http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/
"Avatar" is not simply a sensational entertainment, although it is that. It's a technical breakthrough. It has a flat-out Green and anti-war message. It is predestined to launch a cult. It contains such visual detailing that it would reward repeating viewings. It invents a new language, Na'vi, as "Lord of the Rings" did, although mercifully I doubt this one can be spoken by humans, even teenage humans. It creates new movie stars. It is an Event, one of those films you feel you must see to keep up with the conversation. The story, set in the year 2154, involves a mission by U. S. Armed Forces to an earth-sized moon in orbit around a massive star. This new world, Pandora, is a rich source of a mineral Earth desperately needs. Pandora represents not even a remote threat to Earth, but we nevertheless send in the military to attack and conquer them. Gung-ho Marines employ machine guns and pilot armored hover ships on bombing runs. You are free to find this an allegory about contemporary politics. Cameron obviously does.
Pandora harbors a planetary forest inhabited peacefully by the Na'vi, a blue-skinned, golden-eyed race of slender giants, each one perhaps 12 feet tall. The atmosphere is not breathable by humans, and the landscape makes us pygmies. To venture out of our landing craft, we use avatars--Na'vi lookalikes grown organically and mind-controlled by humans who remain wired up in a trance-like state on the ship. While acting as avatars, they see, fear, taste and feel like Na'vi, and have all the same physical adeptness.
This last quality is liberating for the hero, Jake Sully (Sam Worthington), who is a paraplegic. He's been recruited because he's a genetic match for a dead identical twin, who an expensive avatar was created for. In avatar state he can walk again, and as his payment for this duty he will be given a very expensive operation to restore movement to his legs. In theory he's in no danger, because if his avatar in destroyed, his human form remains untouched. In theory.
On Pandora, Jake begins as a good soldier and then goes native after his life is saved by the lithe and brave Neytiri (Zoe Saldana). He finds it is indeed true, as the aggressive Col. Miles Quaritch (Stephen Lang) briefed them, that nearly every species of life here wants him for lunch. (Avatars are not be made of Na'vi flesh, but try explaining that to charging 30-ton rhino with a snout like a bullet head shark).
The Na'vi survive on this planet by knowing it well, living in harmony with nature, and being wise about the creatures they share with. In this and countless other ways they resemble Native Americans. Like them, they tame another species to carry them around--not horses, but graceful flying dragon-like creatures. The scene involving Jake capturing and taming one of these great beasts is one of the film's greats sequences.
Like "Star Wars" and "LOTR," "Avatar" employs a new generation of special effects. Cameron said it would, and many doubted him. It does. Pandora is bevy largely CGI. The Na'vi are embodied through motion capture techniques, convincingly. They look like specific, persuasive individuals, yet sidestep the eerie Uncanny Valley effect. And Cameron and his artists succeed at the difficult challenge of making Neytiri a blue-skinned giantess with golden eyes and a long, supple tail, and yet--I'll be damned. Sexy.
At 163 minutes, the film doesn't feel too long. It contains so much. The human stories. The Na'vi stories, for the Na'vi are also developed as individuals. The complexity of the planet, which harbors a global secret. The ultimate warfare, with Jake joining the resistance against his former comrades. Small graceful details like a floating creature that looks like a cross between a blowing dandelion seed and a drifting jellyfish, and embodies goodness. Or astonishing floating cloud-islands.
I've complained that many recent films abandon story telling in their third acts and go for wall-to-wall action. Cameron essentially does that here, but has invested well in establishing his characters so that it matters what they do in battle and how they do it. There are issues at stake greater than simply which side wins.
Cameron promised he'd unveil the next generation of 3-D in "Avatar." I'm a notorious skeptic about this process, a needless distraction from the perfect realism of movies in 2-D. Cameron's iteration is the best I've seen -- and more importantly, one of the most carefully-employed. The film never uses 3-D simply because it has it, and doesn't promiscuously violate the fourth wall. He also seems quite aware of 3-D's weakness for dimming the picture, and even with a film set largely in interiors and a rain forest, there's sufficient light. I saw the film in 3-D on a good screen at the AMC River East and was impressed. I might be awesome in True IMAX. Good luck in getting a ticket before February.
It takes a hell of a lot of nerve for a man to stand up at the Oscarcast and proclaim himself King of the World. James Cameron just got re-elected.
A New Eden, Both Cosmic and Cinematic
This movie has been designated a Critic's Pick by the film reviewers of The Times.
