Before I begin, I would like to apologize for that joke in the subtitle. Sometimes you just can't help yourself.

At this point in time, there seems to be a certain futility in writing a response to Avatar. Most of the mainstream critical response has been overwhelmingly positive, while the more negative responses have extracted, elaborated, and spun out so much of the film's problems with scripting, plotting, racism, gender, politics, the environment, elementary science, and basic logic that it is hard to imagine what new ground could be covered. It might seem more rational to throw in the towel, accept Avatar as the renaissance in filmmaking the newspapers proclaim it to be, and let it sink out of sight and out of mind.

Of course, if I were one of those rational people, this article would not exist. Perhaps there is a certain spirit of opposition that animates this piece, an inner compulsion to take a stand against a mendacious force that so many have accepted uncritically. Maybe it's a need to strike back after having been bullied by a story that does not deserve the accolades it has received. In the end, this article may be a call by a small, imperfect man for some intellectual honesty, for filmmakers to respect their audiences and make an effort to discuss the world in all its irreducible complexity.

Or maybe I just hate mechs. Who can say?

Fundamental Flaws and the Fundamentals of Storytelling

While the objections to Avatar have taken a wide variety of critical approaches, there is a single source from which all the complaints spring. The fundamental problem with Avatar is that its ideas are deeply and patronizingly simple. While people have made unkind comparisons to Dances With Wolves and Ferngully, in actuality the film takes its cues from an unreconstructed back-to-nature idyll that's been floating around in Western culture since the heyday of Romanticism. While such stories can be entertaining and deeply satisfying if done correctly, the story of Avatar is constructed in such a minimalist fashion that any potential suspense is precluded. If you've ever read a book, rented a movie, or watched an after-school special where the protagonist gets away from the noise and grime of the city and learns to appreciate the beauty of the great outdoors, then you have already seen Avatar. There are no twists, no untelegraphed turns, no inversions or deconstructions, no attempts to play with the well-worn tropes or reassemble them into something provocative. In Avatar, what you see is what you get and no more.

This desire to maintain the austere "universal appeal" of the film also leads to the reduction of its characters into ciphers. As is typical in these types of stories, the entire narrative revolves around the journey of the protagonist, in this case Jake Sully, from skepticism to holistic communion with nature. Unfortunately, the dramatic potential of Jake's journey has hampered by Cameron's decision to make him a doorknob. Jake's position in the story is essentially reactive; rather than discovering and learning for himself, his job in the movie is to move from place to place on Pandora, be given wisdom by others like so much Halloween candy, and perform the occasional heroic gesture to cement his standing as a positive role model. Perhaps because the character of Jake Sully was intended to act as an "avatar" for the audience to explore the VFX paradise of Pandora, he does not really have enough of a presence as a character to stand out against the background. (I admit that I have not seen Terminator: Salvation, so I do not know if this is a weakness on the part of Sam Worthington or of the script.) For all that the film delves into his inner workings, he might as well have been spontaneously generated in a tank en route to Pandora.

As for the rest of the cast, most confirm to broad archetypes, with only a few enjoyable standouts. Far and away the most successful is Sigourney Weaver's portrayal of the hard-bitten xenobiologist-anthropologist in charge of the avatar project. She is genuinely delightful to watch, combining an intellectual admiration of the Na'vi with a wearied irritation at the vagarities of the colonial government. Giovanni Ribisi's corporate attaché, with his love of mini-putt and his belabored racial slurs, comes across as more of an irritant than a credible antagonist. The strangest case of all may be Colonel Quatrich, a stock hyper-militarist antagonist who, through the strange alchemy of Cameron's script and actor Stephen Lang's charisma, instead becomes the awesomest, most manliest man in all of mandom. In all honesty, it's hard not to love a character who can hold his breath for fifteen minutes, is impervious to fire, and whose mech is armed with a giant switchblade. (After watching Lang's performance, it's not hard to imagine that Quadrich's presence of Pandora is the result of a binding UN resolution on America designed to "give the other countries a fighting chance.")

Despite these flourishes, all the characters are still bound tightly to the idyll plot, and as such do not have much opportunity to grow outside its requirements. It is a constriction that becomes all the more noticeable as the film progresses, to the point where it seems that every contrivance and inconsistency is solely designed to fulfill the master plan. Of course Jake is an "unenlightened" marine who has a twin exobiologist brother who died with a ready-to-run alien body. Of course Jake has no family, friends, wife, girlfriend, cat, coffee shop, book club, or DVD collection back on Earth to divide his loyalties. Of course the corporate observers and mercenaries are evil, shortsighted, and stupid. Of course the unobtanium is under the Na'vi tree-town. Of course.

Racism, or Attend To My Spiritual Longings, Smurfycat!

