Songs From The Wood

Taking advantage of an unexpected day off, Shanthala and I watched the IMAX3D version of James Cameron’s “Avatar”. Hailed by critics and audiences alike, it has since sunk the top grossing movie of all time, the director’s own Titanic and become the biggest grosser of all time. While I joined the masses in taking it there, I can’t say that I wholeheartedly agreed with either the audiences or the critics.

Let me start with the good. The effects are spectacular. James Cameron has spent an enormous amount of time in constructing the world of Pandora, the planetary moon in the Alpha Centauri star system, on which the movie unfolds.  As a consequence, the visuals are stunning and so detailed, they probably hold up to repeated viewing. Cameron was apparently an adviser to NASA for the camera design used on the Mars mission and he’s clearly a technical genius. The visuals are not just randomly created for effects. Cameron has tried to ground this world in a decent amount of science. Quite a few commentators think that the science is even pretty good. A 350 page companion book to the movie, structured like an army field manual, covers in hardcore-fan-satisfying detail the geology and astronomy of Pandora, flora and fauna on Pandora and the physiology and culture of the Pandoran sentient beings, the Na’vi. The language of the Na’vi was constructed with the help of a linguist and has a website dedicated to the language, complete with flash cards to help you speak the language. So, what the Na’vi speak is not gibberish dressed up as an alien language.

And I don’t even think I’m qualified to appreciate the difficulties in filming the movie. The Wikipedia provides some jaw-dropping insights into the subject.

And now for my disappointments. Yes, the special effects are spectacular, but I never felt that I was looking at a real, non-computer animated world. Take Jurassic Park, as a point of comparison. At no point in that movie did I ever feel that I was watching computer animated images. And having watched IMAX movies before (those National Geographic or made-for-IMAX documentaries), I did not feel sufficiently immersed by the movie’s unique “immersion” technology. Watching an IMAX movie about the Grand Canyon a few years back, I felt my stomach plummet with the camera as it chased a hang glider over the edge of the canyon. No such thing happened as I watched the Na’vi soar over hanging mountains on top of strange looking birds. Shanthala reminded me that those IMAX movies were shown on gigantic screens. The Wikipedia points to others suffering from a similar problem as mine and that Shanthala is not incorrect. But still, I was disappointed.

What about the way the aliens look ? Yes, they’re 10-12 feet tall, blue, have a tail and their faces are a mixture of humans and cats. But they’re still so humanoid. Is this how imaginative you can get ? The ICICI blog, a blog about cognition and culture, however, defends Cameron’s vision saying, “Indeed, there are good reasons to expect that life on others planets might evolve as it did on Earth. Everywhere in the universe, living beings would face similar evolutionary problems: They need energy, detectors, and computational systems. And everywhere in the universe, they will discover the same solutions exactly as, on Earth, the same tricks (enzymes, sex, eyes, etc.) have been discovered again and again by different species.” Cameron states in an interview that he deliberately made the Na’vi look human to enable people to relate to them more easily. Otherwise, how many could empathize with the hero’s attraction to the Na’vi heroine ?

That said, I found the imagination still limiting. Why pair bonding between the Na’vi ? Do they have to sleep the way we do ? The men ruled the world, concerned with warfare and diktats. Were the Na’vi hunter-gatherers or agricultural settlers ? Nothing in the movie depicts how they acquire food, but a stratification of society of the form shown is closer to an agricultural world than a hunter-gatherer world. With a running time of over 2.5 hours, there was enough time to show all this, but did not, which disappointed me. Like most science fiction, the physics is well imagined, not so much the biology and culture. The only book that I’ve read that depicted alien culture, cognition and biology imaginatively was the Hominid series by Robert Sawyer.

The story is as cliched as cliche can be. A gentle, nature loving, technologically primitive society is under attack by greedy, blood thirsty corporations and their private armies in search of a valuable mineral called unobtanium. The utopian world of the noble savage is alive and well in the movie. The narrative follows a boringly predictable trajectory: the initiation into the ways of the natives, the rite of passage, the chanting and music of the natives, the hero’s change of heart, the final battle between the hero and his nemesis, his one time boss. Nothing surprised me in the story, nothing at all but the effects. Further, while upholding the peace-loving nature of the natives, the narrative sadly resorts to a stereotypical, violent resolution of the conflict.

And the characters ? Female leads in Cameron movies have always been the strong, kick-ass type and the movie has three strong women in prominent roles including the heroine. The hero is naive, brash and unafraid of authority, but with a heart of gold, a “gift”. He goes on to charm the natives, fall in love with the daughter of the head of the natives and save their world. The objective scientist who is full of questions and curiosity but who hasn’t the heart of gold cannot do what he can. Other prosaic characters include a jealous rival among the natives – the heir apparent – who has been promised the hand of the daughter, the queen who is a shaman, the friendly sidekicks, the insiders who help the hero, the violent military commander with no shred of respect for life, the uncaring corporate bureaucrat. The good have no flaws and the bad have no redemptive qualities. There is not one 3D character in this 3D spectacle.

I thought that Cameron indulges in some clever tongue-in-cheek in renarrating the destruction of the ecology of the native Americans, more commonly called Indians. He draws much from the culture of the real India (not Columbus’ misidentified continent), from the title of the movie to the color of the Na’vi to some words in the Na’vi language. For example, the word for bonding or feeling the connection between the Na’vi and the rest of the planet is “sahelu”, a derivation of the Hindi word for friendship, saheli. The Na’vi are blue in homage to the Hindu deities like Krishna and Rama, according to Cameron. I wonder if Cameron came up with the name “Na’vi” as a pun on Marathi where Navi means new (as in Navi Mumbai).

Avatar feels like the Star Wars of this Facebook generation. I think the floodgates are about to burst on commercial 3D movies. A slew of trailers of soon to be released 3D movies preceded the showing of Avatar. I imagine the movie moguls are rubbing their hands in glee at the prospect of the audiences flooding back to the movie halls. People who own fancy, expensive home theater are now upended by a technology that cannot be matched in their homes. No more waiting for DVDs or even Blu-Ray discs. If you want the ultimate in effects, come to the movie hall. And the consumer industry must be salivating at the soon-to-follow arrival of the wave of new TVs, home theatres and sound systems. IMAX, Discovery and Sony have already announced the launch of 24×7 3D TV channel. Avatar video games are on their way as is of course, two more sequels to the movie. Avatar franchised dolls and toys will be on every shelf accessible to kids. The very value – commercial exploitation – that the movie deplores and holds as the chief reason for the destruction of native habitats, is being unleashed as a consequence of its success. That is how success is defined in this globalized culture where economics is king.

I guess the laugh is on me, the nerd in me expecting to see the utopian union of great literature and great art with popular success. I wasn’t old enough to appreciate Star Wars when it came out. I maybe too old to appreciate Avatar.

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