By MANOHLA DARGIS
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/
Published: December 18, 2009
With “Avatar” James Cameron has turned one man’s dream of the movies into a trippy joy ride about the end of life — our moviegoing life included — as we know it. Several decades in the dreaming and more than four years in the actual making, the movie is a song to the natural world that was largely produced with software, an Emersonian exploration of the invisible world of the spirit filled with Cameronian rock ’em, sock ’em pulpy action. Created to conquer hearts, minds, history books and box-office records, the movie — one of the most expensive in history, the jungle drums thump — is glorious and goofy and blissfully deranged.
The story behind the story, including a production budget estimated to top $230 million, and Mr. Cameron’s future-shock ambitions for the medium have already begun to settle into myth (a process partly driven by the publicity, certainly). Every filmmaker is something of a visionary, just by virtue of the medium. But Mr. Cameron, who directed the megamelodrama “Titanic” and, more notably, several of the most influential science-fiction films of the past few decades (“The Terminator,” “Aliens” and “The Abyss”), is a filmmaker whose ambitions transcend a single movie or mere stories to embrace cinema as an art, as a social experience and a shamanistic ritual, one still capable of producing the big WOW.
The scale of his new movie, which brings you into a meticulous and brilliantly colored alien world for a fast 2 hours 46 minutes, factors into that wow. Its scope is evident in an early scene on a spaceship (the year is 2154), where the passengers, including a paraplegic ex-Marine, Jake (Sam Worthington, a gruffly sensitive heartthrob), are being roused from a yearslong sleep before landing on a distant inhabited moon, Pandora. Jake is woken by an attendant floating in zero gravity, one of many such aides. As Jake himself glides through the bright cavernous space, you know you’re not in Kansas anymore, as someone soon quips (a nod to “The Wizard of Oz,” Mr. Cameron’s favorite film). You also know you’re not in the gloom of “The Matrix.”
Though it’s easy to pigeonhole Mr. Cameron as a gear head who’s more interested in cool tools (which here include 3-D), he is, with “Avatar,” also making a credible attempt to create a paradigm shift in science-fiction cinema. Since it was first released in 1999, “The Matrix,” which owes a large debt to Mr. Cameron’s own science-fiction films as well as the literary subgenre of cyberpunk, has hung heavily over both SF and action filmmaking. Most films that crib from “The Matrix” tend to borrow only its slo-mo death waltzes and leather fetishism, keeping its nihilism while ditching the intellectual inquiries. Although “Avatar” delivers a late kick to the gut that might be seen as nihilistic (and how!), it is strangely utopian.
It doesn’t take Jake long to feel the good vibes. Like Neo, the savior-hero of the “Matrix” series played by Keanu Reeves, Jake is himself an avatar because he’s both a special being and an embodiment of an idea, namely that of the hero’s journey. What initially makes Jake unusual is that he has been tapped to inhabit a part-alien, part-human body that he controls, like a puppeteer, from its head to its prehensile tail. Like the rest of the human visitors who’ve made camp on Pandora, he has signed on with a corporation that’s intent on extracting a valuable if mysterious substance from the moon called unobtainium, a great whatsit that is an emblem of humanity’s greed and folly. With his avatar, Jake will look just like one of the natives, the Na’vi, a new identity that gives the movie its plot turns and politics.
The first part of Jake’s voyage — for this is, above all, a boy’s rocking adventure, if one populated by the usual tough Cameron chicks — takes him from a wheelchair into a 10-foot, blue-skinned Na’vi body. At once familiar and pleasingly exotic, the humanoid Na’vi come with supermodel dimensions (slender hips, a miniature-apple rear); long articulated digits, the better to grip with; and the slanted eyes and twitchy ears of a cat. (The gently curved stripes that line their blue skin, the color of twilight, bring to mind the markings on mackerel tabby cats.) For Jake his avatar, which he hooks into through sensors while lying in a remote pod in a semiconscious state, is at first a giddy novelty and then a means to liberation.
Plugging into the avatar gives Jake an instant high, allowing him to run, leap and sift dirt through his toes, and freeing him from the constraints of his body. Although physically emancipated, he remains bound, contractually and existentially, to the base camp, where he works for the corporation’s top scientist, Dr. Grace Augustine (Sigourney Weaver, amused and amusing), even while taking orders from its head of security, Col. Miles Quaritch (Stephen Lang), a military man turned warrior for hire. A cartoon of masculinity, Quaritch strides around barking orders like some intransigent representation of American military might (or a bossy movie director). It’s a favorite Cameron type, and Mr. Lang, who until this year had long been grievously underemployed, tears into the role like a starved man gorging on steak.
