Linda Hamilton to work out and learn how to dis- and re-assemble firearms blindfolded for Terminator 2. And then married her.
Empowered, amazonian women are great and sexy. No one should be ashamed of admitting that preference...unless it rings a little false, because you're a notorious multi-millionaire control freak. But then, we don't always let ourselves keep the things we want. It's kinda like the Sith in Star Wars: always two there are, an apprentice and a master, and a good apprentice has to grow and eventually kill his master, but he also has to do exactly what the master says all the time! It is a paradox, just like the paradox of the human heart.
I guess what I'm saying is, that was the moment when I realized I knew a little more about James Cameron than I really wanted to.
Anyway, then the movie's over, except that Jake records his final confessional, about how they force all the humans still alive to go back to Earth and never come back unless they figure out a cheap way to drop small asteroids on the planet and kill everything, and about how the Lorax told him a way to kill his real body and just live in the game as his avatar. It's kinda like The Matrix, except in reverse, or maybe inside-out.
It would have been nice to cut right there, but no, they have to reassure the babies in the audience: "don't worry, see, he woke up just fine, here's your bottle go back to sleep." I don't really think it's important whether he passed through the James Cameron network unscathed; what really matters is that he made the decision for himself, even if it was what anyone would choose. He found a way to live in a recurring dream where everything was beautiful, and everything means something, you'd do it, right?
I guess that's kinda why we go to movies in IMAX Digital Things-Fly-In-Your-Face 3D.
0 comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.