The revolution will not be Avatar

Touted as the cinematic event of the closing decade, Avatar whipped viewers’ expectations to titanic proportions, a feat not unfamiliar to writer and director, James Cameron. However, while Avatar is credited for leading the 3D movie revolution, what exactly it foreshadows about the future of film is both narrowly groundbreaking and mistakenly unique.

What has been called a landmark in movie history, Avatar has surely set a new standard for film. What kinds of standards? As a technological feat, Avatar is memorable and all but secures a new theatre experience. As art, Avatar is a representation of cultural currents. But in a film that is meant to project the future of a society, James Cameron’s fantasy and concept of a futuristic world fall short of revolution, and do a disservice to the future of film.

Avatar is the fantastical depiction of Pandora, a name that is not alone in the movie for its blatant symbolism. In 2154, Pandora’s indigenous inhabitants are the Na’vi, unwillingly engaged in a battle over their natural resources with an invading force of heavily armed and militant humans. And while it is abrasively misleading for a Hollywood power-player like Cameron to suggest the energy crisis as the relevant concern of future generations—because it will not be; that is our cross to bare today—it is even more disappointing to see how the stereotypical and unimaginative whims of Cameron can be disguised behind the full force of a 500 million dollar budget.

What is perhaps this film’s greatest disservice to the audience is its failure to push human boundaries and its blatant embrace of stereotypical and inequitable standards, when it suggests instead a novel foray into a future reality. The Na’vi, supposedly an inhuman species tacitly unencumbered by regular human foils, namely greed and ignorance, are a laughable hodgepodge of cultural stereotypes borrowed from indigenous cultures of planet Earth.

Gender stereotypes abound in characters that possess qualities mirroring perfectly the standards we expect of our already tired Disney heroes and heroines. Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) is the film’s protagonist, a wheelchair bound ex-Marine whose most defining characteristics are his boyish good looks and stubbornness. Sully’s counterpart, female protagonist and princess of the Na’vi, is Neytiri (Zoe Saldana), a cat-like, blue-skinned hyper-incarnate of an Earthling supermodel.

Neytiri’s likeness to contemporary Western standards for female beauty are uncanny: tall, lithe and seamlessly graceful, Neytiri navigates the world of Pandora with ease. Her performance, non-human or not, has won the accolades of her human critics, who have dubbed her buttocks as grab-worthy and her as sexy, as Roger Ebert admitted in a Trekkie-esque salivation.

While exhausting, this ubiquitous depiction of the female body is not altogether surprising, not much really is in a film that is being celebrated for its revolutionary force. The story is simplistic and structured around a plot line so unimaginative as to be banal. The embedded love story achieves nothing more than a cringe-worthy depiction of Boy Meets Girl, upholding ideas of pre-feminist era romance.

Neytiri inherits the Pocahontas-styled burden of teaching Jake the Na’vi ways. She initially throws a temper tantrum, but this is the only hiccup in their romance, and shortly Neytiri’s feminine wiles and compassion will allow her to love this irreverent, yet likeable, intruder. The extent of her emotional range spans feline hissing and childish bleating (about, ironically, Jake’s childishness) and coy, pre-coital passivity. In a scene beneath a Spirit Tree, Neytiri submissively turns from Jake to suggest other, more attractive Na’vi prospects more deserving of his love. Nonetheless, brave marine-cum-honourary Na’vi declares his choice and Neytiri breathes, “We are mated for life.” Avatar’s only love scene segues abruptly to Jake Sully jumping awake to his Earth reality in a sweat-drenched moment of “what-the-hell-am-I-doing” regret.

Avatar’s astronomical financial endeavor belies an unimaginative and oversimplified depiction of pressing political issues and engenders disappointing racial and gender roles. Amidst the snap, crackle and pop of this “3D revolution” is nothing substantively novel. Cameron has passed up the chance to truly push boundaries and to make audiences uncomfortable with unfamiliar concepts of reality, sexuality, power, culture and ways of being in the universe.

So the film “King of the World” has done it again, as Avatar steamrolls box offices and seems poised for nothing short of global domination. While Cameron’s future is undoubtedly green and his fantasy is apparently blue, Avatar is an insulting black and white endorsement for how we ought to imagine ourselves—nothing more than what we already are when we aren’t at our best.