Mr. Cameron lays out the fundamentals of the narrative efficiently, grabbing you at once with one eye-popping detail after another and on occasion almost losing you with some of the comically broad dialogue. He’s a masterly storyteller if a rather less nimble prose writer. (He has sole script credit: this is personal filmmaking on an industrial scale.) Some of the clunkier lines (“Yeah, who’s bad,” Jake taunts a rhinolike creature he encounters) seem to have been written to placate those members of the Michael Bay demographic who might find themselves squirming at the story’s touchier, feelier elements, its ardent environmentalism and sincere love story, all of which kick in once Jake meets Neytiri, a female Na’vi (Zoë Saldana, seen only in slinky Na’vi form).
Mr. Cameron has said that he started thinking about the alien universe that became Pandora and its galactic environs in “Avatar” back in the 1970s. He wrote a treatment in 1996, but the technologies he needed to turn his ideas into images didn’t exist until recently. New digital technologies gave him the necessary tools, including performance capture, which translates an actor’s physical movements into a computer-generated image (CGI). Until now, by far the most plausible character created in this manner has been slithery Gollum from Peter Jackson’s “Lord of the Rings” cycle. The exotic creatures in “Avatar,” which include an astonishment of undulating, flying, twitching and galloping organisms, don’t just crawl through the underbrush; they thunder and shriek, yip and hiss, pointy teeth gleaming.
The most important of these are the Na’vi, and while their movements can bring to mind old-fashioned stop-motion animation, their faces are a triumph of tech innovation, with tremors and twitches that make them immediately appealing and empathetic. By the time Neytiri ushers Jake into her world of wonders — a lush dreamscape filled with kaleidoscopic and bioluminescent flora and fauna, with pink jellyfishlike creatures that hang in the air and pleated orange flowers that snap shut like parasols — you are deep in the Na’vi-land. It’s a world that looks as if it had been created by someone who’s watched a lot of Jacques Cousteau television or, like Mr. Cameron, done a lot of diving. It’s also familiar because, like John Smith in “The New World,” Terrence Malick’s retelling of the Pocahontas story, Jake has discovered Eden.
An Eden in three dimensions, that is. In keeping with his maximalist tendencies, Mr. Cameron has shot “Avatar” in 3-D (because many theaters are not equipped to show 3-D, the movie will also be shown in the usual 2), an experiment that serves his material beautifully. This isn’t the 3-D of the 1950s or even contemporary films, those flicks that try to give you a virtual poke in the eye with flying spears. Rather Mr. Cameron uses 3-D to amplify the immersive experience of spectacle cinema. Instead of bringing you into the movie with the customary tricks, with a widescreen or even Imax image filled with sweeping landscapes and big action, he uses 3-D seemingly to close the space between the audience and the screen. He brings the movie to you.
After a few minutes the novelty of people and objects hovering above the row in front of you wears off, and you tend not to notice the 3-D, which speaks to the subtlety of its use and potential future applications. Mr. Cameron might like to play with high-tech gadgets, but he’s an old-fashioned filmmaker at heart, and he wants us to get as lost in his fictional paradise as Jake eventually does. On the face of it there might seem something absurd about a movie that asks you to thrill to a natural world made almost entirely out of zeroes and ones (and that feeds you an anticorporate line in a corporately financed entertainment). But one of the pleasures of the movies is that they transport us, as Neytiri does with Jake, into imaginary realms, into Eden and over the rainbow to Oz.
If the story of a paradise found and potentially lost feels resonant, it’s because “Avatar” is as much about our Earth as the universe that Mr. Cameron has invented. But the movie’s truer meaning is in the audacity of its filmmaking.
Few films return us to the lost world of our first cinematic experiences, to that magical moment when movies really were bigger than life (instead of iPhone size), if only because we were children. Movies rarely carry us away, few even try. They entertain and instruct and sometimes enlighten. Some attempt to overwhelm us, but their efforts are usually a matter of volume. What’s often missing is awe, something Mr. Cameron has, after an absence from Hollywood, returned to the screen with a vengeance. He hasn’t changed cinema, but with blue people and pink blooms he has confirmed its wonder.
“Avatar” is rated PG-13 (Parents strongly cautioned). Gun and explosive violence, death and despair.
AVATAR
Opens on Friday nationwide.
