Can blue men sing the whites?

Yes, like three-quarters of the rest of the human population, I went to see Avatar a month or so ago.

I feel slightly ashamed of myself. There are many better films that have come out in the last year that I have still to see. There are even better films going the rounds of Beijing cinemas recently.

But - love it or hate it - I suppose we have to accept that this was an 'event', one of the most talked-about releases in many years, something that may be seen as a landmark in the development of cinema. (I am somewhat sceptical of that; and if it did prove to be the case, I fear it would not be in a good way, but rather in the way that many people view the impact of the dawning of the Star Wars franchise - that it spawned an era of big-budget but empty-headed action movies, massively hyped in advance marketing and desperately dependent on big opening weekends to recoup their bloated special effects budgets, and frequently directed as much towards peripheral merchandising as cinematic art. That was an era that followed on from, and seemed to largely put an end to two decades of outstandingly edgy, thoughtful, diverse film-making out of 'Hollywood'; in the '60s and '70s much of the American cinema mainstream was 'indie' - whatever happened to that? Lucas and Spielberg will have to answer in hell. But I digress.... Is Avatar anything more than a 'next generation' Star Wars? No. I'm not even sure that it's that. And I hope we don't see a lot of copy-catting of this CGI overkill in the next wave of blockbuster releases.)

To return to my shame-ameliorating excuses - and to give Avatar its limited due - for a moment... I saw it as part of a night out with a group of friends (indeed, the evening was organised by a young lady I was rather attracted to, which, on its own, made the experience much more pleasant than it might otherwise have been): a nice Thai meal, a late showing at the multiplex, and then a few drinks afterwards over which to contemplate our reactions - together, this made for a most diverting evening.


Pity the film SUCKED so egregiously.

Come on, you know it did. Yet there's something about this film that seems to paralyse one's critical faculties for a while. Many people, I believe, who think they love it at first, come to realise over the succeeding days that it was actually pretty piss-poor. People like me, who realise they should hate it even as they are watching it, somehow manage to switch off that nagging critical voice for the duration and surrender to the spectacle of it. It's so BIG, so loud, so brash, so over-the-top that you can't help but marvel at the arrogance and pomposity and sheer unashamed dumb stupidity of it. It's an awful story and an awful piece of story-telling, but it's A RIDE. And, as with rollercoasters (the less good ones), you feel swept up in the experience, you enjoy the brief exhilaration while it's happening; but the moment it's over, you think to yourself, is that it? was that really worth the money?

There was an interesting theory being touted around when Avatar was pulled from Chinese theatres after just a few weeks that the censors had suddenly realised there was a potential in the story to promote social disharmony (the aliens are being evicted from their tree by violence, and fight back to dramatic effect; millions of ordinary Chinese are being evicted from their homes by violence to make way for new property developments, etc., and mostly do not fight back). It would be wonderful if it were true, but I think: a) China's censors are too dumb to read sub-text; b) even if they weren't, they wouldn't care, supposing (probably rightly) that most of the audience are too dumb to read that sub-text or too acquiescent or fearful to try to act upon it. No, it was pulled because it was doing too well: the Chinese authorities don't like to see foreign films beating out the domestic product too badly (the same thing happened with the politically unobjectionable Da Vinci Code a few years back).

I gather there's also been a lot of criticism of a kind of patronising, white supremacist tone to the story, in that the aliens are seemingly powerless to resist the colonial invaders until one of them swaps sides to lead them. That seems to me a bit overblown. The Na'vi aren't as helpless or unimpressive as all that. The invaders, despite being our own humankind, are clearly shown to be the bad guys (and they're all, or nearly all white). And it's a very old story archetype to have the messianic leader be an outsider - I don't think we need to read that as necessarily belittling to the people he comes to lead. On the contrary, perhaps the one point on which James Cameron elaborates usefully on this archetype is that his hero is transformed and ennobled by physically becoming one of the race he leads. Apart from that, yes, it's just Captain Smith and Pocahontas all over again - but I don't suppose Cameron was intending to affront the sensibilities of Native Americans who'd only just forgiven Disney.

However, there's not really much point discussing the story. The story is slight, silly, strains the suspension of disbelief way too far. The holes in the plot are too, too many to enumerate. (It's not explained, for example, what the precious mineral [I refuse to use that silly name they gave it, or I'd snort tea all over my keyboard!] is used for, or why it floats. More bothersomely, it's not explained why they're looking for it in the ground, when it would surely be a lot easier to extract from the floating mountains, which are presumably full of the stuff. And how is that avatar control system supposed to work - what kind of effective bandwidth would you need, regardless of the communication medium, to accomplish full brain-body interaction? And how could you accomplish it remotely in real time?? And why is this communication - whatever medium it's using - not affected, as all other human communications are, by the interference from the minerals in the mountains? And when do these 'avatar drivers' ever really sleep? It seems when their avatars are asleep, they're still awake as humans, so they must be getting pretty darned tired. No small animals on this planet, it seems, only big ones: what kind of an ecosystem is that? I could go on.)

