The Significance of “Avatar”

By Dan Cohen, Santa Monica Reporter

When the original “King Kong” came out, in 1933, it was a screaming sensation. One critic called it “the greatest trick film of all time.” It wasn’t like there hadn’t been monster movies before–there had–especially during the silent period. Just not like this.

The forerunner is probably “The Lost World” (1925,) for which Willis O’Brien, who was later hired to animate Kong, created small dinosaurs out of small models made of clay, that were then shot using stop motion photography. Even though the creatures were nakedly synthetic, audiences loved them. Why? O’Brien’s dinosaurs were more ambitious than anything that came before.

But they were primitive compared to Kong, who was way more than a miniature superimposed on photographic images. He was a compendium of several small models, full size mechanical arms and legs, a guy in a suit, and a variety of head masks. But there was something else, something truly extraordinary in the way Kong was “animated.” O’Brien, with daring and wit, directed his artists to actually draw on each frame of film in which the miniatures appeared, which added a whole new dimension to the creature. A whole layer of detail was added. The artists’ work gave Kong a quirky, life like quality that made it easier for the audience to suspend its disbelief.

Kong had personality, right down to the hair on his back, which seemed to undulate as he battled everything from other monsters to a New York subway train. But he wasn’t the only element that made the movie special. It also boasted the remarkable Skull Island, a herd of other prehistoric creatures, the Empire State Building, and the scantily clad Fay Wray, who’s screamed almost as loud as Kong roared. Even Kong’s voice was special, the sound of lions played backwards.

The result was a roller coaster ride that never let up. Audiences were riveted with a non stop succession of images and sound, only a few short years after “talking” pictures became the norm. Another plus: “King Kong” was the first sound film with a completely original score, written by Max Steiner, who went on to compose “Gone with the Wind!”

What does all of that have to do with “Avatar?” A lot, because writer/director James Cameron has delivered an innovative movie experience, today’s equivalent of what producer Merion Cooper and Willis O’Brien birthed in 1933.

“Avatar” is a combination of precisely calculated convention and painstaking craft. Like Kong, and every other watershed movie in the history of this carnival of a medium, it understands that our eyes and minds demand a rush of new stimuli in order to keep us engaged.

The story begins with a company of Marines landing on a planet appropriately named “Pandora.” Appropriate because the deeper we delve into the planet’s interior the more of its awesome color and complexity is shown. Of course this is a mirror for an inner journey. But more on that later.

The military base is the only earth like reference point in the entire film. This opening sequence, while familiar to anyone who’s turned on a TV in the last 50 years, is presented in a startling, beautifully modulated 3D, that’s so friendly to the eye it whets our appetite for more. And as the movie proceeds it only gets better.

We’ve been deluged with 3D movies the last couple years, mostly CGI animation, or horror films. They’ve come with the dire prediction, spewed from studio execs like storm warnings, that in the future, most theatrical films will be shown in 3D. That means we’d have to wear those clunky, prison style glasses they force you to buy every time you stepped inside a movie house. Let’s hope not.

While the animated features, like “Coraline,” and “Up” bear no relation to reality, hence nothing to answer to, the horror movies have treated it badly. The actors and settings invariably look like cardboard cut outs from a kids’ story book, while the narratives are little more than tired excuses for shots of body parts spurting into dead air. It’s novel for about ten minutes, beyond that, crashing bore.

Writer/director James Cameron, (since “Titanic” almost a household name,) knows better than to try our patience with any of that. Shortly after establishing his main story point, as strong a jumping off point as any Sci Fi thriller of the past couple decades, he starts to reveal the eye candy inside “Pandora’s” box. From there his movie truly soars, because what Cameron has created, at an alleged price tag of $300 million, is a completely binary world that first references what we know, then reinvents it with wit and mercurial imagination.

The result is more like “Wizard of Oz,” than “2001, A Space Odyssey.” There’s nothing abstract or puzzling here. But somehow it’s obsessively literal quality, where nothing is left to our imagination, delivers a crazy quilt of visual poetry. The key is probably in the obsessiveness.

Jake Sully, played by Sam Worthington, arrives on Pandora a cripple desperate to escape his own skin. The “avatar” technology, developed by a scientific team headed by Sigourney Weaver, offers him the only hope he has of walking again. But there’s a price to pay; he’ll have to inhabit an alien body.

Weaver and associates have devised a box that projects the minds of soldiers into bodies that mimic Pandora’s indigenous population. After acclimating to their alien forms the Marines job is to infiltrate, then conquer the “Navi.” A big corporation wants their land for its valuable minerals.

It’s been done so many times before it shouldn’t work. But Cameron is a showman on the level of Merion C. Cooper. The second Worthington makes the transition he’s thrust into an otherworldly jungle that comes off like the Amazon cultivated by psychedelic drugs. In an almost comic turn, Jake, whose human face is an empty canvas, slowly comes to life as he accepts the implications of his new identity and its myriad powers.

A lot of the fun is in watching him struggle to adapt. These early passages, where the camera moves with amazing dexterity, are blessed with a child like enthusiasm. Cameron, ever the wide eyed explorer, won’t let us rest, introducing an extraordinary new terrain every few minutes, each credibly linked to the last, but unique in its own right. The movie goes on like that for almost three hours.

But as Gertrude Stein once quipped about Oakland, (CA) “There’s no there, there. In this case every shot is computer generated. And yet it’s tangible, in no small measure complemented by the clever use of 3D. But Avatars’ crown achievement is in the realization of the human like creatures who populate the place.

Cameron toiled several years on a technique of motion capture that grafts real life behavior on computer generated images. Basically, the actors, wearing large suits with cameras inside them, act out their parts in full. Their movements, their entire performances, are then imposed on computer generated images. There are no models. The Navi only exist on film. Amazingly, their movements, right down to each muscle, are as fluid as the handful of humans in the movie. And the closer we get the more lifelike they appear. In fact the close ups of their faces, of which there are many, defy analysis.

I make a point of this because it recalls Willis O’Brien’s achievements of 1933. Kong was a monster with a host of human emotions, including a sense of humor. In addition to his movie fame he inspired a slew of scholarly work on subjects ranging from colonialism to race relations, largely because of this empathic quality.

Cameron’s most endearing character is his female lead, Neytiri, vividly “portrayed,” (for lack of a better word,) by Zoe Saldana, who took the Uhura role in the new “Star Trek.” The face and body he and his talented crew have devised, has Saldana looking like her alien sister. Like the rest of the tribe, her absurd physical proportions perform impossibly heroic feats, all made credible by the technology. But what really wins us over is that face, its expressive texture and movement. This is “animation” at its best.

In the wake of this movie’s huge success it’s amusing to hear commentators, like the ruffled morning reporter on NPR, who complained that the story line is a mash up of movies she’d seen before. Of course it is! It’s a kissing cousin of “Dances With Wolves,” “A Man Called Horse,” and any number of pioneer epics. In a knowing nod in that direction the movie’s hands down bad guy tells us “We’re not in Kansas anymore” in the first reel.

Did anyone think that 20th Century Fox was going to throw 300 million on a formula that was all but cast in stone? Or that they’d make a big storybook movie that was shot through with ambiguity?

Avatar’s strength is the innovation it brings to tried and true conventions. The entire, insanely elaborate contraption is artful in so many ways it defies you to count them. It may not be a great work of art, but it doesn’t need to be. It never pretends to be anything other than grand, eye popping adventure. On that level it’s peerless.