Written and directed by James Cameron; director of photography, Mauro Fiore; edited by Mr. Cameron, John Refoua and Stephen Rivkin; music by James Horner; visual effects supervisor, Joe Letteri; production designers, Rick Carter and Robert Stromberg; produced by Mr. Cameron and Jon Landau; released by 20th Century Fox. Running time: 2 hours 46 minutes.
WITH: Sam Worthington (Jake Sully), Zoë Saldana (Neytiri), Sigourney Weaver (Dr. Grace Augustine), Stephen Lang (Col. Miles Quaritch), Michelle Rodriguez (Trudy Chacon), Giovanni Ribisi (Carter Selfridge), Joel David Moore (Norm), C C H Pounder (Mo’at), Wes Studi (Eytukan) and Laz Alonso (Tsu’Tey).
REVIEW: Cameron’s ‘Avatar’ Is a Big, Dull, America-Hating, PC Revenge Fantasy
by John Nolte
http://bighollywood.breitbart.com/
Absent from the big screen for over a decade now, Oscar-winning director James Cameron returns armed with a reported half-billion dollars, a story he’s been desperate to tell for 15 years, and the very latest in cutting-edge visual technology. The result is “Avatar,” a sanctimonious thud of a movie so infested with one-dimensional characters and PC clichés that not a single plot turn – small or large – surprises. I call it the “liberal tell,” where the early and obvious politics of the film gives away the entire story before the second act begins, and “Avatar” might be the sorriest example of this yet. For all the time and money and technology that went into its making, the thing that matters most – character and story – are strictly Afterschool Special.
AP Photo/20th Century Fox, Mark Fellman
In this image released by 20th Century Fox, writer-director James Cameron, foreground right, reviews a scene with actors, from left, Sigourney Weaver, Joel David Moore and Sam Worthington during the filming of, "Avatar."
What a crushing disappointment from one of our most original and imaginative filmmakers.
Set in 2154, “Avatar” is a thinly disguised, heavy-handed and simplistic sci-fi fantasy/allegory critical of America from our founding straight through to the Iraq War. Sam Worthington is Jake Sully, a paraplegic Marine Corporal sent to the planet Pandora after the untimely death of his brother. In a plot-thread built up to promise much that never pays off, Sully has none of the training his brother benefitted by: years of schooling in the Avatar Program to prepare him to infiltrate the indigenous species of Pandora called the Na’vi, who are the only things between Earth’s RDA (Resources Development Administration) and a precious energy resource “ironically” called Unobtainium.
Because the air on Pandora is toxic to humans, the RDA developed the Avatar Program to create clone-like avatars from both Na’vi and human DNA (which is why they need the untrained Sully) that allow for a human to transfer their consciousness into the 10-foot native blue beings and safely explore the planet. The scientists want to use the program to study Pandora, the military wants to conquer it, and the RDA wants to strip mine it. At first Sully’s unconcerned with these dueling tensions and agendas. Once a marine always a marine, and when his commanding officer, the beefed up genocide-happy Col. Quaritch (Stephen Lang), asks him to infiltrate the Na’vi and do recon for a probable attack, Jake is more than ready. Hoo-rah.
But before you can say I’ve seen this movie a thousand times before, Jake enters his Na’vi avatar and in a tired action scene straight out of the “Jurassic Park” trilogy, gets lost in the dangerous Pandoran forest only to be rescued by something else he’d like to enter, the beautiful (if you go for ten-foot tall gaudy blue females) Neytiri (Zoe Saldana) – a walking cliché of the tough, earthy, compassionate, oh-so wise love interest who can somehow speak English … but in that halting way that’s so gosh darned endearing.
And so begins the real Cliché-A-Thon…
***SPOILERS COMING***
Does Neytiri just happen to be the Chief’s daughter? Check! At first, does the tribe not trust Sully and want to kill him on the spot before Neytiri intervenes with wise explanations as to why it’s their tribal custom to take in strangers as one of their own? Chuh-eck! Is Sully then immersed in the native culture and put through a series of tests to prove his worthiness beginning with the sort of clumsiness that brings hoots of derisive laughter from the male warriors but endears him to Neytiri? Double check! Does Sully eventually become one of their strongest warriors and on the day he’s to be initiated as a full member of the tribe—GOD this movie’s tedious.
There’s nothing wrong with a simple, boilerplate plot. They’re boilerplate for a reason. But within that well worn template complicated characters involved in complicated and surprising relationships are an absolute necessity, and this is where “Avatar” fails miserably.