Let us make no bones about it: Avatar is a racist film. It is a necessary corollary of the idyll plot; whenever the wanderer encounters people who live in the idealized state of nature, it is their purpose to educate the wanderer in some deeper truth about the operation of the world. With skillful hands, this type of narrative can avoid the trap of depicting pantomime indigenous people whose sole reason for existing is to educate wayward Romantics. Avatar, suffice to say, fumbles early, and fumbles hard.

Despite all the time, money, effects, and research lavished upon them, the Na'vi still come across as curiously unformed, beings that embody a sort of generically photogenic Neolithic society. While they certainly have enough of a cultural style as expressed by their gear (their costume, their tools, their weapons, and so on), it is fairly hard for a viewer to interpret the world from a Na'vi viewpoint, beyond using the crudest of clichés about naturalist animism. To the untrained viewer, there is nothing to separate the Na'vi from, say, the native American cast of Disney's Pocahontas. Indeed, in the film's climax, where Jake travels the width and breadth of the unnamed continent to rally all the tribes of Na'vi against the humans, the various Na'vi tribes only seem to differ in costume, an idea that is blatantly laughable to any serious student of anthropology.

Of course, this mutual unintelligibility of cultures may have been part of Cameron's point. After all, the centerpiece of Na'vi culture and society, the Tree of Souls, involves a biological act that humans cannot experience, though that raises questions about the film's seeming disinterest in exploring the human-Na'vi conflict as a struggle between separate species rather than a allegorical clash of human races. However, even this generous interpretation breaks down in further dissection in the presentation of both the Na'vi and Pandora.

After the glamour of Pandora's visuals has worn off, and Jake Sully begins to take his journey to understand the mysteries of the Na'vi, it becomes clear that Pandora is, in essence, a giant amusement park. There's lizard-horses to break in, pterodactyls to bond with, trees and vines to swing around on, bows and arrows to play with, and all sorts of funny plants, floating mountains, and glowy spores to gawk at and poke. Never mind that most of this rests only dubiously with the laws of science as we understand it, and often in their complete violation. Even smaller principles are ignored; the Na'vi seem to be able to live in such harmony with nature that their town-tree can support hundreds of individuals without having them resort to stripping the forest for food and firewood to support their town. Pandora cannot be understood in and of itself because Pandora cannot exist in our universe, other than as a fantasy game-world for jaded materialists.

As for the Na'vi, they seem that most curious of societies: a subsistence hunter-gatherer society whose culture is entirely palatable to an early 21st century Western audience. The Na'vi do not expose unwanted children to the elements, nor do they burn people alive in wicker men to commemorate the solstice. They don't sink struggling criminals into peat bogs or have them trampled to death in sacks. Despite having a sort of mild warrior culture, the Na'vi do not even engage in brutalizing initiation rituals into adulthood or ritualized scarring or the mass sacrifice of prisoners of war. This is not to say that the Na'vi should have been portrayed as Ignoble Savages, but rather that these omissions show that, rather than illuminating the full complexity of the pre-urban culture of the Na'vi, they and their world are only intended to be Consolations, places where American heroes can go to escape the corruptions of modernity and be reborn as innocent alien children, pure and simple as nature intended. Perhaps the truth of this can be found in the basic anatomy of the Na'vi; despite living on an alien planet dominated by hexapods, the proportions of the Na'vi are a race of tall, striped blue humanoids that walk and talk like humans do and are pretty to look at to boot.

Before leaving this topic, a brief word should be given to the avatar program itself, the process by which human minds are piggybacked into purpose-grown human-Na'vi bodies for the purpose of better interacting with the local Na'vi population. While most commenting on the film as cited The Matrix and its sequels as inspirations for this system, there is another, more recent film that provides a closer model. In the Hollywood/war film satire Tropic Thunder, white actor Kirk Lazarus (Robert Downey Jr.) undergoes a complex surgical procedure designed to give him the physical features of an African-American in an effort to "get inside" the mind of his character, Sgt. Lincoln Osiris. The key difference, however, is that while Jake Sully's journey from human to Na'vi is rendered as a heroic quest back to nature, Lazarus' attempts at "understanding blackness" are mocked as the delusions of a narcissistic method actor who only succeeds in parroting the "badass black sergeant" archetype endemic to American war cinema since WWII. It may be of note that Lazarus/Osiris is also far more enjoyable character than Jake Sully.

Colonialism, or It Takes Two To Despoil

The "corruptions of modernity" illuminates another great weakness of Avatar: its depiction of a colonial relationship. Most of the reviews of Avatar have made much of its ties to the broader story to the American expansion to the West in the 19th century, so much so that Dances with Smurfs has become the accepted alternate title online. However, there are fundamental differences between that mode of colonization and the one presented in Avatar: on Pandora, there are no human settlers. Beyond the avatar program, neither the humans nor the Na'vi show any interest in each other, and mostly seem to avoid one another whenever possible. The human colonists stay within the boundaries of their own small settlement, relying on imported technology, building materials, and food as much as possible, while focusing all their energies on mining unobtanium and mapping Pandora.