Oh yes, and Cameron can't do villains. He was OK with the Terminator and the Aliens because the plot gave them a very basic but compelling and convincing motivation. As soon as he gets into human characters, he's lost. The thing that sank Titanic (pardon the pun) was not the Kate & Leo romance (really quite sweet, and not all that unconvincing) but Billy Zane's two-dimensional rotter repeatedly pursuing them back below decks into the icy water. In Avatar, half of the cast is that Billy Zane character - it's simply ludicrous.

But let that pass; this film isn't about the story, it's about the special effects. Is this really the HUGE STEP FORWARD everyone (well, the film's publicists, anyway) have been saying it is? No. CGI techniques move on rapidly year by year. And this is the most money that's been thrown into the CGI. So, we have a big movie with more CGI than ever before, both in the landscapes and in the creatures. But is it really such a big advance on what we've seen before? I don't see it. The distinctive thing about Avatar is the number and detail of the humanoid characters created with CGI, and how they've been modelled on the human actors to enable them to produce convincing acting performances. Yes, there's a lot more of that here - but is it qualitatively a quantum leap ahead? I don't think so. The landmark breakthrough here was Andy Serkis's Gollum in the Lord of the Rings trilogy. Here, instead of one Gollum/Jah-Jah Binks/Incredible Hulk, we've got a whole forest full of them. Now, I grant you, some of the detailing was very impressive - not just in the facial expressions, but also in some of the close-ups of hands and feet. I found the film at its most successful in the more intimate scenes, particularly in the nicely played (and almost convincing!) romance between Sam Worthington and Zoe Saldana. Some of the detailing, however, wasn't very impressive at all. The more Na'vi figures Cameron tried to cram into a scene, the less convincing the illusion became; and their movement, from a distance, particularly in the battle scenes, just wasn't very realistic at all.

Ah, but it was in 3-D as well. Big deal! I can see that in an I-MAX theatre this might have made a difference. That's a completely different experience, with the shape of the auditorium and the unfamiliar tilted-back seating adding to the disorientation and the sense of wonder (I saw the 3-D re-release of Fantasia in an I-MAX a dozen or so years ago, and that was quite a trip!). But in a regular theatre with the uncomfortable red-green goggles, it's a rather feeble gimmick - more often, in fact, an irritating affectation than an enhancement to the film. I didn't find there was any sense of depth to the picture at all most of the time. (I can accept that I might start to think of this differently, if 3-D ever becomes the norm; but at present, I'm used to creating the sense of three dimensions with my imagination, and having the film-maker try to do it for me merely distracts from that.) The 3-D effects seemed to be confined to occasionally having something appear to break the plane of the screen and enter the front of the auditorium - and usually this was one of the weird 'magic seeds' that looked like flying sea anemones, which people soon got bored with. I think this rather lame trickery can work quite well with horror movies, where you can achieve simple shock effects by suddenly having a clutching hand or a glinting knife-blade plunge through the screen toward the audience, but its usefulness in other types of picture is pretty much zero. In fact, it annoys me (again, this may change if - god forbid - we ever become used to it) because it transgresses the normal experience of cinema-going (we know the picture is two-dimensional, projected on to a screen just in front of us, but we pretend it isn't) and thus keeps reminding us that the screen is there. I don't wan't to be reminded that the screen is there. Artifice that draws attention to itself shatters the illusion it seeks to enhance. (Discuss.)

What irritated me most about this film, though, was that it had no sense of proportion, no sense of self-restraint. This is manifested in many aspects of the story and production design. It's not enough that the Na'vi are super-strong and agile hominid blue cats; oh no, they have to be 9ft tall as well (I found this tended to create some sympathy for the undeserving human villains; it wasn't really a fair fight). It's not enough that their holy sanctuary is in the heart of some beautiful mountains; oh no, these have to be flying mountains. It's not enough that they can run like the wind and ride 'horses'; oh no, they have to be able to ride flying dragons as well. It's not enough that they live in a huge tree; oh no, it has to be thousands of feet tall. Everything, everything about this film is wildly overdone. And that, for me, is what really kills it, even as an undemanding popcorn spectacle: the final battle scenes do not engage at all - they're a chaotic, overblown mess. There's so much going on in the frame at one time, and it's happening so quickly, that you can't really attend to.... or follow.... or care about any of it. You're just sort of dimly aware that the CGI movement modelling is much less impressive when they're trying to do this much at one time. Sometimes, JC, less is more. As a tree-hugging eco-parable, I almost bought this (almost - then I thought I should go and watch The Emerald Forest again); but the climactic scenes bored me and gave me a headache.

[The title of this post is, of course, taken from a pastiche of a blues song by The Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band. You can hear them playing it here (no video, alas), or enjoy a recent performance (with video) by British pub rockers The Sticklebacks here. The song (lyrics here) makes fun of the fact that the blues is increasingly played by affluent - and white - musicians, and, I suppose, implicitly questions whether this can be as authentic and valid as the original blues music of the Mississippi delta. Then again, maybe it also makes fun, especially in its title, of the fact that so many people raise this objection to modern blues music. It struck me as a rather appropriate reference for a film where blue men, voiced mostly by black men, are confronting white men, some of whom want to become blue men....]