Within 15 minutes, the “liberal tell” spoils every story beat of Sully’s character arc. He’s as dull a protagonist as you’ll ever see. Sigourney Weaver plays a gruff-talking, cigarette smoking scientist with … wait for it, wait for it … a heart of gold. Giovanni Ribisi’s sweaty weasel of a corporate executive never moves beyond that and Col. Quaritch is all ‘roid rage, no humanity and his Big Speech about the necessity of “a pre-emptive attack to fight terror with terror” was as surprising as Cameron‘s use of a military “shock and awe” campaign to level the Na’Vi’s precious “Home Tree” as a tacky metaphor for the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center.
Oh yeah, he went there…
In supporting roles, Michelle Rodriguez and Joel Moore bring a whole lot more to their underwritten roles than the film deserves — you’d like to spend more time with them — but it’s always back to the film’s dullest characters: the one-dimensional Na’vi. You would think that with 15 years and a half-billion dollars, Cameron could come up an alien species that doesn’t drip with every Indian and African sacred-cow cliché imaginable. These are creatures who worship the Great Mother Eywa, have a sacred relationship with the earth, shoot bow and arrows, ride horse-like animals, whoop it up in battle, and talk like this: “It has only happened five times since the time of the first songs of our ancestors.”
The Na’vi also apologize to animals after killing but before butchering them. So I guess that’s okay. Maybe if Quaritch had gotten on the loudspeaker and spoken a little mumbo-jumbo before dropping a daisy cutter on Home Tree all would be forgiven.
On top of that, the Na’vi are an awfully stupid species. After years of dealing with the “Sky People,” for some reason they still haven’t figured out that arrows are useless against giant military aircraft. And is it okay to mention how hard it is to keep track of who’s who, because the Na’vi, uhm … all look alike? Twice I was sure Sully’s avatar had been killed. Twice I was disappointed.
Cameron’s brainchild tribe is boringly perfect and insufferably noble … I wanted to wipe them out.
Visually “Avatar” doesn’t break any new ground. It looks like a big-budget animated film with a garish color palette right off a hippie’s tie dye shirt. Never for a moment did I believe the Na’vi or the world of Pandora was something organic or real. The fairly pointless use of 3-D certainly doesn’t help, but Steven Spielberg’s sixteen year-old dinosaurs are light years ahead of “Avatar” in the reality department.
The one thing Cameron has always done well is to create busy, energetic, brilliantly choreographed action scenes that allow the audience to follow what’s going on. That’s not a small thing because it’s becoming a lost art in Hollywood as more and more filmmakers lazily trade coherence for the artless shaky-cam and hyper edits. And while none of Cameron’s big battle set-pieces is ever able to overcome the “liberal tells” pre-ordained outcome and create a sense of suspense or peril, at least you don’t get lost in the precious wonder of it all.
Think of “Avatar” as “Death Wish 5” for leftists. A simplistic, revisionist revenge fantasy where if you freakin’ hate the bad guys (America), you’re able to forgive the by-the-numbers predictability of it all and still get off watching them get what they got coming.
And if Cameron is able to make a profit spending a half-billion dollars on a little liberal bloodlust, more power to him.
UPDATE: More on “Avatar” vs. “Jurassic Park” here.
Crummy Script, Glorious Method
James Cameron has an artist’s eye. If only he had a sense of plot and dialogue!
By Frederica Mathewes-Green
http://www.nationalreview.com/
December 23, 2009
In Avatar’s opening moments, hero-to-be Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) is waking up on the planet Pandora after a cryogenic journey, and reflecting on the twists of fate. Here he is, a paraplegic Marine, filling in for the twin brother who actually trained for this mission. But right before Tommy was due to ship out, “a guy with a gun put an end to his journey, for the paper in his wallet.”
Sounds like a line from a Forties detective movie, doesn’t it? Or how about this one: Evil Col. Miles Quaritch (Stephen Lang) barks at his troops, “You are not in Kansas any more, ladies and gentlemen. If there is a hell, you might want to go there for some R&R after a spell on Pandora.” (The colonel, you may be sure, has a trace of a Southern accent.) Later, he tells Jake, “You got some heart, kid, showing up in this neighborhood.”
Jake replies offhandedly, “I figured it was just another hellhole.”