This model, then, is not the model of the American frontier; it is the model of the final wave of European resource-extraction-based colonization in Africa at the end of the 19th century, and of contemporary practices by American corporations throughout Latin America. While this is an exceeding vicious colonial system that certainly should be criticized, it is also something of a cop-out on the part of Cameron. By reducing the human expansion on Pandora to this (exceedingly simplified interpretation of) this mode of colonization, it neatly sidesteps all manner of issues regarding the relationships between colonizer and colonized, the multiple worldviews each group develops as it interacts with an outside culture, and the way the two groups react and adapt to one another.

Avatar deals with these issues in the classical Gordian fashion. The mode of colonization the humans use, as mentioned above, is useful in precluding dicussions of the sort of tangled issues of cohabitation that would arise in a North-American-style colonization by expanding immigrant settlements or a British-India-type colonization by a foreign trading company that becomes a freelance government as local authority decays. There is no trade relationship on Pandora to speak of: the humans make some half-hearted attempts to entice the natives with an English-language school and roads, while the Na'vi are seemingly "uninterested in anything humanity could give them," or so Jake Sully exposits in a video log. It appears that the Na'vi are even uninterested in the most basic products of Earth's industry, including such staples as grain, woven cloth, refined metals, or cheap flintlock guns, the goods that served as the bread-and-butter of European traders in Africa and beyond for centuries. As for the social dimensions of colonization, they are never mentioned. Pandora is so utopian, it seems, that there are no socially disadvantaged Na'vi that would see the arrival of humans as an opportunity to achieve a kind of success Na'vi society denied them. Nor are there any Na'vi leaders who are genuinely impressed by human achievement and who seek to uncover its secrets so that they may be combined with Na'vi ideas to improve their own societies. The Na'vi, it would seem, view all outsiders as fundamentally worthless, as an opportunistic pathogen to be avoided or driven off. In a telling detail, the Na'vi formally refer to themselves as "the People," a phrase with many unfortunate implications to modern minds; if the Na'vi are "the People," then there must be a group of "Not People" who can be safely attacked/mutilated/eaten without undue comment.

The Root of the Problem, or Talk to Me Like an Adult Dammit!

While the above points could be elaborated ad infinitum by themselves they give a fairly clear explanation as to why Avatar is so deeply unsatisfying. Every time the film has a chance to explore an issue in depth, it is ignored in favor of undemanding analogies and monochrome morality plays of soulless industrialists against free-spirited space furries, all in the interests of maintaining a clichéd plot that has been deconstructed, critiqued, and found wanting in a hundred different monographs and a hundred different books. Perhaps the most galling thing is that all this was something Cameron should have been aware of, leaving one of two possibilities. Either he simply was not aware of the flaws in his plot, or he was aware but chose to ignore the problems and press on anyway. Given how Avatar has been praised for its "messages" by the mainstream press, choosing the second scenario would make Cameron guilty of serious intellectual dishonesty.

It is dishonest because, at the end of the day, Avatar is just a fantasy. The natural idyll was only ever a creation of the mind, never fluorescing into being outside of a pair of covers or a canvas. People chose to industrialize because they wanted lots of cheap goods and the distant possibility of a job where you don't have to break your back farming for fifty years, but can get an education and spend your time writing or making movies. We've been doing this for about two centuries now, and most of us would rather it was made less wasteful, dirty, and dangerous than give it up entirely. You can't stab modernity in the chest with a spear, and to claim otherwise is to indulge in a fantasy that helps no one, and distracts people from trying to find a way through the recursive puzzle-box that is our planet. We cannot fight, so we must adopt, adapt, and improve.

In closing, I would recommend that everyone watch Princess Mononoke. After reading this, you'll be glad you did.

Links to the Opinions of Wiser Men

Given the high profile and structural flaws of Avatar, it has prompted a few intellectually stimulating and gleefully vidictive essays online. The following sample represents my favorites of the bunch.

Over at Locus magazine, Gary Westfahl gives a brief review that discusses some of Avatar's SFnal ancestors.

At CHUD.com, there's a piece comparing Avatar to its progeniter, a treatment Cameron wrote back in the '90s entitled Project 880, which lends some credence to the "intellectual dishonesty" theory.

The upper-middle-brow literary blog The Valve comes at Avatar from several directions at once, with articles dicussing how the film shifts genres about halfway through and inadvertantly shoots its political message in the foot, how Jake Sully embodies the worst aspects of the American psyche, and a piece that says what I managed to say in less than a thousand words. (One of The Valve's main contributors also gets in a good point on his own blog about the seemier side of the Pandoran genocidal omnimind memory trees.

Finally, Adam Roberts gives you the business in one sentence.