I think you get the picture. In this film, though, there are two pictures. Later on, Jake walks among the Na’vi, the gentle people of Pandora, by means of an avatar — that is, a Na’vi body that was grown in a test tube, which he remote-controls from a high-tech pod at the base camp. His lovely tutor, Neytiri (excellently portrayed by Zoë Saldaña), explains that he, too, will one day ride the enormous mountain banshees — something like tie-dyed pterodactyls — which in the native lingo are called (I think) “eclans.” “You must choose your own eclan, and he must choose you,” says Neytiri.
“When?” Jake asks.
“When you are ready,” she replies.
Later, Neytiri watches approvingly as Jake goes through the ritual that accompanies killing for food. “I see you, brother,” Jake says as he delivers the final blow, “and I thank you. Your spirit will depart, and your body stay here to become part of the People.”
Sorry to put you through that, but there’s really no way to describe just how inane this dialogue is. The plot it is meant to sustain is every bit its equal. You see, humans have destroyed the earth’s ecology. (“You will find nothing green there,” Jake tells the Na’vi tribe. “They killed their mother.”) Now they seek the resources of other worlds, in particular the rich lode of a priceless mineral under Pandora’s crust.
This mineral is called “unobtainium.” It really, truly is. And the richest reserves of unobtainium lie beneath the giant, ancient tree where the Na’vi live. The bad colonel intends to get at it, one way or another (insert sound of knuckles cracking here). He tells Jake, “I need to find out how to force their cooperation, or hammer them hard if they don’t.”
Yet in presenting the apparently eternal conflict between gentle people with flowers in their hair and technology-crazed meanies, Avatar comes to us by means of the most advanced technology available. Director James Cameron took 14 years to make the movie, inventing a new process for 3-D in order to film it. He took the motion-capture technology that gave us Gollum in the Lord of the Rings trilogy, and advanced it several major steps forward. This film was not made by folks who live in a giant tree.
And it’s unclear how this plaintive call to live in tune with nature is supposed to be implemented by the viewers who take it to heart. Should we demand that our popcorn be made over a campfire? Then hoof it home in a Fred Flintstone car?
I don’t need to tell you that, at 161 minutes, Avatar is far too long for material this thin. This story has been told plenty of times before, and better. You can also expect that a hectic, noisy battle scene is surely on the way, one that consumes great quantities of film in showing us what looks like a video game.
What I didn’t expect was the sheer beauty of the film. It won me over. I think it was the forests of Pandora that first broke through my grumpy attitude — the graceful trees, plants with enormous fan-like leaves, curious twisted ferns that shyly retract when touched. Everything is glowing in lavender, blue, and aqua; it could have been painted by Maxfield Parrish.
The highly anticipated 3-D process is most successful, I think, with the “seeds of the sacred tree,” a cross between a butterfly, a spider, and a dandelion puff. When these seeds begin drifting down, they really do seem to leave the screen and float over the heads of the audience.
Yet more beautiful were the Floating Mountains. These enormous floating rocks, crowned with trees and trailing vines, are truly awe-inspiring; they are worthy, I thought, of J. R. R. Tolkien.
So, yes, you need to see this movie, and see it while it’s in theaters, full-screen and in 3-D. Yes, you can take the kids, but only if they can handle some violent moments. The most graphic, I thought, came when a Na’vi spoke his last words with a shattered tree limb through his chest. There’s no nudity (though the cat-like Na’vis’ costumes are quite scanty) and the single love scene is swift and discreet.
Avatar is a perplexing mix of glorious method and crummy material, and it left me wondering why, in the hands of one artist, a familiar tale can move us even more profoundly because of those earlier links, and we call it a “classic” — while in the hands of another artist it seems derivative and stale. Why, in the hands of one artist, can a work express childlike wonder, while another’s reveals childish immaturity? The characters pushed around in this story seem like something thought up by a twelve-year-old. This is most ludicrous in the climactic battle, when bad Col. Quaritch survives a series of death-dealing blows that are increasingly hard to believe; at one point, his shoulder is literally on fire. I pictured Cameron killing Quaritch off with great satisfaction each day, then coming back the next day saying, “But I can’t let him die yet!”
Some artists remain in touch with the inspirations and enthusiasms of their twelve-year-old selves, and produce something fresh and moving. There’s no reason that this script had to be as flat as it is. But, oh, the beauty. James Cameron may have a tin ear for dialogue, but he indisputably has an artist’s eye. Go see it on the big screen, and let yourself be dazzled.
— Frederica Mathewes-Green writes regularly for Beliefnet.com, Christianity Today, and other publications. She is the author of Gender: Men, Women, Sex and Feminism, among other books.
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